When you’re given the same message from several directions at about the same time, it’s time to listen and take action. It was my financial advisor and financial coach who sent me one particular message, the one to listen to and take action on. And it wasn’t a financial message, either!
The message? Fitness. My financial coach, Doug, started talking about the health benefits of augmenting your vitamin D3 levels years ago because the modern lifestyle keeps you out of the sun where you generally get your vitamin D from (not a precise explanation, mind you). And if you live in the northern part of the northern hemisphere you get even less vitamin D than if you live in the southern part of the US (translate if you live in the southern hemisphere).
A modern indoor lifestyle in the northern part of the hemisphere creates a vitamin D poor body, and the associated poor health that comes from that. Doug talked about how higher levels of vitamin D boost your immune system, strengthen your bones, and fight cancer. Who knew, at least “way back” then?!
Doug also talked about the benefits of walking and running, working out, and spending time outdoors being active as part of a healthy lifestyle. Yeah, right. My reaction at the time was “I’m active and eat healthfully. I don’t need to be that extreme.” I did at least start taking vitamin D, mega-doses by some standards, with great results.
Then my financial advisor, Glen, after hearing about my high performance coaching business with a focus on boosting people’s energy, suggested I read the book Younger Next Year. He said he read it years earlier and started applying its lessons and felt the difference. He lives in Portland, OR — you know, the city where it never rains and always has perfect biking weather — and rides his bike to work every day. Every day! We had initially thought he was about 35 years old, until he started talking about his grandkids. Ok, so maybe he was 45, and started his family early. We thought that was good evidence to what a healthy lifestyle can do for you. But, nope, he’s 55. He is living proof that there is a way to be healthy, and younger. A way to be energetic, vibrant, and alert — even after 30.
Despite experiencing both financial professionals in my life giving me the same fitness message, it still took me awhile to act on their golden nuggets. It was probably eight months before I opened the book I bought the minute Glen suggested it. Sure I’d been faster at acting on Doug’s advice, but I didn’t have to do much to take vitamin D (note: I didn’t start going to the gym or running, or even augmenting my exercise program). So, after reading a chapter of “Glen’s book” I turned to my husband and asked him to put down the book he was reading to read this along with me because it was so powerful and important. He did. It is.
Coaching people to have more energy for vibrancy, productivity and high performance, and alertness so they can age gracefully is what I focus on. I feel it’s important to role model it too, so it’s important for me to practice what I preach, for me to walk my talk. It’s my practice to experiment with “new ideas”, or more accurately adopt old ideas, and share my experience with the process. This fitness message gets the same treatment as everything else you hear from me.
You are responsible for generating your own energy each and every day. You do that with the right attitude nutrition, movement, and breathing (oxygen is so good for you!). In my experience, there’s more to having a strong energy than only those things, which I cover in articles each week and in depth during my coaching sessions. And it’s simpler than that too. Fitness covers it succinctly.
You need only three things to get and stay energized. The authors of Younger Next Year, Chris and Harry, a retired lawyer-turned-author and a top-notch internal medicine doctor, summarize it nicely: exercise, nutrition, and commitment. And that energy is the key, in my way of thinking, to getting and feeling younger. Those three things keep entropy, or decay, at bay in your life.
Exercise is the key to aging, or anti-aging if you will. Eat less of everything, and make sure you fuel yourself with whole foods is the key to energy. Commitment, being involved with other people and caring about something outside yourself, is the key to emotional health. Put those three elements together and you have a life of living in focused energy with mindful balance.
When I started the book I wasn’t sure I was going to get anything new from it. Since Doug’s days of urging me to get out and walk/run and go to the gym, I had at least started riding my stationary bike regularly. Various exercise has been part of my life sporadically since I was in my twenties (before that I called it transportation: riding my bike everywhere I went). I figured I was doing enough.
After all, when I decided to combat my hypothyroidism, I committed to daily exercise. Interval riding on my bike, multi-tasking with watching 30 minutes of a movie to keep me on the bike longer (each day and through time), was my program. My stand-up desk helped me combat that sedentary lifestyle so prevalent today, especially with office workers — or so I thought. I park at the far end of the parking lot when I go to the store and move around the house and property regularly. With the advent of the VivoFit exercise band in my life, I was surprised to learn I didn’t move around nearly as much as I thought I did, nor as much as “the experts” recommend. And with time I didn’t do my interval training as rigorously.
Strength building was the element I was missing. Chris and Harry convinced me through their explanation that it’s imperative to exercise essentially every day for the rest of my life. Well, if I want to live in focused energy, that is. They aren’t talking about walking some, as my VivoFit and UP3 have me doing, and not riding a stationary bike. They are talking out and out aerobic exercising six days per week and strength building, working on all muscle groups, two or three days per week — every week. I go for something every day, with a rare day off, to keep the momentum going and the habit entrenched. I’m doing three days of strength training, four days of interval training, three days of intense riding, walking vigorously at least 20 minutes per day with another 10 or so additional minutes of intense walking, and stretching every morning for about 10 minutes.
I’m seeing a difference already after just a few weeks, even though I’ve been “exercising” regularly for years. It helps to listen to expert advice.
Entropy, another word for decay, is what I urge you to fight against to stay energized through your day. Here’s my blending of the different definitions of entropy, as a way of explaining why it’s a good thing to avoid: it’s disorder, a loss of transmitted information (your brain power), the evolution toward inertness, and the steady deterioration of a system, aka your body. All of this is, especially the deterioration — or decay — of your body, is inevitable, but exercise can slow the decay, and even reverse much of what you already have experienced.
How? Good question.
Equate movement, aka exercise, with springtime. Movement, and springtime, are signals that all is well, life is good, and it’s time for things to grow and live. The weight you put on for the winter, the food stores that sustained you through the lean winter, melts away as you become lean and powerful again. That same movement, and springtime brightness, signal the brain to shake off its lethargy and become alert again, and to become optimistic again.
Winter, on the other hand, signals the body it’s time to conserve energy stores and to pull in. Your body becomes lethargic, gains weight and loses muscle mass, and you even develop depression. This is a sedentary life. This is what signals decay, that entropy you want to avoid. Your modern, sedentary lifestyle is like winter and causes you to dry rot, to give up on life and fail to engage.
By doing something daily you tell your body it’s springtime, not winter. You tell your body it’s time to live, not rot and decay. Aging is inevitable; the way you do it is up to you. You can determine your speed and level of decay by the amount of exercise, the quality of nutrition, and the amount of social interaction and commitment to life you adopt.
Life is energy. Use it or lose it. In nature there is no retirement or sedentary option. In nature there is growth or decay. The same holds for you and your life. By being active daily — every single day — you can resist and slow the decay, and even reverse its effects.
Exercise is magic! You may be thinking, “come again”. Exercise gives you the optimism, strength, and flexibility to do what needs to be done in a day. This magic is really like a coded message that tells your body to not turn into a decayed bag of bones. And, as with all magic tricks, you have to work at it constantly to perfect it. So, pick a time, set a schedule, and get that habit going.
That decayed bag of bones is more sickly, more prone to cancer and modern ailments like Alzheimer’s, arthritis, stroke, heart attacks, osteoporosis, diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension, and depression. See, I told you that was something to avoid! Exercise magic is the master signaler to support repair and strengthening of joints and muscles, positive brain chemistry, and a heightened immune system. That magic helps create a vibrant, energized life, a life worth living.
With my newer focus on exercise and fitness, it startled me to hear people talk about how they hate exercise. I’d never thought about it before, and I guess that’s one big reason so many of us don’t exercise — hard and regular…and daily. To avoid being a decayed bag of bones before your time, get up and move. Strength training, with a professional so you don’t hurt yourself, and endurance training, and flexibility training — all make up your weekly exercise regime, or magic show rehearsal. Do it, on matter how you feel about it, unless you are inviting me to call you an old, decayed bag of bones.
One bit of science to support how exercise is magic, and magic you want in your life. Hang with me a moment because it’s going to look like I’m contradicting myself. Read through to the end to enjoy the complete magic show. There is a master chemical for inflammation and decay. There’s also a master chemical for growth and repair. The inflammation/decay master chemical is nicknamed C-6, and the growth/repair master chemical is nicknamed C-10. C-6 is produced by a sedentary lifestyle, aging, and exercise.
What?! Exercise? See, I told you…hold on. C-10 is produced in response to C-6. Growth is triggered by decay, decay from intense exercise. The magic show portion of the story is that the more C-6 produced by aerobic exercise the more C-10 is produced and released. A sedentary lifestyle does cause a slow release of C-6, but not enough to turn on C-10. A sedentary lifestyle means a steady decay into an old (or not so old) bag of bones. And no matter what you do, aging creates C-6 too. It takes a surge of C-6 from a surge of magic — aerobic exercise — to turn on enough C-10 to overcome a sedentary lifestyle collection of C-6, and to almost negate the C-6 from that inevitable aging.
To avoid being an old, decayed bag of bones, you have to exercise daily. You can find a way to love it, or not, but you have to do it if you want to be younger, energetic, and vibrant. If you follow these suggestions, you can have the health of someone in their 40s or 50s well into your 80s and 90s; the book explains why.
Fitness was quite a golden nugget message to get from my advisors. It’s a golden nugget I pass on to you. Be more attentive to the amount of gold in this nugget than I was. Don’t wait years to listen to me. Don’t even wait months to listen to me. Regardless of your state of health or state of mind, you can make it better and get younger by getting up and moving. Start exercising like your life depended on it, because it does. You too can be younger next year, starting today. You owe it to yourself to buy a copy right now (there’s one version for men, and one for women).
Listen to your advisors. They know what they are talking about.
I have just joined the gym upstairs, bit over a month ago, feels great just to work muscles, and go to sleep tired!!! I would only add that if you work hard and sweat as you should, a good full spectrum plant biased Mineral supplement should follow up a good work out, as Sweat is not just Sodium!! Great read, thanks!