
On International Day of Older People, ‘look after your body as if you'll need it for 100 years!’.
To live is to change. This realisation is so obvious that we take it to be synonymous with evolution, whatever age we consider it to be. However, the word change takes on a completely different meaning when associated with childhood or adolescence, or when we place it in the phase of life we call ‘adulthood’. Starting with physical appearance, of course, but also on a psychological and social level. Despite the fact that we now know that ageing is a continuous process, and that by the age of 30 we can see a series of physiological changes with implications for various areas of individual functioning, the truth is that by the time we reach old age no one takes us seriously...
In fact, at any time of life we know what lies ahead. Although science has shown us that adopting healthy lifestyles increases the likelihood of ageing with a better quality of life, it's around middle age that we start to experience greater difficulty in doing things as small as climbing a steeper flight of stairs, memorising a number or remembering a name, or making decisions as quickly as before.
At best, between the ages of 50 and 60 comes the time when we start going to the doctor regularly for this or that, when words like cholesterol and hypertension enter our vocabulary, when ‘having tests done’ becomes routine, or worse, when we fall seriously ill and become definitively ‘chronically ill’ with something. Add to all this the death of our parents, and we can only assume that we are beginning to grow old.
All these messages that the body and society send us will be even more pronounced at the age of 60, challenging individual determination to keep ourselves in the best possible condition. This will require things as simple but as neglected as reducing stress, taking care with our diet, practising regular and continuous physical activity, maintaining intellectual curiosity and a positive attitude towards life.
The director of the Harvard Study, Robert Waldinger, offers this advice: ‘Take care of your body as if you were going to need it for 100 years!’. Basically, it's about getting round the ‘bad news’ that comes with ageing by using appropriate strategies, both physically and mentally. But it's also about valuing what we do well, what we're capable of: what I can still do rather than what I can no longer do...
In this way, we will feel more confident, dispelling the implicit fear that we are crossing the threshold between full capacity and progressive incapacity, blurring the effects of the passing years as far as possible. And the longer we can do it, the better.