Most seniors don’t want to be bodybuilders or performance athletes. Yet most seniors are presented with exercises and diets that seem to promote building large muscles and losing weight to the point at which you have minimal fat on your body. There is virtually nothing about fitness as part of your overall lifestyle.
Yes, bodybuilders have huge muscles and very low fat. And most marathoners are thin and look malnourished. Neither are necessarily healthy.
The problem for seniors who want to just be healthy and fit, but not go to extremes, is that there is very little good information available to satisfy that need.
There are lots of exercise programs for seniors. They say all sorts of different and confusing things. Most don’t touch on lifestyle and only talk about the fitness end of it. The best I have seen that DOES include lifestyle factors, is Younger Next Year, by Chris Crowley and the late Dr. Henry Lodge. It has the best advice I have seen to date for Seniors about keeping fit and staying young, and is the closest I have seen to my own thoughts and theories on Health and Fitness for Seniors. It’s still not good enough.
Another good resource about staying fit and living young is Making Old Bodies Young, by Bernarr Macfadden. This book was originally published in 1919, and is very “old school” about health and fitness. That’s one reason it’s so good. Many of Macfadden’s principles, thought of as “far out” in the 1900s are just now being validated by science.
There is still a lot of confusion, particularly on the weight loss and diet side. Most of the dietary plans out there work short term and some are arguably, dangerous. But they are only useful for a while. Most of those programs are not long term solutions and most people on them revert to their original weight over time. Keto, Whole 30. Vegetarian, Vegan, Paleo, etc. The list goes on and on.
I was successful in losing weight using The South Beach Diet, by Dr. Arthur Agatston. I lost 40 pounds and never gained a bit of it back. It promoted neither low fat nor low carbohydrate. But it did stress the right fats and carbs and was what he called “Low Glycemic”. It worked for both me and my wife, but I have no idea whether it would work for you.
So, what’s the answer?
Stay tuned. Over the next few weeks, I’ll share ideas that have worked for me to go from 200 pounds to 160 pounds and be in the best shape of my life, starting at age 70 and still continuing today. I’ll include and share ideas from people I have interviewed and studied for well over a decade. The goal is to provide ideas and guidelines, but not specific dictates about what is best for you. As Bruce Lee said so well, “Take what you find useful, discard what is not, and add what is uniquely yours.” Great advice!
As a side note: I’m neither a Medical Doctor nor a Psychologist. I earned an NASM Personal Trainer Certification a decade ago with a designation as a Senior Fitness Specialist. I am letting them lapse this year because I have never actually used them, and I am 80 years old after all.
Anyhow, I hope you will find the upcoming material useful, and I thank you for reading.