by Daniel Lucas
1. You are what you eat! Our food choices are some of the most important choices we make. Choosing quality food is vital to maintaining muscle tone, organs, your digestive system and overall body function. Whole, organic, nutrient-rich foods act as high-octane fuel for your body. Processed foods are calorie-rich and nutrient-poor—your digestive system will waste energy on trying to break down calories that it doesn’t recognize as food. Keep your digestive system young and running lean and clean.
2. Use it or lose it—but use it correctly! Modern life has all kinds of challenges. One of our biggest challenges is repetitive movement, whether it’s at a keyboard or on a treadmill. Be aware of how repetitive movement can overtax some muscle groups, making them tight and sore, while leaving other muscles underused and weak, eventually leading to misalignment. Add some variety to your movement and take breaks from repetitive movements to keep your muscles balanced. Too much repetitive motion in one direction results in stress and inflammation to the muscle tissue and joints. Speaking of stress…
3. Don’t hold on to stress—it’s unrelieved stress that makes us old. Very few people in this day and age can claim to have a stress-free life. It’s how we deal, or don’t deal, with stress that can either keep us young or take us out of balance. Not all stress is bad. When we ask our muscles to work, for example, we’re putting stress on the muscle tissue, tendons and ligaments to make them stronger. But we wouldn’t ask them to work 24/7! If you’re in the habit of internalizing stress and carrying it around, you’re making your system work overtime and decreasing your natural function. Develop the habit of reducing stress on a daily basis—exercising, taking breaks, moving your breath out of your shoulders and into your rib cage, drinking plenty of water—so you can be free of carrying stress around.
4. Play young! Go and do things that connect you to truly feeling young. Sometimes we all have to reach back to go forward. What activities make you feel young? Dancing, hiking, playing volleyball, riding a bicycle…all of these are responses our clients have given to this question. Ask yourself! And really try to embody that feeling of being young in your life each day.
5. Let go! Being young is being resilient. Consciously let go of the stressors in your life that you can’t control; let go of the negative language that accompanies those stressors and inhibits your abilities (“I’m too old for that”, “I’ll never get rid of my stress” etc). Let go of the illusion that you can’t feel young!
