Tag Archives: healthy lifestyle

5 Ways to Help Your Parents Stay Healthy and Active

When you were a child, mom and dad were quick in chasing you around. But as they get older, you may notice that they no longer have as much energy for physical activities. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) the recommended amount of physical activity is about 30 minutes a day, five days a week. Did you know all physical activity and basic physical movements require healthy muscles for strength and energy?

If you’re caring for parents, it is important to know regular exercise and the right nutrition not only helps them keep chronic illnesses at bay – but it also helps preserve their muscles to give them the strength and energy to achieve all of life’s possibilities as they age.

Here are five ways to help mom and dad to stay healthy and active as they enter their golden years.

Follow A Balanced Diet Incorporating Muscle Nutrients

Image: sansoja/Pixabay

Maintaining a balanced diet goes beyond making sure mom and dad get a healthy dose of fruits and vegetables. The body requires important nutrients and sufficient protein as it ages to support overall health and muscle strength. However, no single food provides all the nutrients for good health, so it is important to make sure mom and dad eat a variety of foods for different vitamins and nutrients.

There is also another nutrient that should be the mainstay of your parents’ diet. HMB, a muscle building ingredient, can help in maintaining muscles and physical function as your parents age. HMB is a metabolite of the essential amino acid leucine and has been shown to help the body regain strength2. Small amounts of HMB can be found in avocados, citrus fruits, cauliflower and catfish, but these are not enough to fully support mom and dad’s overall muscle health and strength. Hence, oral nutritional supplementation with HMB can help keep them strong.

Incorporate Weights into Your Daily Runs

You may be familiar with the heart-health benefits of jogging and running, but why not add a little strength training into the aerobic mix? By adding some resistance in the form of ankle weights or handheld dumbbells, older adults can build stronger, leaner muscles and protect against muscle loss as they age. Consider joining mom or dad for regular jogs around the neighborhood, passing off the weights among you for a rotating benefit for everyone.

Consider Low-Impact Routines and Resistance Training

Try something new and encourage mom and dad to join you for low-impact exercises that build the mind, body and balance, which can help prevent dangerous falls3. Even if they have never done them before, the stress-busting, blood-pressure-lowering benefits of yoga, pilates and tai chi make these routines worth exploring.

In addition to low-impact routines, resistance exercise has been proven as an effective way to increase muscle mass and strength. Create more moments that matter together and try out a class or even stream routines from YouTube.

Image: John Moeses Bauan/Unsplash

Bust A Move

Take advantage of the heart-pumping benefits of dance for older adults and crank up a few tunes from different decades for fun with the entire family. Help mom or dad take a jog down memory lane in a group class that teaches the moves of yesteryear, such as line dancing, ballroom dancing or even disco! Feeling daring? Go virtual and get a gaming console that encourages dance.

Make Workouts A Family Affair

Who said workouts had to be all work and no fun? Find physical activities that the whole family can partake in. The Ensure Gold Strength Run on November 10 is a 3-kilometer run that can put mom, dad and the whole family’s strength to the test. You can run side-by-side with mom and dad and encourage each other along the way, all while enjoying nostalgic music from the disco fever of the 70s all the way to the roaring 90s! There will also be fun activities to test your muscle strength and try other aerobics and strength training fitness.

While aging is natural, losing too much muscle mass is not. It is never too late to take steps to slow down or reverse muscle loss. These simple measures are key in supporting good muscle health so that your mom and dad have the strength and energy to continue doing the things they love with the entire family. Make your family’s muscle health a priority.

 

Adopting a healthy lifestyle helps reduce the risk of dementia

One of the greatest fears most people don’t speak about is cognitive decline and dementia. How do they cope in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia?

The World Health Organization (WHO) has just released its guidelines about how people can address this fear and reducing their risk of dementia. Believe it or not, it’s as simple as:
#Move8 fitness movement at KL Car Free Morning – photo courtesy www.move8.org.
  • getting regular exercise

  • not smoking

  • avoiding harmful use of alcohol

  • controlling their weight

  • eating a healthy diet

  • maintaining healthy blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels

And who’s a poster model for this? Malaysia’s and the world’s oldest Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahahir Mohammad, of course! At the age of 93 years young, Tun M as he’s fondly known to Malaysians, said this, “I would advise people not to rest when they grow old because if you rest, you will soon become very weak and incapable, and may become senile. Be active after you reach retirement age.

Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad courtesy of https://aarondell.home.blog/tag/mahathir-mohamad/

It is the same as your muscles. If you don’t use your muscles and lie down all the time, the muscles cannot even carry your weight. You cannot stand. You cannot walk.

The brain is the same. If you don’t use your brain, you don’t think, you don’t read, you don’t write, the brain regresses and you become senile. So always be active,” Tun M advised.

In the press statement issued on 14 May 2019 from its Geneva headquarters, WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus shares that in the number of people with dementia is expected to triple in the next 30 years. “We need to do everything we can to reduce our risk of dementia. The scientific evidence gathered for these Guidelines confirm what we have suspected for some time, that what is good for our heart, is also good for our brain.”

WHO’s Global Dementia Observatory, launched in December 2017, is a compilation of information about country activities and resources for dementia, such as national plans, dementia-friendly initiatives, awareness campaigns and facilities for care. Data from 21 countries, including Bangladesh, Chile, France, Japan, Jordan and Togo, have already been included, with a total of 80 countries now engaged in providing data.

Creating national policies and plans for dementia are among WHO’s key recommendations for countries in their efforts to manage this growing health challenge. During 2018, WHO provided support to countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Qatar, Slovenia and Sri Lanka to help them develop a comprehensive, multi-sectoral public health response to dementia.

An essential element of every national dementia plan is support for carers of people with dementia, said Dr Dévora Kestel, Director of the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse at WHO. “Dementia carers are very often family members who need to make considerable adjustments to their family and professional lives to care for their loved ones. This is why WHO created iSupport. iSupport is an online training programme providing carers of people with dementia with advice on overall management of care, dealing with behaviour changes and how to look after their own health.”

Dementia: a rapidly growing public health problem

Dementia is an illness characterized by a deterioration in cognitive function beyond what might be expected from normal ageing. It affects memory, thinking, orientation, comprehension, calculation, learning capacity, language and judgement. Dementia results from a variety of diseases and injuries that affect the brain, such as Alzheimer disease or stroke.

Dementia is a rapidly growing public health problem affecting around 50 million people globally. There are nearly 10 million new cases every year. Dementia is a major cause of disability and dependency among older people. This is a rampant non-communicable disease (NCD) and inflicts a heavy economic burden on societies as a whole, with the costs of caring for people with dementia estimated to rise to US$ 2 trillion annually by 2030. The increasing numbers of people with dementia, its significant social and economic impact and lack of curative treatment, make it imperative for countries to focus on reducing modifiable risk factors for dementia. Action area 3 of the Global action plan on the public health response to dementia 2017–2025 is risk reduction. Download the global action plan here.

Some highlights from the plan on the areas for action include: increasing prioritisation and awareness of dementia; reducing the risk of dementia; diagnosis, treatment and care; support for dementia carers; strengthening information systems for dementia; and research and innovation.

This topic has recently been covered by The Star newspaper in Malaysia, “Dealing with Dementia”.

Dementia patients require assistance with even the basic needs

And also in Singapore, their Ministry of Health website addresses citizen’s concerns about the ever rising occurrences of dementia in elderly folks. Find out more about dementia signs here.

Warning signs of dementia
Dementia affects memory, judgement, language, planning and behaviour.

The video above, is inspired courtesy from Indonesia’s popular poco-poco dance. Some believe this helps prevent Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia by stimulating the brain. In the CGTN news channel video description, they share that Alzheimer’s affects the elderly, has no cure and experts have been looking for ways to prevent it.

Source: World Health Organisation // Ministry of Health Singapore // Ministry of Health Malaysia

Editor’s Note: Never Too Late

Hands up please to those of you who began the year with the resolution to lose weight. Be honest. I am one of those people.

It all began with sitting by the beach, waiting for the fireworks display, that we started talking about our New Year resolutions. Although it’s mostly about body goals, losing weight is an important factor as 75% of us who were there were overweight.

For me, I began my body transformation completely mad – threw myself into exercising and crash dieting. That ended up pretty bad. I had injuries and binge-ate most times.

Took me a while to get into the groove of things while my friends are already seeing results. That did not hamper my enthusiasm to achieve my goals though. In fact, it encouraged me further.

I decided to adopt a healthier lifestyle and more realistic goals. The goal in the adoption was to change habits and mindset.

It may be July now but I feel as if it’s January and I’m just starting to finally realign myself towards a better me. There is no excuse to stop achieving goals set out on that beach on New Year’s just because it’s the middle of the year. The best time to begin working on a better you is now.

 

My weight as of 1 January 2018: 71kg

My current weight: 67kg