There are many precautionary steps we can take to preserve our health as we grow older. There are also many things we can proactively do to maintain our health. One of the ways to get vitamin D in our bodies is through sunlight.

Common Benefits Of Sunlight For Seniors

Sunlight has been connected to a myriad of health benefits, some of which are particularly important for seniors. Vitamin D is the source of most of these benefits. Direct exposure to sunlight allows the human body to produce vitamin D. Vitamin D helps generate the production of other vitamins that our body needs. Some of the many benefits of sunlight for seniors are:

• Improved sleep patterns
• Improved mood
• Cardiovascular health
• Stronger bones
• Improved mental capacity
• Reduced risk of influenza
• Reduced risk of diabetes

Seniors are recommended to receive 5-10 minutes of sunlight 2-3 times a week. This amount of exposure balances getting enough sunlight to produce an adequate amount of Vitamin D without increasing the risk of skin cancer.

Best Activities For Seniors To Get Sun

Seniors to go outside to get the Vitamin D they need! Being outside can involve a number of activities. Here are some suggestions for what to do outside.

• Take a walk
• Paint
• Talk on the phone
• Listen to music
• Write a letter
• Visit with a friend

Precautions To Take With Sunlight For Seniors

While sunlight can be great for seniors, it does not come without risks. These risks include heat stroke, skin cancer, and burns. It is important to take the necessary measures to protect ourselves from the sun’s direct rays. Some precautions to take are using good sunscreen, wearing wide-brim hats, and wearing sunglasses. These are all vital for the elderly to get the benefits of sunlight while minimizing the risk of sun damage.

Getting adequate sunlight is just one aspect of caring for seniors. Orchard at Athens is a senior living community in Athens with many outdoor areas to help our residents get the sunlight they need. Please contact us if you have questions or would like to schedule a tour of our community.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said…”Today is the oldest you have ever been and the youngest you’ll ever be again.” It has also been said that “Aging is a privilege that not all of us are privileged to have”. In this article we discuss the aging process and how to reduce the negative effects.

When Does Aging Start?

Aging happens, but it is how we think about aging and what we do as we age that matters.  Aging begins around age thirty and progresses at about 1 percent a year. This is such a slow process that we only see the results after years have passed. And for every aspect of physical and mental aging, some people may get better with age.  For example, by getting the right amount of exercise, some people may get stronger as they age.

In the book, Super Brain, Deepak Chopra and Rudolph Tanzi state that everyone ages differently. Identical twins who are born with the same DNA will have completely different genetic profiles at age seventy. While the chromosomes of the twins will not have changed, the years of experiences will have caused the activity of their genes to be switched off in a unique pattern.

How To Remain Healthy & Reduce Aging Effects

No matter which approach you take to remaining healthy as you age, your brain is involved because certain messages are good for cells and certain messages are bad. Below we’ve included some tips for diet and other activity considerations to help reduce the negative effects of aging.

Proper Diet To Reduce Aging

Eating fast food sends one kind of message while eating salads send another. Eating a balanced diet is important, and the preferred diet is the Mediterranean, which includes the following food types:

• Olive oil instead of butter
• Fish or soy-based protein instead of red meat
• Whole grains
• Legumes
• Mixed nuts
• Fresh fruits
• Whole vegetables

Activities to Reduce Aging

Other ways of lowering the risk of aging include;

• Avoid over eating
• Don’t smoke
• Consume alcohol in moderation and red wine is preferable
• Take steps to prevent household accidents such as slippery surfaces, steep stairs, fire hazards etc
• Get enough sleep
• Get enough rest during the day
• Keep regular habits but also include some new activities
• Read or listen to books
• Learn something new
• Change the way you drive to the store once a week
• Keep from being isolated, stay connected to friends and family
• Get out and do something productive in your community
• Find a daily routine for mediation, prayer, or some kind of mindfulness exercise
• Practice stress management
• Reach out to your support system and if you don’t have one, find people who can be your support system

Set up your daily living to create opportunities to make the best choices possible for healthy aging. Knowing what is good for you and doing what is good for you are two different things. Therefore learning what helps the body and mind age well is only one step in the process. Turning knowledge into a habit takes time and effort.

It takes roughly 21 days to form a new pattern of behavior or a new habit. Pick one thing to change out of the list above and try to keep it going for 21 days.

Orchard at Athens is a Senior Living Community in Athens Georgia that is committed to helping people age well. We provide many opportunities for our residents to help their body, mind and spirit stay healthy, strong and well. Please visit our dining page, activities page or contact us if you have any questions about healthy activities and diet to reduce aging risks.

Orchard at Athens provides a holistic approach to well-being, which includes making your life work for you. One of the exercises that provides functional benefits for seniors is yoga. In this article we’ll discuss the topic in more detail.

What Does Making Life Work For You Mean?

Making your life work for you means:

• Finding the right fit in living accommodations
• Offering opportunities for education
• Spirituality
• Community outreach projects
• Social events
• Exercise

The Role of Exercise

Exercise is vitally important for a healthy life.

We all know injuries can happen in the gym, but most often with the elderly, these injuries happen executing daily activities such as carrying groceries.

Injuries from routine activity happens more often than people would like to admit, especially when living with a chronic condition. Your muscle mass and strength will decrease 30 – 50% between the ages of 30 and 80.

That means the average person starts losing the ability to perform everyday functions when they hit middle age.  This is why functional strength training has become such a hot topic and will be built into the activities of daily living for residents living at Orchard of Athens.

What is Functional Strength?

Functional strength training is defined as: “Training that attempts to mimic the specific physiological demands of real-life activities.”

Functional training such as resistance exercises and body weight movements can help you become stronger, more flexible, agile and better equipped to handle day-to-day feats of strength and athleticism that are often overlooked. Plus, it can help you become less injury-prone.

A common misconception is that you may be too old for strength training. But clinical data from a variety of sources clearly show the benefits of improving one’s functional fitness level, particularly for older adults.

Benefits of Functional Strength Training

Functional strength training is something all adults could really benefit from, and it’s never too late to reap the benefits.

• A study of 87 adults aged 65-93 years published in the American Journal of Health Promotion showed that functional ability improved for functionally limited elderly people who participated in a 16-week structured exercise program consisting of thirteen different strength training exercises using a Thera-Band resistance band.
• In another study, researchers tested the effects of 12 weeks of resistance training on isometric strength, explosive power, and selected functional abilities of healthy women aged 75 and over, they saw statistically significant improvements in 4 out of 5 exercises measured.

One of the best programs for functional strength is yoga.

Yoga Benefits

Yoga has been around for more than 5,000 years. Yoga does more than burn calories and tone muscles. It’s a total mind-body workout that combines strengthening and stretching poses with deep breathing and meditation or relaxation.

There are more than 100 different forms of yoga. Some are fast-paced and intense. Others are gentle and relaxing.

Types of Yoga

Examples of different yoga forms include:

• Hatha. The form most often associated with yoga, it combines a series of basic movements with breathing.
• Vinyasa. A series of poses that flow smoothly into one another.
• Power. A faster, higher-intensity practice that builds muscle.
• Ashtanga. A series of poses, combined with a special breathing technique.
• Bikram. Also known as “hot yoga,” it’s a series of 26 challenging poses performed in a room heated to a high temperature.
• Iyengar. A type of yoga that uses props like blocks, straps, and chairs to help you move your body into the proper alignment

For more information and the holistic approach to well-being and living, please contact us.

There are many aspects of humans to consider when talking about living a holistic, healthy life. In this article we’ll touch on 4 different areas. Caregivers must remember to care for themselves first so that they can provide optimal care for those they are servicing.

Body

Our bodies need rest. Studies show that the vast majority of people need 8 hours of sleep a day. Available research states there are a few people who function normally with less than 5 hours of sleep. But the eight-hour mark is where most human beings must fall. Currently, most people are not getting enough sleep and therefore are not able to perform to their full potential.

If it is difficult being able to get a good night’s rest, there may be respite programs, day programs or in home care that you can utilize in order to get some rest or have time to get a break from caregiving. Geriatrician Dr. Rosemary writes in her book Take Your Oxygen First, that it is imperative that we find ways to take care of ourselves in order to be able to be there for the person living with dementia.

Diet is another way to reduce stress in our life and ensure we are well taken care of.  Cutting out processed, fried and high calorie foods is a good place to start. If you have been overwhelmed by the amount of advice and contradicting literature that is out on a healthy diet, here are some very basic steps to starting to eat well.

• Omega 3’s are probably the single most important nutrient we need for brain health.
• Eating healthy fats which include: monounsaturated fats like olive oil and fat from avocado, saturated fats from grass-fed beef, eggs, butter and yogurt and coconut oil, and unsaturated fats from fish oil, flax oil and raw nuts.
• Reducing your sugar intake is another easy way to improve your diet and exercise is really important to reducing stress and having a healthy lifestyle.

Exercise is also an important factor in reducing negative stress and adding some positive stress to the body. Exercise that is the most beneficial is aerobic exercise. Twenty minutes of walking or swimming will improve your health and can dramatically decrease stress.

Heart

It is important to find ways to maintain our emotional state. Being a caregiver to someone who is living with brain change can be emotionally draining. As the person we care for changes, we can often feel a range of emotions that include but are not limited to sadness, pity, compassion and anger. It is important that we remember that feeling these emotions is normal. We can have anticipatory grief for what is to come, and we grieve the changing stages of dementia. Our brain is designed for joy, love, and connection. It thrives in positive emotional conditions. It is important to find people with whom we can connect and find support when we are caregivers, and a good resource is the Alzheimers Associate Atlanta Chapter.

Mind

When we learn new things and engage our brains in fun and creative ways, our brain is stimulated. Reading, and writing have been shown to help maintain brain health, as well as working our memory, learning new information or adapting to new ways of doing a task. If you can find new routes to the store, pick up a new hobby, learn something new on the computer, or write in a journal, this learning will help reduce your stress and can improve brain health. The website Games For the Brain is an easy way to start.

Spirit

It is also very important to recognize and value our spiritual life. For some of us our spiritual path includes a religious tradition, but it can also be found in nature, in sacred spaces, being with people who share our beliefs and values. In times of stress and difficulty, it can be difficult to find ways to slow down and quiet our mind in order to meditate and pray. One way that helps us move into a space where we are able to quiet our minds is to find our spiritual on-ramp. This on-ramp is the way that we are oriented to our world. There are all kinds of misconceptions about how we should meditate and pray but the one way that can really help is finding our spiritual on-ramp.

We are all oriented to our world differently and therefore your meditation may not look like someone else’s meditation or prayer. Some people are oriented to their world through their sight. If you are a person who is visual, you may find your spiritual on-ramp through different sights. If you are a person who is oriented to their world through sound, you may find your on-ramp through music or guided meditation through a drumming circle or nature sounds. If you are a person who loves to move, you may find your best ways of meditating are when walking, dancing, or doing another kind of physical activity.

Final Stress Reduction Tip

One more tip to decrease the  stress of an already very busy life with many decisions to make, is to sit down and write up a list of things that you can do to reduce our stress in your life. Therefore, when you find that you are feeling stressed, you do not have to think about what to do, just go to the list and pick out something!

Orchard at Athens wants to be part of your solution and help make your life work for you! We do this by supporting you in a holistic approach to life and focus on the body, heart, mind and spirit, and are always open to being flexible and creating new opportunities to make your life work for you. We have a highly trained team seeking that you and your loved one keep your focus on the health and well-being a holistic approach to live can create, no matter a medical condition. Please contact us to learn more about our community.