Physical Wellness

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Dance as though no one is watching you. Love as though you have never been hurt before. Sing as though no one can hear you. Live as though heaven is on earth.

Physical Wellness 老當益壯

Health is the most foundational area of wellness in our earthly life. Physical wellness pertains to the bodily aspect of our health. Most people know death is inescapable and therefore majority of seniors are not afraid of dying. But they are afraid of falling ill, especially prolonged illness during their old age. Their reasons may vary like some don’t cherish the thought of losing their independence. While some are afraid of the escalating medical costs. Most seniors believe they will become a burden to their loved ones and infringe into their children’s wellness of life.

But the mechanical parts of our physical body suffer from wear and tear. All our functional parts will age with usage. At the same time, our body needs to be use to keep it in shape. There are many parts of our body that follows “the use-it-or-lose-it” rule. To prevent your body parts from getting rusty, we have to keep on going. Our bones, our muscles, our heart and most importantly our brain are all subjected to this same rule. So exercise is essential to keep our body parts in motion. But because of wear and tear, we shouldn’t over exercise. The body needs repair or rest too. On top of rest and exercise, the body needs fuel or energy that comes from the food that we consume. To sum up, we need to pay attention to three basic areas of life to keep physically well, they are: – diet, exercise and rest.

Exercise

There are numerous studies and reports that prove exercise is a must to REVERSE the human aging process. Exercise not only keeps the external looking younger through cleaning the skin and stretching out wrinkles, it actually strengthens the internal organs especially the cardiovascular system through pumping the heart and puffing the lungs. But it has to be real disciplined exercise and not pretend motions at a relaxed and irregular pace. Researchers and health practitioners calls it ‘no pain, no gain’. We believe for seniors, we may not have to go as far. We do suggest ‘no sweat, no gain’ though if we want to derive real health benefits out of our exercises. Just like our other internal systems like gastro-intestinal, urinary and respiratory systems serve to remove waste bodies, sweating will remove the body’s toxicity and regulate the body temperature.

There are different parts of the body with different characteristics. First of all, there are the parts that are external and internal. Then there are parts that perform different functions. So to keep all these parts in motion, there are different exercises prescribed for them. For example,

To build muscles, weights training is recommended.
To strengthen joints, stretching exercises.
To renew internal cellular grow, best form is aerobic exercise.

The importance of the different forms of exercise may change with age. Nevertheless, a balance must be strike and each form of exercise will complement the other. For those who are not active or ill, do consider walking as exercise. The trick is to get into the habit of exercising and to re-balanced our forms of exercise.

Diet

Eating a good, balanced diet is essential to our well-being. Balance means a combination of all the necessary nourishment for life e.g. protein, carbohydrate, fats etc.. Nutritionists have found that most of the essential foods are best extracted from natural plant food. Different coloured vegetables and fruits are found to have different levels of ‘good elements’ that serves different areas of our bodies. Next, we recommend taking of fish for many essential vitamins.

The word ‘diet’ is use because it carries also the meaning of not over-eating. When we over-eat, our body has to work extra hard to digest the food and extract the unabsorbed food. So the trick is to eat more regularly but the experts’ advice is to eat to 70% full whatever this means.

Abstaining from manufactured food e.g. deep fried food, preserved food and canned food while eating nature’s produce e.g. milk, honey, nuts, fruits and vegetable used to be commonsense. However, because the world’s air and water has become polluted and farmers has resorted to add chemicals to fertilizers to get better yield has distorted the natural contents of even natural foods and destroyed many of the vitamins and minerals that were formerly part of their health benefits. It has become necessary to supplement some of these lost vitamins and minerals with health supplements. Unfortunately, unlike medication, health authorities don not govern the use and consumption of such supplements. There are so many health supplements suppliers that it can be confusing for us as to what are necessary and what the genuine remedies are.

Rest

The basic way our body repairs itself is through rest and sleep – deep sound sleep. Most adults in our modern society of bright lights and TV late night programs are sleeping later and later hours. Our body clocks are out-of-sync with natural day and night. Usually the wrong sleep pattern accumulates over time and causes fatigue and lowers the immunity shield of our body. To stay fit, made sure you get at least 7 hours of sleep regularly and the sleep should be deep, sound sleep.

Taking Action

We are creatures of habits. We have lived decades in a certain lifestyle targeted at making more money, acquiring more things and gaining more power which are often contrary to improving our physical fitness. So it is understandable that it is difficult to change our lifestyle and routines for some long-term, less-visible internal health benefits. REVERSE Co-operative wants you not just to think young but also to actually acquire good lifestyle habits. We want you to join our movement to change lifestyles – to become less consumed in the rat-race, get sufficient sleep and rest; to be conscious of taking a balance diet supplemented with the correct health supplement and adopt a daily exercise habit. Many of the older generation after years of slogging at making a living finds exercise strenuous. REVERSE co-operative suggest that you take up activities that suits your interest and ability. We list in this website different games and exercise groups that you can join so you can choose something in your own inclination and will enjoy e.g. badminton; table-tennis; IG (inter-generational ball); line-dancing; walking; cycling groups etc. listed by days of week so you can not only have exercise everyday but different exercise on different days to break the monotony of disciplined exercise. You can further gain benefits of social wellness, emotion wellness etc. by joining others in the seniors cohort exercising together in groups.

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