Want To Get Younger Every Day? Eat Well For Your Life And Microbiome
Information about diet and lifestyle that has worked for my husband and me
My husband and I have a happy marriage and healthy, thriving lifestyle. One of its cornerstones is a healthy diet and daily exercise. Another cornerstone is sufficient, high-quality sleep. Yet another? Lowering stress whenever possible.
Bruce just celebrated his 70th birthday and I am 61.
Our conventional health metrics are excellent for our respective ages. Bruce’s doctor even asked, “How did you do it?” Most of her patients are diabetic, or suffer from heart disease and high blood pressure. At his age among this patient group, Bruce is a minority of one as far as his good health, weight, and low use of prescription medication is concerned.
I meet many other older adults with serious health challenges. The majority of men and women in our area (Southwest Florida) are overweight or obese. Many people, including young adults who should be in the prime of their lives, have Type 2 diabetes. Others have mobility challenges. Some people are depressed or suffer from severe anxiety. Others drink too much alcohol or are addicted to other substances.
So, here it is, straight up. I’m a pro writer and have been one for many years. My profession is strongly associated with substance misuse, mental health challenges, and emotional instability. Bruce and I also both play music, and you may have heard of the “27 Club.” If any activity has a worse reputation than writer as far as health and self-care is concerned, it’s musician.
Both Bruce and I have a history of major depression. You know: the type where you can’t get out of bed. I was diagnosed with complex PTSD in June 2006. Over time, both of us ended up weighing a lot more than we should have. We were exactly like all the other overweight, aging adults — feeling sluggish and downbeat.
As I tell others, the first step I took to improve my health came in December 2018 when I asked Bruce to give me a fitness tracker for Christmas. He gave me a Fitbit and I immediately saw from using it that “Ms. Health” was in sad shape. Not really: in “average” shape for my age.
It wasn’t where I wanted to be, and I didn’t see that as being “who I am.”
So what to do?
Getting Better Sleep and Moving More
Before I did anything else, I worked on getting a better night’s sleep. Then, I started getting more steps per day, moving from 6,000 steps a day up to 10,000. Now, I aim for 11,000 steps a day and achieve it most days. I also no longer use Fitbit: I have a Garmin Vivoactive 4.
Becoming more active began to show me some truths about wellness and health. I started to realize it’s a holistic process: there’s no one single “diet” or any type of exercise or working out that’s going to make a big change on its own. I also realized that good health is a day-to-day process. Making one small change each day while retaining other positive behaviors will make the biggest difference over time.
Eating Better And Enjoying Life
Every day, Bruce and I marvel at the delicious food we eat. Until or unless people change their diet away from highly-processed packaged foods, it’s difficult to experience or understand how incredibly delicious real food is.
By “real food” I mean fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and simply-prepared protein. It is not a “diet,” it is a lifestyle. When we eat out, which we do once a week or so, we always order simply-prepared basic foods: steamed vegetables, simple salads and soups, and lean, simply-prepared proteins. We eat a lot more fish than we ever used to eat. Fortunately, we are on Florida’s Gulf Coast, which makes this easy, more affordable, and pleasant.
We do not buy or consume highly-processed food. Period. No chips, cookies, crackers, packaged meals, frozen meals, burgers, burritos, nothing: none of it. Zero.
What’s the result of eating better?
A Healthier Microbiome for Healthier, Longer Life
You’ve probably already seen advertisements for “microbiome” friendly foods. Our microbiome is present throughout our bodies and on our skin. It’s a collection of trillions of different invisible microbes that all perform important health roles. We all live together, even though we can’t see these tiny creatures.
As I learned more about the microbiome, I began to realize that feeding my healthy microbes was important. I also learned that I want to reduce the toxic, troublesome microbes which had built up in my body over a lifetime of eating typical American highly-processed foods, from Coca-Cola to McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets.
Bruce and I have been eating well for over three years now, and I’ve been following a deliberate program of prebiotic, health-promoting foods to heal and strengthen my microbiome since February of this year. So far, it seems to be working well.
Research in the microbiome is just beginning to become more common, and more is learned about how these microbes interact with every body system. Researchers are even calling the human gut microbiome another organ, and out of our body’s organs, this one isn’t just the newest one that’s been recognized, it’s the least-studied and understood.
There has been a lot of attention paid to genetics and their role in our health, and as a sci-fi writer, I’ve even written about genetics and gene therapy — including “youth treatments.”
For free, every single one of us can improve our own health and that of our microbiome by eating simple, natural, health-promoting foods. We do not need to spend a lot of money on expensive formulas. We also do not need to spend a lot of money on pills and supplements. Every nutrient our bodies and microbiomes really need is present in fiber-filled fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and lean protein.
My friend Diane, a top nutritionist, tells me the same advice that I have gotten from the Zoe personalized nutrition program. You do not need to pay extra money to have your microbiome, blood lipid, and blood sugar responses tested. You can follow the advice of professional nutritionists, who have understood for many years how important good nutrition is to all aspects of our health and well-being.
The nutritionists and dietary experts are right, and I know this from personal experience.
Bruce and I are happy, healthy, and thriving because we eat well and we eat to promote all aspects of our health and well-being. What we eat really is the foundation for any type of happiness and well-being. Eating well gives us the energy to be active. It helps us to sleep better at night because we are not waking with heartburn or middle-of-the-night food cravings. It also offers us the opportunity to eat truly delicious food and recognize and understand how good “good food” really is.
Highly-processed foods are so devastating to everything about our being, from blasting healthful microbes out of our body and encouraging unhealthy, harmful ones to proliferate to harming our mental and emotional health.
Is happiness, health, and growing “younger every day” just a result of eating truly healthful food? No: but this one step is a beneficial and foundational one for everyone, at any age.