How Muscles Help Your Weight

There is one thing that almost all people pay some attention to which is very, very important for our lives. In fact, if you pay a lot of attention to this one very important thing, you most likely will live much longer. And what is that one thing that can help give us a longer and better life? It’s a healthy weight.

Watching our weight and keeping it at the right levels usually makes our lives much more enjoyable, healthier, and longer. Thankfully, there are a lot of things we can do that can keep our weight where it should be and, wow, that can really help make for a great life.

Most kids don’t pay a lot of attention to their weight and eat everything they want. When we get a little bit older—like in our teens—we pay more attention to how we look and try to eat the right foods in order to become more active in sports or to look better. But a healthy weight is good for us, no matter our age.  

I was quite surprised when I discovered that your muscles can actually help you lose weight or keep you at a good weight. Most of us don’t realize that doing things like working out, weightlifting, and even just plain old walking can help with our weight management, not just because these burn calories but because they build muscle.

As we age, it is very common for people to stop working on their muscles all that much, at least until they come to the understanding that building or maintaining a lot of muscle helps their health big time. One of the challenges we have as we age is a loss of muscle which can contribute to gaining more fat. We lose muscle because, as we get older, our muscles wear down and that along with often being less active in our 50s, 60s, and 70s means our muscles are getting smaller and with that comes weight gain as our calories go to fat instead of being burned by muscle.

One of the best types of food we can consume to help us build muscle, get rid of a lot of fat, and control our weight is protein. There are a lot of studies that have shown that eating plenty of protein—like 25 to 30 grams first thing in the morning and then the same amount for lunch and dinner—along with lots of moving and lifting weights–will help you keep and build your muscle and burn fat. Some great, healthy foods that are high in protein include fish, chicken, lean beef, eggs, soy, beans, lentils, pumpkin seeds, nuts, cottage cheese, Greek yogurt, cheese, and milk.

When it comes to exercise, you don’t have to run to burn fat or build muscle. A lot of walking and staying very active helps build muscle which helps you burn more fat. I usually walk 10,000 to 12,000 steps a day and it’s done wonders for my health. It makes me feel so good in addition to helping me maintain my ideal weight while sending more blood to the brain which helps our memory and thinking.

So, let’s all of us humans work out regularly and eat more protein so we can look forward to a longer life and a healthier body.

Supplement Your Mood

In last week’s blog, I talked about how, after making tons of money, I turned some of my business responsibilities over to a few associates and family. After that, I thought my life would be so great, so easy, so happy and content. But I was in for a big surprise!

I began to go crazy and wondered why. I quickly started to realize that what I was experiencing was actually normal when a person retires. It seems that if you get to a point in your life that you’ve got enough money to do anything you want, you still have to have a plan to make your life fulfilling and meaningful again.

So, in my experience, my mood changed a lot, and I became disturbingly different. So, I turned, as I do, to reading about this thing I was going through. I found a couple goods of goods books that were so unbelievably helpful.

One of the books that really got my attention was Disrupt Aging by Jo Ann Jenkins. I actually had the book before this all happened but it didn’t hit my brain like it did when I was so down in the dumps. Some information, as good as it is, doesn’t mean a lot until you really need it.

The other book that hit me even harder, giving me very specific and easy things to do, was The Mood Cure by Julie Ross. I learned so much from this book. Her recommendations made an immediate difference in my life. They resolved things due to aging as well as mood, such as the age related decrease in serotonin, which plays a critical part in regulating our mood.

 So, I looked into what supplements and vitamins could help our mood and lift our lives.  Here’s a short list of what I found:

• Tryptophan
• 5 Htp
• Magnesium
• Calcium
• Iron
• Chromium
• Vitamin D

When I started taking these, I did notice that my mood was much better and that the change was very quick.

Go ahead and do a little research and see what else you can find about taking certain vitamins and supplements. As I am sure you will agree, our mood is so very important in our lives, so it’s well worth giving it a try. After looking into the supplements and talking to your doctor, give them a try and see what good stuff happens.

A Positive View of Aging

I wrote last week’s blog all about some of my younger days and a little about these more recent times in my life, which really got me thinking about how we perceive time and what all that time means to us now.

I’m pretty sure most people who have been around for a while are somewhat like me in that when we were young, life seemed to move so very slow. Now, however, as I push 80 years of age, time seems to be slipping by me at a very fast rate. It can be a bit disturbing to think of this, but what I have come to realize is that the passing of time is not what we want to focus on but what we did in the time we’ve had.

There are so many lessons we can learn from our past, if we will just take time to set our minds and pay attention. One big lesson that I have realized lately, came while looking back and remembering all the many things that have crossed my path that I have learned from. It’s that many of the things I’ve actually include a lot of great things about aging. This is especially true in the books I’ve read.

I’ve learned so much from not just reading, but from thinking about what I am learning from that reading. I read two great books some time ago that have been very helpful and beneficial for understanding aging and not getting negative about it. One was called Disrupt Aging by Jo Ann Jenkins, which I have written about before. The other was titled Successful Aging by Daniel J. Levitin. I learned so much from both these books, things that helped me think about and see aging in a more positive light.

And just a few days ago, my son gave me another book that I’m finding very helpful in accepting aging and life in general. That book is called Gratitude Journal by Sujatha Lalgudi. Having a lot of gratitude in your life lifts your spirits just like when you give things—money or time or gifts—to your family, friends or even strangers.

Lalgudi writes in his book, “I hope you find this journal to be helpful in your journey of gratitude and happiness and will continue the practice.” And it has!

Next week I want to share with you a list of his affirmations, which is very interesting and very helpful for anyone’s life. He also asks people to write to him on the subject of Gratitude so I will send you his contact information in the next blog post.

100 Ways to 100 Years

On my July 2nd post, I said I would continue with an additional list on the theme of aging and what you can do to live a longer heather life but I wasn’t able to do that the following week, so I still owe you, my good readers, that list.

In that previous blog, I wrote about some basic things a person can do to reset the whole body, which included eating extra protein and colorful fruits as well as getting in some strength training. That’s a good place to start and pretty easy to do, but now I’d like to share with you more ideas from the article “100 Wonderful Ways to LIVE TO 100”.

Living to 100 is a great goal and it can be done. No, it’s not easy, but don’t you agree that it’s probably worth the effort? Your kids and grandkids and great grand kids would certainly like you to do it.

Here’s a few more suggestions from that article:

1. Find a reason to laugh and smile a lot.

2. Try a little responsible “retail therapy”.

3. Don’t forget about yourself. Fitness guru, Jack LaLanne, who passed away at the age of 95 in 2011, knew the importance of looking after yourself. “This is where I take care of the most important person in my life, me”.

4. Try to have a friction free marriage.

5. Put the pedal to the metal – be a super cyclist.

6. Stop smoking.

7. Get fishy. Consume lots of omega-3 fatty acids.

8. Get busy and stay busy.

9. Get enough sleep.

10. Run, but not too much.

11. Wash your hands.

12. Buddy up at the office.

13. Grow from trauma.

14. Smile a lot.

15. Hit the gym.

16. Turn off the TV.

17. Cut the sugar.

The bottom line is, never forget how very important you are and take care of yourself, especially when it comes to self-talk—keep that positive for a long, happy life.

Age is Not a Number

Last week I had said I’d planned to add to the list of things you can do to reset yourself and slow your aging. But life got a bit complicated, and I have to postpone creating that list until next week. But here is an update to a post I did some 8 years ago that addresses some of these same things.

On January 8th of 2014, I launched what I called my “90 Day Super Quest”. That quest was an ambitious goal to get myself into the best possible physical and mental shape of my entire life and I was starting that exactly 90 days before I turned 70!

Just one week into my super quest, I was right on schedule with my workouts which included tennis, weightlifting, sit-ups, push-ups, and stretching. I had also worked on the mental side of my quest by keeping up with reading, writing, making new friends, and spending lots of time with old friends and family. However, I noticed a problem right around the one-week mark. It was that old demon—that negative inner self-talk. I had become way too focused on the fact that I was getting older, with that number 70 dominating the chatterbox inside my head, and not in a positive way.

But then I just happened to pick up a book that I’ve read and written about many times, and it flipped open to page 55 where the word “aging” jumped out at me. The book was Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Beyond, her follow-up book to Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. And, wow, does she have some great thoughts about aging and what your inner voice should NOT be saying about the subject, such as:

“I am getting older now. Aging is horrible. I wish my body was young again. Look at those wrinkles. Who could love a face that’s old? I hate it. Pretty soon, no one will want to be around me. When I was young, I could dance all night. Now I don’t have the energy. Why do people have to age? I wish I could be young forever.”

Then she goes on to discuss what we should be saying to ourselves:

“I love aging. My children are grown and now I’m free to do the things I put off doing. I’m glad I joined the gym. I don’t think I’ve ever been in such great shape. I’m going to learn all I can about keeping myself in the best of health. I have so much to look forward to. I learn and grow every day of my life. I wouldn’t want to go back one day. Why would I want to go back?”

Reading that, I realized that I needed to get rid of that number 70 that had become so set in my head. Instead, I started asking myself the question that I used to ask so often, something we all should probably ask ourselves whenever we think about aging: “How old would I say I am if I didn’t know?”.

Back then, when I asked myself this question, I could honestly say I felt 44. And for the rest of my 90 Day Super Quest, I thought to myself that, when I was done with this, I would be in the best physical and mental shape of my life as a 45-year-old! That outlook helped me push through the challenge and to this day, with some reminders here and there, I steer my mental chatter toward the positive and try to stay focused on the age I think I am, not just some number that has more to do with the calendar than what great things I have in my life.

More Reasons for Living in the Right-Now

Doesn’t life seem to change quite a bit as you get older? It sure does for me. Our bodies are certainly not the same at 70 or 80 as they were when we were teenagers or even at 30 or 40.

I had lunch the other day with an old friend that I’ve known for many, many years. I’ll call him Jerry. We have had so many great years together. Recently, I called him up to ask if we could meet for lunch at a restaurant or my country club. Jerry said he’d love to, but we would have to have lunch at his house since he was not very mobile. I was quite surprised to hear this since Jerry is only about a year older than me and the last time I saw him, he seemed to be just fine and had always been in good health.

We met up a few days later at Jerry’s house and I brought him lunch. I was surprised to see him with a 4-wheel walker and, on top of that, he shocked me with the news that he had bone cancer and, even worse, the cancer was also now in his brain.

Wow, that was such bad news, and I really felt sorry for my dear, long-time friend. Aside from all that bad news, I was very happy to find, after talking to him for a while, that his thinking was in excellent shape. He told me about a trip that he just got back from. In spite of his physical shape and health problems, he said he had a wonderful get away to Europe. As we talked about some trips we had taken together in the past, I was amazed that Jerry remembered so many details of our trips, many that I have a hard time recalling myself. He really impressed me!

When most of us were young, we might have thought life was an easy ride, and we figured we would live to 100 and have plenty of time to do all the things we want to do. We might also have hoped that maybe, by the time we’d reach old age, they will have invented a medicine or procedure to extend our lives by many, many more years and maybe even close to forever (I’ll hold on to that far out dream!) But even if we could live forever, we still have to deal with our older our brains and bodies not working near as well as in our younger years.

Since we most likely won’t live to be a 100 or more, we need to wrap our minds around living in the Right-Now Moment. It is true that we can’t continuously live in the present if we want to plan a big, fun getaway trip, since that takes future thinking. However, I certainly have found that as I think about going to Europe or Japan or any new place, it lifts my spirits.

Traveling to new places and seeing new things excites my mind and, I believe, it makes me healthier. It could even push off the day that I check out of life by many more years. I sure hope so!

Signs and Habits for Longevity

Recently, I was going through some old files, and I came across notes I wrote about living a very long life. I wrote it in 2008, but as I reread what I’m calling the “12 Signs and Habits for Longevity”, I was re-motivated to pay more attention to those 12 signs.

I thought I’d share them with you as well and I hope that they are as helpful to you as they were, and still are, to me.

1. Drink 2 cups of green or white tea every day.

2. Take 30 minutes each day to walk, bike, or run.

3. Don’t drink a lot of soda.

4. Work out your lower body and legs to give you more strength.

5. Eat more blueberries and red grapes as well as having a little of red wine here and there to reduce the risk of heart disease and Alzheimer.

6. Eat little or no beef to reduce your risk of colorectal cancer.

7. Get a college education if you can. Statistically, it increases your life expectancy by 18 months or more.

8. Reduce or try to eliminate chronic stress as it weakens the immune system and increases cellular aging, shorting life expectancy by 4 to 8 years.

9. Hang out with more healthy people.

10. Work on keeping your weight down. Don’t use housekeepers or gardeners to maintain your house, but do it yourself to burn more calories and help control your weight.

11. Work on having a very positive outlook and sense of purpose.

12. Give yourself over to helping other people, not just your family, but old friends and new friends as well.

If there are things on this list, you can do or change in your life to live better and longer, now is the time to do it!

Slowing Down Time

I don’t know about you, but I am so amazed by how quickly 2021 went by. It was gone in a flash. And now we are almost a quarter of the way through 2022. Why does time seem to go at warp speed these days? Well, there are actually very specific answers to that question and your age has a lot to do with how quickly or slowly time passes for you, but it’s not the whole story.

The speed of time is, for one, perceived quite differently by kids and young people compared to older folks. When we are young, time seemed to go so slowly. Do you remember when you were 15 years old but just months away from turning 16 when you could then drive by yourself? Wow, the time then seemed to slow down so much it almost stopped.

But have you noticed that now, being older time seems to have sped up? I just turned 78 last week, but it seems so much less than one year ago that I cerebrated my 77th birthday. That was a really fast year.

The reason for this has a lot to do with how many new experiences we have. Our brain encodes new experiences differently than familiar ones and our subjective experience of time is tied to the number of new memories we create. The more new experiences we have, the more memories we are storing and the slower time will seem to pass. That does make sense to my brain as I get older and pay attention to my thinking and my life and the speed of our human existence.

In BBC’s Science Focus magazine, Dr. Kit Yates, author of The Math of Life and Death, writes that, “The greater our acquaintance with the routines of everyday life, the quicker we perceive time to pass and, generally, as we age, this familiarity increases.”  

He goes on to say that this theory, “suggests that, in order to make our time last longer, we should fill our lives with new and varied experiences, eschewing the time-sapping routine of the everyday.” I’d like to add that seeking out new and novel experiences is also really great for the health of your brain. It’s even been suggested that the desire to have novel experiences can be a predictor of a healthier, happier, and maybe even longer life.

If you are interested in these challenging ideas that we face as we age, I encourage you to search the internet and find out more about why time passes quicker as we age as well as ideas for adding new experiences to your life so you can slow time down and benefit from a happier and healthier brain.

Our Amazing Brain

Wow, what an incredible machine we all have and often take for granted. I’m talking about the human brain and it does so much more than we fully realize. Even as I write this, I have to stop and take note of the fact that my brain knows where each key on my computer is located to the point that I don’t even have to think about it. Likewise, when we are sleeping, the brain continues to work without our input. Then, when we are awake, we can, again, choose what we want to think about.

When I decide to accomplish a particular thing, I can think about it and set my sights on it, keeping my decision and the steps I need to get there in my mind. I can set a goal with a time frame on it and most of the time I can reach that goal, mainly because of the powerful machine in my head.

When we take a big look at the world, we can see what the human brain has been able to come up with. It came up with the automobile, airplanes, rocket ships, computers, space stations, and even heart replacement surgery! And that’s just a tiny list of the amazing things it can invent.

I’m very, very impressed by the brain’s ability to remember things, especially my wife’s. She remembers everything and with so many details that I am constantly surprised. On the other hand, the older I get, the less my brain remembers, although it’s still amazing.

The change, however, has motivated me to find various methods to kick it into gear. One that works really well for me is when I am trying to remember a person’s name that I haven’t seen or talked to in a very long time. I mentally go through the alphabet and usually, when I come to the first letter of their name, bingo, I remember it. For example, I was trying to think of a tennis friend in Kauai that I hadn’t seen in sometime so I started going through the alphabet and, wow, the first letter did it. His name was Al.

So, how do we wake up the power of our mind and intentionally and productively choose what we think about? To start, we all need to be conscious of what we are putting into our brain. What kind of information do you feed it? Do you give it challenges and problems to figure out to keep it agile? And what do you eat to keep your brain healthy?

There are a lot of ways to support your amazing brain. But the first thing you need to do is decide to intentionally take care of it and make it a priority. Once you’ve done that, be on the lookout for ways to keep it fit, healthy, and amazing.

I’ll talk more about what you can do to keep your brain fit and healthy in next week’s post.

Mindful Aging

Wow, the end of 2021 is already here, just a few more days. Time is such an interesting thing and I find it fascinating that the passage of time seems to change its speed depending on your age and/or things you have planned in your life. When most of us were young, anxious to be old enough to get our driver’s license, time seemed to be moving so very, very slowly. I remember counting down the days until I could get mine. But things do change, especially when you get older.

At my age now, just a little more than 3 months until I hit 78, the years seem to speed up. I can remember, easily, the new year’s celebration I was at last year at my good tennis friend Al Ficker’s house in Kauai. It’s like it was just a couple of months ago. Wow, this year just flew by in a flash.

I am re-reading the great book by Jo Ann Jenkins called Disrupt Aging. I’ve written and talked about her book in previous posts. There are so many good and smart things she says about “really owning your age” and being proud of whatever that age number is. I loved her quote about a woman who said, “No one’s going to deprive me of my age.”

Marc Freedman, founder and CEO of Encore.org, and author of The Big Shift wrote, “In Disrupt Aging, Jenkins offers the generational call to action we’ve been waiting for—to break free from outmoded ideas about age, to embrace the rich possibilities present in the decades opening up beyond fifty, and to join a growing movement of individuals determined to live lives infused with purpose. Beautifully written, full of humor and inspiration, and powerfully argued, this book offers the definitive map for making the most of the longevity revolution, as individuals and as a nation.”

Jo Ann has so many good thoughts and ideas for our lives as we age, such as:

• The best life includes contributing to the well-being of others.
• Try new things and take chances…don’t live in fear of aging.
• Focus on health, wealth and self. 
• This is a time to shift from “mindless aging” to mindful living.

If you are retired now, take a hard look at your life and determine your thoughts about aging. How can you age more mindfully? And if you are not retired yet, then it’s a good time to start making plans for what you are going to do when retired. Yes, write it down, make lists, set priorities and write down your future schedule. You’ll be glad you did when you finally retire.

And when you do retire, as well as right now, be sure to strive for always living in the right now moment!

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