How To Play Offense With Your Health

Don’t wait until your sick to take action. Here’s how to play offense with your health: Get enough sleep, maintain your social connections, eat nourishing food, be in the sunshine, and stay active. 

Sleep: Getting enough sleep protects the body from getting diseases like dementia and cardiovascular disease and improves the body’s metabolism. It’s been found that getting less than five hours of sleep puts someone at two times higher risk of getting dementia. Lack of sleep has also been found to impair glucose metabolism, leading to diabetes.

Maintain Social Connections: Having strong social connections has shown to increase the body’s immune response by decreasing inflammation and improving the body’s ability to recover from diseases.  Feeling more connected to others also reduces levels of anxiety and depression.

Get in the sun: Vitamin D controls over 1,000 different physiological processes in the body and the body produces less as we age. A 70-year-old produces 4x less vitamin D than a 20-year old. Vitamin D contributes to our health by 1) helping to build healthy bones 2) improving vascular function and reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and 3) improving the immune response.

Eat Nutritious Food: Food is medicine and when we don’t eat right our body deteriorates. There’s an overwhelming amount of nutrition advice and there’s growing evidence that nutrition will become highly individualized based on someone’s genetics and health goals. Whether your vegan or an avid meat eater, eating foods that are minimally processed and in their most natural state is a safe bet and of avoid processed sugar.

Stay Active: Staying active helps to maintain muscle and improves bone and joint health. Maintaining muscle helps us to become more resilient to aging and disease. Muscle tissue is more sensitive to insulin, reducing the chance of getting diabetes. Staying strong and mobile is a way to prevent osteopenia and osteoporosis. Balance and stability become more challenging as we age but maintaining strength makes the body more resilient to falls.