The longer your exposure to unhealthy things, the unhealthier you will be. Healthy ageing has two components. One is prevention and minimisation of disease, the other is quality of life and optimisation of ability – put simply, finding ways to make the most of what you have. Age is not a measure of years, it’s also a measure of your exposure to bad habits. The longer you eat poorly and are inactive, the greater your chances of getting degenerative diseases.
Luckily, for those of us who worry a ‘healthy lifestyle’ involves difficult regimes, the women we studied were not fanatical. You do not need to become a health ‘fanatic’ to be healthy. In fact, research shows these people have worse health than those who opt for moderation in all things.
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The women at the heart of the Women’s Healthy Ageing project, which began in 1990, come from all walks of life. And these participants have shown us that things you do in your forties, fifties and sixties will help your health when you’re over 70. If you act on the secrets they revealed – to move, eat well, to stress but not distress, to connect – you’ll build your intrinsic capacity, your ability to weather the storms life throws at us.
It’s what provides resilience in the face of inevitable change. Here are 7 life lessons to glean from women who lead long, healthy lives:
When people decrease activity in retirement, there are consequences for their health. For example, early data shows the chance of getting dementia doubles every five years over the age of 65.
However, what our research also reveals is that illnesses like dementia are not an inescapable part of ageing, but rather they are diseases that evolve due to persistent ongoing inflammatory damage to nerve cells. The way we live can change these outcomes. This is just one of the secrets we have learnt from women in our study.
If you’re expecting me to tell you exactly what to do, prepare to be disappointed. The most important thing is to do whatever activity you want. It doesn’t have to be the same activity either. You might do something when you are one age and another when you’re older. You might do one activity with friends, another on your own; a physical activity at home might not be the same as an activity away from it.
Just be active, every day. Doing some form of activity you enjoy, or that’s an unavoidable part of life, is the key.
Physical activity has been shown to directly relate to how long you live, as well as how long you live without disease. The National Cancer Institute has published work showing patients with cancer who don’t exercise are more likely to die than those who exercise regularly.
Numerous studies show how much you walk each day relates to how long you’ll live. So, go for a walk today!
It’s a well-known phenomenon that those who continue in a research study long-term tend to have better health. Even being part of short research studies improves your health because the scrutiny picks up things that might otherwise go unnoticed.
In our study, we found 60 per cent of our women had low vitamin D levels. Ours is an observational study, however, we results with participants’ GPs and this resulted in women having vitamin D supplementation, so in subsequent years the women didn’t demonstrate the same deficiencies. This is an example of how even in observational research, taking part can influence health and we see less illness in participants.
For those who worry a ‘healthy lifestyle’ involves a strict adherence to difficult eating regimes, these women were not fanatical. Research shows those who focus on a single thing – like rigorous diets – have poorer health than we’d expect.
Interesting studies have shown people who are dieting are more likely to get infections. Researchers have tested the blood of people dieting and shown there are fewer natural-killer cells (the immune system cells that eat up bad things that end up in our bodies) compared with people not on a diet.
‘Eating healthy’ within the calorie limits your body needs is not dieting. We need to ingest enough. We should not ingest too much. This may seem straightforward but ‘enough’ and ‘too much’ mean different things to different people and can thwart our efforts to find the right balance.
If there’s more energy going in, you put on weight. And the inverse is true too. Get the maths right, and you’ll be set for a healthy life and ageing. A health professional can help you calculate a tailored personal ‘required calories per day’ plan for you.
Negative life events challenge mental resilience. They place us at risk of developing depression by lowering our positive mood. But rather than focusing on reducing negative impacts, at times outside our control, the key to good mental health is to augment our positive mood. This is akin to positive thinking and the feeling you really can do it, things are not that bad and you feel hopeful – and it’s a strong protector of mental health.
Overall, the greatest influences causing negative mood in women boil down to three factors: daily hassles, stress and bothersome symptoms. To maintain health and wellbeing, women need to prioritise reducing hassles and stress.
Research also shows if we can increase how we view our wellbeing, there are long-term positive changes in our physical and mental health. We get better at this skill with time. We’ve learnt from the amazing women in our study that nothing is more important than being optimistic. They’ve shown us that positive attitude and mood can be powerful in dealing with even dramatic and crushing life events. The adage ‘laughter is the best medicine’ is still in circulation for good reason. Bless the comedians; they are champions of public health.
When looking at each side of the health coin you may ask: What is ‘purpose’? In essence, purpose is what connects us to a feeling of being useful in our role, and that our service is of value. It correlates strongly with people feeling their lives have meaning.
Overwhelmingly, the secret our women reveal to us time and again is ‘it’s the little things that count’. We’ve observed in our study that people have an incredibly wide variety of social connections and – most importantly – that a person can change their connections dramatically over time, sailing life’s winds as they alter.
It’s the surprising secrets that are most precious, and one of the ones that surprised us most was that not all socially active women are fit and well. We saw a number of women volunteering, caregiving and grandparenting who had arthritis and reported active aches and joint pains, yet engaged despite these.
They had better mood as they tended to focus on the positive attributes of their dedication, priding themselves on being responsible and reliable. Their communities appreciate this and reward them.
What’s interesting about the healthiest women in our study is they don’t do the above in isolation. They’re wonderfully efficient. They integrate several activities at once. They’re active while interacting with friends and while caregiving or volunteering.
They bring a positive attitude to life and routinely find things to do that include being active, while also being mentally stimulating, which makes them feel happy and purposeful.
This is an edited extract from Secrets of Women’s Healthy Ageing: Living Better, Living Longer by Professor Cassandra Szoeke, Melbourne University Press.
Text: bauersyndication.com.au