Why I Changed My Attitude Towards Exercise
I was just touching my toes while I was waiting for some water to warm on the stove, when I remembered something that a friend of mine told me.
“Exercise is free medicine,” Colleen had said. Colleen is 84 years old and while she’s only three years younger than my grandmother and they both share the same type of blindness–macular degeneration, which renders them legally blind but with some peripheral vision–the differences between them are stark.
One of them gave up on life and confined herself to a chair almost 50 years ago, is overweight, and requires a caregiver while the other is the most active senior I’ve ever seen.
Despite being legally blind, she takes the bus and goes to the senior center and the Braille Institute and takes all kinds of classes, including cooking and dancing classes. Colleen takes several vacations a year including annual trips to Hawaii and to Graceland to visit Elvis.
I have always hated exercise, and avoided it like the plague. Doctors always wrote me excuses to get out of physical education in junior high and high school.
But as I have crossed over into middle age as a single woman, I’ve begun to see the value of exercise more and more. Physical exercise also helps our mental health by creating endorphins.
Personally I like low impact exercise, like walking or bouncing on a rebounder. Dancing has become my joy and I can easily get 4-10 hours a week of exercise doing that. I also started doing a few girly push-ups (from the knees rather than the toes) to build my arms and it gets easier as I go along.
When we are younger we don’t think about our old age, and while I still consider myself far off from old age and retirement, I plan to go into it fully prepared for the best health that I can possibly drag along with me.
I’ve been drinking alkaline ionized water from a water ionizer for about 10 years now. I’ve seen it do remarkable things for my health, and I hear other people tell of the amazing benefits.
I would have never thought that changing the water I drank could make such a change in my life but it has. And people even think that I’m much younger than I am.
I’ve even added more fruits and vegetables into my diet which is something that I would have never thought possible as I didn’t really like them.
The women in my family live well into their nineties, so I fully expect to live to be ninety eight, but my plan is to be healthy.
So I will utilize Colleen’s advice that exercise is free medicine and do more today than I did in my twenties and thirties.
How about you?
DISCLAIMER:
I am not a doctor, please consult a licensed medical professional before embarking on any new health regimen.