Resist The Force Of Aging

Resist The Force Of Aging

If you’re the type of person who would rather watch TV and eat all day long than giving you’re muscles a little more stretch, better think twice. Here’s the deal: this lifestyle speeds up aging. How? Well, inactivity accelerates aging in two ways: it decreases our muscle strength and gives us extra pounds.

Muscle meltdown

As we age, the quantity and strength of our muscle fibers diminish. Truth to the matter is, we lose two to four pounds of muscles every ten years. Decreased number and strength of muscles causes our muscles to lose flexibility, losing our usual range of motion and optimal strength.

Lack of exercise is to blame. It was found out that not exercising for even just a week weakens our muscles significantly. In fact, if you don’t exercise for a month, you will lose almost 50% of your original muscle strength. Some people may not even notice their atrophied muscles because of the fatty buildup in their body. Blame that too to lack of exercise.

Gaining extra pounds

The simple logic here is that if you are inactive, you gain extra pounds, and extra pounds can age you. But hey, there’s a missing link. How does an increase in weight speed up aging?

Researchers have recently found out that as people become heavier and became more insulin resistant (a common side effect of being fat and heavy), their telomeres (strands of DNA at the end of a chromosome that protect the tip from destruction and classically shorten with age) shrank more than those of people who didn't increase their weight and developed more insulin resistance, an apparent sign that the aging process was speeding up among overweight. Researchers suppose that the stress caused by increased weight and insulin resistance spawn inflammation and free radicals that damage cells. Simply put, a heavier body ages its own DNA.

The Solution

But the good news is, you can recover what you have lost and slice off what you have gained. Research clearly shows that a healthy lifestyle and exercise can help keep your DNA younger.

In studies, regular exercise has been proven to keep you from diabetes, muscle atrophy, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and heart diseases. Regular workout helps prevent hypertension, reduces body fat, raises High Density Lipoprotein (good cholesterol), lowers Low-Density Lipoprotein (bad cholesterol), improves circulation, keeps the bowel healthy, and regulates key hormones.

An anti-aging workout is best for you! This includes consistent cardio, yoga, and weight training.

You can do jogging, cycling, walking, and swimming for thirty minutes a day for about five times a week. Doing these of higher intensity everyday can be helpful in bringing more blood and oxygen to our brain. These activities also guard your heart by lowering blood pressure, reducing LDL, and keeping arteries flexible to improve circulation.

Lifting weights should also be part of your roster of activities. Weightlifting for 20 minutes a day, twice a week can be of great help in having strong bones, and muscles, which of course includes the heart. For beginners, 3-5 pound dumbbells will do.

Doing yoga is one of the best activities to fight stress. It relaxes the body, thereby, keeping stress from burning you out. It also protects the body against free radicals that break down the elasticity of the skin.

More Benefits

Exercise does not only keep you young, it also helps you sleep, firms you up, improves your mood, keeps you slim, and take note of this, charges up your sex life :D

BONUS : Say Hello To A Forever Young You

As you grow older, your priorities become redirected. Before, the greatest problem you could possibly have is what to wear on your school/ office wash day. Fast forward, the hurdle you’re facing is a 2-year old child. Fast forward again, you look in the mirror and realize that all those worrying and “problematizing” finally took their toll on your skin.

It’s about time that you know yourself more and pay less attention to your outside appearance. After all, what really matters is how you feel inside. A rich man can feel that he still needs to get richer; so in principle, he is not rich at all. However, a poor man can be more contented than a millionaire and at the end of the day, the poor man becomes happier. Let’s cruise through what keeps one young by not applying a wonder cream or doing a wonder work-out.

MEDITATE

The day-in, day-out stress will make you feel like “slipping away” from the things which used to make you happy and things which used to make you feel like a child again. Rekindle these good memories by meditating at least ten minutes a day. Take some time to detach yourself from the world and think. You don’t need to philosophize deeply or to draft your next blog entry. Just enjoy some silence and a piece of world peace.

Choose a ten- to fifteen-minute break in your day. Just a short while. You have twenty four hours a day. Surely you can find or MAKE time for some productive self-healing.

KEEP A DIARY

A diary is a very important tool for a writer. However, even if you’re not a writer or even if you are not a grammar expert, it is also advisable to keep a diary. A diary is an outlet. It is a friend which will listen, will not judge and handy also. A diary is a tool of letting-go of the bad things that have happened to you which pull you back from moving forward.

You need to pass on some of your worries somewhere so you can focus to more important things like the relationships around you and the smallest get-happy detail of your everyday life. Keeping a diary also is like keeping a record of your psychological states. There are people who freak out when they realize that they’re starting to age and surely you don’t want to be one of them.

Don’t look at it as a task. Just write whenever you want to. Even in the middle of the night. Isn’t it just neat that someone will listen to every detail of your nightmare and not brand you a lunatic?

HAVE A DATE WITH YOURSELF

The most important person in your life should still be yourself EVEN IF you have aged. Remember when you were younger, when all you wanted was the latest gadget and the in pair of jeans? That’s exactly how you should still feel, albeit being more mature. Try not going into the selfish path; that’s too much.

Watch a movie alone; save yourself from the pains of having to explain to someone how the plot should have gone. Devour your favorite cake alone, go shoe-shopping alone, brim in front of the mirror and say “I’m the king/queen of the world”! Err, please remember to do the last thing alone too. Please. It’s for your own good.

When you were young, it was all about you. Now that you’re older, let it still be all about you. The secret to staying young is all in the mind. You don’t even need to get out of your home right? There’s no use studying what certain chemicals can do to save your skin while not learning to know, love and embrace your self. Your beautiful, ethereal self.