Improving wellbeing … one step at a time

We received some interesting information from the breast cancer charity Walk the Walk in a press release promoting their forthcoming SunWalk in Battersea Park London, on Sunday on 24th July.

Apparently…

• Mile for mile Power Walkers walking at a minimum pace of 4 miles an hour use the same amount of energy as runners
• Experts have been quoted as saying ‘Walking is the nearest thing to the perfect form of exercise”
• Walking at least 45 minutes 4 times a week at pace, you could lose up  to 18lbs in a year without changing your diet

Sounds just the thing for any older person faced with the challenge of losing a few pounds and retaining, or regaining, fitness.

Details of the event can be found at www.walkthewalk.org.

Even if you aren’t able or don’t want to participate, it’s a great reminder of the value of propelling yourself out of the door on a regular basis (no special preparation or equipment required) in the fight to lose a few pounds and fend off decline.

Looking after your health – who can you trust?

We all know that looking after your health and taking preventative measures to ward off degenerative disease and decay is a priority for the over 50s. But sometimes conflicting advice makes it all seem far too difficult. How much alcohol is recommended? Are eggs good or bad for cholesterol? Should you take aspirin or avoid it? The list is endless and in the media, opinions change day to day.

A recent “sit up and take notice” piece concerned the health-giving properties of green tea which has long been promoted as a virtual wonder cure for all known ills. This time, however, reports were suggesting that merely drinking one cup a day would be enough to reduce your risk of dementia or cancer. Sounds fantastic – but is that true or not?

As ever, our advice is to check it out on a great website devoted to all things medical and health related, the “NHS Choices” website which you can access here http://www.nhs.uk/Pages/HomePage.aspx ).  It gives full, scientific, unbiased advice and commentary on all such research studies and is worth checking out whenever these big claims break in the news.

For the record, the green tea claim apparently isn’t quite that straightforward as it was portrayed, see here.

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2011/01January/pages/green-tea-and-alzheimers.aspx

I wish I’d looked after…

The current economic climate seems to be doing everything possible to make us feel helpless – and in some cases downright desperate and depressed. The only antidote is to try to be positive and to look at what we can do in the face of it all to regain some control and prove we can change things. One of the most significant challenges for the over 50s is to look after our health particularly in the light of a new blast of publicity showing that  record levels of drinking, obesity and sedentary behaviour are causing UK citizens to have the highest proportion of preventable cancers ( in a comparative study with the US, Brazil and China).

According to the report by the World Cancer Research Fund around 78,000 of us (of all ages) develop cancer needlessly each year because of our unhealthy lifestyles.  Yet healthy living could prevent 39 per cent of cases of the 12 major cancers – including bowel and breast cancer as well as mouth, pharynx and larynx cancer and cancer of the oesophagus.  Even more thought-provoking is that these figures don’t include smoking which accounts for one third of cancer cases.

Although the report recommends government intervention to encourage a switch to healthy foods, the ultimate answer – regardless of how unpalatable – is surely that we all have to start taking more responsibility for ourselves and our future health. As older people (reputedly wiser) we also need to be role models for our children, grandchildren, colleagues and friends.  Okay, no one wants to start apportioning blame at the stage where you find you’ve succumbed to cancer (or heart disease, stroke, and other related catastrophic  illness) but on the other hand it’s too late then to start wishing you’d looked after your health.