Fitness and Wellness After Age Forty – Have you ever heard the expression, “youth is wasted on the young”?
This is an expression that crosses cultural boundaries and resonates in a humorous way with people across the globe because it’s true in many ways.
While there are great and not so great elements to every stage of life, the fast metabolisms, boundless energy and bouncy skin that come with our teens and twenties are something that many of us become wistful for as we enter our forties and beyond. We feel that it’s a shame that we can’t enjoy those things more in our later years when we’re happier, more stable, more secure and therefore supposedly more able to appreciate and enjoy them.
But thanks to incredible leaps in medicine over the last few decades, getting older is not what it used to be. Not my a mile.
We know so much more about nutrition, fitness, orthopedic medicine, hormone replacement and mental health than we ever have before.
We have access to things like lasers and Botox that can dramatically improve our skin’s ability to age gracefully and beautifully.
And as more and more of the general public becomes aware of how corrupt much of big pharma is and how much fake, processed food many of us are consuming on a daily basis, there’s a mass return to natural and homeopathic medicine that is revolutionizing everything we know about wellness and internal health.
Still, there are some specific basics that everyone should be mindful of when they’re looking to start or optimize a fitness and wellness journey after the age of forty. Many people just don’t know what the specifics are, so they often spin their wheels needlessly in many different directions trying to figure out why they still don’t look or feel their best.
There are four major components to optimal wellness in this stage of life:
1.) Navigating hormonal changes and menopause.
Hormone disruption often happens for both men AND women in middle age and beyond, and this is one of the main reasons why people’s metabolisms slow down and it feels more difficult to lose weight.
It is CRUCIAL to have regular lab work done to make sure that your hormones are at normal, balanced levels, and it’s equally crucial that you maintain a hormone replacement regimen prescribed by a doctor if one is needed. Fortunately, there are lots of great companies now offering remote consultation over the phone and easy, cheap lab appointments wherever you live, whether you have insurance or not.
As I mentioned before, we are incredibly fortunate to be living in a time when we have something this crucial and revolutionary available to us.
2.) Addressing bone health concerns.
Just like hormones tend to deplete and become disrupted as we get older, our bones can start to break down around this time too unless we are taking active, daily measures to prevent this from happening.
Women over 40 in particular should be taking at LEAST 5,000 IUs of vitamin D3 with K2 every single day (10,000 IUs is even better!), and should also be supplementing with calcium and getting regular bone density screenings. Your risk of bone density problems goes up if osteoporosis runs in your family, so it’s never too early to begin a daily regiment of vitamin D.
3.) Maintaining muscle mass.
The best thing that you can do for your body composition as you get older is focus on maintaining muscle mass. This becomes more and more difficult the older we get, but it’s always possible with regular weight training and protein intake. Strive for two upper body and two lower body days per week, and aim for 25-40 grams of protein at each meal in order to optimize building and maintaining lean muscle.
4.) Managing stress and time constraints.
We all know that life gets really busy as an adult. Between kids, work, bills and the general stressors of daily life, it can feel extremely challenging to find the motivation, time or consistent discipline to eat and work out the way we know that we should.
But like most things, fitness and general wellness all come down to how badly you want them and how far you’re willing to go to keep the promises that you make to yourself. Even small daily changes can add up big over time.
Park in the back at the grocery store and walk. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Make your workouts a non negotiable appointment that you actually schedule into your calendar.
Long term consistency is what wins this game in the end, and figuring out how to make this a permanent part of your lifestyle is one of the most rewarding things you will ever accomplish.
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