Investing in health also a retirement key

Baby boomers need to do more investing in health, and not just in savings accounts.

Just as a sound pattern of savings will make retirement more comfortable, so will a plan to develop good health habits. Exercise is one of the cheapest and most effective strategies to fight the effects of aging.

Which one of you 77 million baby boomers across American thought it would come to this? ‘Used to be that exercise meant looks, not health.

“When you’re young, you exercise to look good – and get a date,” says Philip Smeltzer, vice president of health care quality improvement at BlueCross BlueShield of Western New York. “The further we get away from 50, we’re happy to live another day. That’s what boomers care about: health and how exercise can make them stay healthy.”

Baby boomers, he says, should take a page from their parents’ book. As young- and middle-aged adults, that generation was much more physically active during their leisure time because they didn’t spend it in front of a computer, television or electronic device. Sedentary, they were not.

The point to an exercise routine is to make it a habit, and work toward not extending life as much as creating a healthful life. Indeed, exercise helps fight the weight gain that can exacerbate illness, experts say. The World Health Organization has recognized that the illnesses of aging – cancer, heart disease, stroke, adult-onset diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease – are 85 percent preventable.

Catherine Ansuini, chairman of Buffalo State College’s health and wellness department, says research shows that adults have good capacity for continued growth and change that will lead to a long and highly functional lifestyle.

“Now that the hormonal fluctuations and life’s obstacles are somewhat within our control, the opportunity to shift into a personal renaissance mode is at hand,” she says.

She’s got some little pearls of wisdom to help the uninspired get active and keep active throughout their lives. One of them: It is easier to act your way into thinking differently than it is to think your way into acting differently.

“So only think about how much you dislike exercise, for example, while your actually exercising,” she says.

Another: No more overnight miracle wellness renovation, crash diet, fitness plans that have repeatedly failed in the past.

By Annemarie Franczyk

Source: Biz Journals

Photo credit: Sugar Beach Residences via Visual Hunt / CC BY