All grown up — Healthy Aging Month turns 30

Written By paige wolk

Along with cooler weather (fingers crossed) September brings one of the most important celebration months in our calendar: Healthy Aging Month.

Did you know that 2022 marks the 30th anniversary of this celebration? Here's what Carolyn Worthington, publisher of Healthy Aging® magazine had to say about the ongoing importance of this recognition:

"When we started September is Healthy Aging® Month back in the 90s, not many people really wanted to talk about growing older.... but [now] the focus is loud and clear that there are many ways to maintain a healthy lifestyle well into later years. Aging is no longer a taboo subject. It’s almost become trendy to be an active older adult."

Let's embrace that trend and talk about all the ways that seniors and their caregivers can discover and maintain healthy new habits and enjoy a better quality of life!

We'll start with the basics: before launching into diet, exercise and lifestyle changes, talk to your doctor and establish a general health baseline. We've included a link below to our Tips for Healthy Aging downloadable PDF document that includes a list of basic medical tests that every senior should have. Take some time this month to get your loved ones started on that list. Once the pokes and prods are out of the way, it will be so much easier to move on to the fun parts of healthy aging — diet, exercise and other lifestyle improvements.

That’s right: we just called diet and exercise "fun." That’s because making something enjoyable is the best way to make it a permanent part of your life. For instance, we all know that a low cholesterol / high fiber diet is key to healthy aging and that walking for twenty minutes a day is better than sitting in a chair, but unless that diet and those walks are something you can look forward to, they are not going to happen on a regular basis.

So don't just start a healthy diet — start a FUN healthy diet. Explore new technologies like air fryers (mmm) and venture beyond the freezer aisle to try new produce or packaged food options. If you don't want to trudge around the same old block, strap on some sparkly sneakers for a walk around a neighborhood you've always wanted to explore. Or better yet, take a class. If you find yourself making new friends while trying out a sport, dance or exercise style that's always sounded like fun, will you even think of it as exercise at all?

Which brings us to the final key to healthy aging: happiness. 

According to a 2016 study, finding and keeping a positive mental attitude about aging helped to prevent older adults from becoming not just mentally frail, but physically frail as well. It appears that just plain old being happy can help turn back the clock. Of course, happiness isn't something you can just turn on. But it is something that you can improve with practice, like diet and exercise. To help with that practice, we've included a link below to an article from the SilverSneakers® blog on 6 Ways to Feel Happier. We hope that these suggestions spark (literal) joy in your own and your senior loved ones’ lives this September and beyond.

Finally, to remove happiness-reducing stress from your own life, give us a call at (817) 887-9401 — and find out how the compassionate caregivers at Overture Home Care can help get your senior loved ones back on the healthy aging track.

LINKS:

paige wolk
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