Walk Longer Live Longer
They say that ‘old age puts more wrinkles on our minds than on our faces’. You are as old as you feel. A 50-year-old who feels 40 is 40 – a 40-year-old who feels 50 is 50. A bored 40-year-old is the same as a bored 50-year-old. In the fight against ageing, mental fitness is as important as physical fitness.
Mental fitness gets you up and going; mental fitness gives you a new attitude, a new outlook to life; mental fitness gives you the drive and energy to make plans for a healthy future.
Many people drift into old age as though it’s inevitable. They make financial plans for their middle age and retirement but they don’t give the same consideration to a physical plan in order to enjoy these years to the full. They drift into their middle and later years sitting around waiting for a heart attack, when what they should be doing is following an exercise and diet plan to help them enjoy life to the full.
It’s not the passing years that’s a problem – it’s a passive lifestyle. By their 50s more than 40 per cent of males and 80 per cent of females are sedentary – they spend too much time sitting.
To give you some idea just how a passive lifestyle can damage your health, a report in a US magazine, Prevention, in February 1991, estimated that 22,000 people in New York alone might die during the year ‘clinging to their armchairs’.
A sedentary lifestyle is considered so bad for you that the American Heart Association now lists it as a major ‘risk factor’ on a par with high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure and cigarette smoking. The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, USA, found that the least active people were almost twice as likely to have heart disease as the most active.
