Healthy Eating When You're 50 Plus Kendal

The biggest barrier to improving the health of older people isn’t knowledge, money, or skill. It’s the killer phrase “I’m too old to change now”. When applied to just about anything in life, that isn’t a reason, it’s a pathetic excuse. And when it comes to healthy eating it’s just WRONG.
Medical research abounds on the damage we do to ourselves through poor eating and the often astounding improvements that can be made if we change our habits, treat ourselves as well as we should, and make healthy eating an ongoing priority.
Those two words essentially encapsulate what eating healthily is all about:
1. Ongoing: Eating healthily has to be sustained mission. Perfection is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to sustain, but you have to be prepared to try and eat healthily the majority of the time, all the time from now on. Most people fail because of a quick-fix mindset. They force themselves to eat things they don’t really like with an attitude that implies short-termism (i.e. “I’ll go back to eating what I really like when I’ve improved my health”).
2. It has to be a priority. Your health really is your most precious asset in later life. Not only for now, but for the future. Again a great deal of research shows that taking care of your body now will help prevent many degenerative and impairing diseases that we tend to regard as inevitable or a matter of chance later on (e.g. diabetes, heart disease, cancer). Prioritising means taking time to plan, shop and eat healthily and to enjoy doing so. It really is that important.
You may have a particular reason why you want to eat healthily (e.g. an illness or disorder) or you may just decide that you need to make some improvements to your current eating habits. Either way, what is sure is that deciding to adopt healthy eating habits will provide you with more energy, fewer minor ailments (e.g colds), and very probably reduced weight and smaller food bills. And that’s all before you start to consider the individual benefits that you would like to achieve.
There’s a lot to be considered if you are thinking about making radical changes to your eating habits at this time of life but this simple six step framework for healthy eating is a good place to start:
1. Research: Find out for yourself the facts about healthy eating: what to eat, what to avoid, how to go about it, and the likely benefit. Speak to your doctor and get their advice about exactly what you should do.
2. Plan: You need to look at your lifestyle: what you eat when, your energy slumps and weak spots, the restrictions of your other daily activities. Eating healthily will invariably mean changing some of your other habits so that you don’t find yourself giving into temptation and going back to your old ways.
3. Set goals: Eating healthily doesn’t necessarily mean losing weight although for many of us that is a good goal. That aside you may want to set goals around feeling less tired, getting rid of a nagging ailment, improving your mood, reducing your blood pressure … whatever will make a real difference for you.
4. Persevere: Things are always easy at the start, but making a major change like altering the eating habits of a lifetime is not going to be easy and you will probably experience intermittent disappointments, failure, and “going off the rails”. Expect this and just vow to get over it and keep on trying.
5. Monitor your progress: Set yourself some milestones and ideally have someone else who will take an interest in how you are getting on. Even the smallest of achievements can make a BIG difference to your ongoing motivation.
6. Be realistic: For all that we wish it might be different, the regrettable fact is that major change takes time. In fact when you’re changing your eating habits you may find that things seem to be worse for a while, for example you might have headaches, bad skin, or just feel depressed or “out of sorts”. Of course, if there’s a major problem you should seek medical advice, but by and large it will just be your body readjusting itself. How long that takes is an individual matter, so just remember to be realistic and don’t expect miracles over night.
One of the wonders of eating healthily over time is how much you suddenly start to appreciate the different subtle tastes and textures of food and drink and how much you really come to value the joy of eating. And oddly enough, many of what once were your “favourite foods” which are high in sugar, fat and empty calories no longer seem very appealing…
Click here for more information about lifestyle changes for the over 50s from in my prime.