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How To Maintain A Healthy Lifestyle After Retirement
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle after retirement is not as easy as it sounds. American comedian George Burns once joked, “Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous. When I was sixty-five I still had pimples.â€
While he was joking, there is a certain truth to the statement. The older people get, the younger the past decades seem. Think back twenty years ago to hold old you were then. Even if society considers that age to be older, it probably does not seem very old to you at all!
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When you see someone at a retirement party, they look fairly happy. They might regale their guests with plans of afternoons on the golf course, taking up a new hobby, or even travelling the world! However, more often than not those plans fizzle out and the person winds up doing very little with their free time.
However an article from Northwestern University confirms what busy retirees already know — that the key to living happily after retirement is staying active and planning new ways to fulfill life, especially when going from working full time to not going into work at all.
What to Expect When You’re Retired
One of the reasons why people have so many problems adjusting to retirement is that they have no idea what to expect. From the driving range to their sex drive, everything is so different than when they spent the bulk of their waking hours at their 9 to 5.
Sadly a lot of what happens to a retiree’s health is negative. While there may be a slight boost in health immediately after retirement happens, it is often short-lived and replaced by deterioration that not only affects a person’s physical state, but their mental state as well.
The negative impact of retirement on a person’s health is so significant in the United Kingdom that the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Age Endeavour Fellowship are lobbying for raising the state pension age to help people work for a longer period of time.
Studies with people who either reached or surpassed the status of octogenarian report that there are four keys to maintaining a healthy lifestyle after after retirement. Here they are, in no specific order, with some added suggestions for each one.
1. Make New Friends – Retiring from your job means you also lose making regular contact with everyone from your co-workers to the bicycle courier to the coffee guy. Making new friends often introduces new activities — and they are not the activities you might associate with the elderly!
2. Take Up New Hobbies – Whether you are puttering around the golf course, daubing a bingo card, skydiving, or ballroom dancing, spending your free time trying new things has three primary benefits. It helps keep you physically active, challenges your mind, and introduces you to new friends!
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3. Keep Learning – You don’t have to enroll in a full semester of college courses to keep learning. Take a class at the local community center or join a local civic group. Sign up to help a local volunteer organization. Anything that keeps you active while engaging your mind is a great choice.
4. Take Your Vitamins – Sticking with a well-balanced diet after retirement is another factor in staying healthy. While you may have earned the riches associated with more free time and less responsibility, rich foods or convenient meals heavy-laden with preservatives and empty calories can propel you into old age more quickly.
Taking the Right Multivitamin
Your body uses up vitamins and nutrients at a more rapid pace as you grow older, leaving you more susceptible to disease. That’s because as you age, you are more prone to accidents which creates more opportunity for free radicals to take up room in your body.
Free radicals are the reason why your body experiences inflammation, and inflammation is the number one reason why our bodies fail to resist diseases. Fortunately medical professionals have found that antioxidants are the number one way to fight free radicals.
Instead of taking the first vitamin you are able to reach on the shelf at your local pharmacy, instead research multivitamins that include glutathione, the mother of all antioxidants. Taking glutathione supplements is beneficial because in addition to the other vitamins and nutrients your body needs, it can fight free radicals, too!
After more than a decade in the pharmaceutical industry, Bill Lawrence moved on to create http://www.healthtraits.org/. This site is dedicated to wellness and staying healthy. Bill saw a lot of companies treating symptoms rather than the underlying conditions, and knew there had to be a better way. He now works to promote products that build the body’s natural defences and encourage total immune health.
