Wellness

For the past several months I have been writing about the concept of “Successful Aging”, beginning with a brief overview of 9 “Habits of Successful Aging”. My subsequent posts have described and explained these habits in greater detail and suggested some avenues and options to more successfully include them in your lifestyle. This post's topic for discussion is “Be Positive”.

In my last post I wrote about the concept of “Successful Aging”, and gave a brief overview of 9 “Habits of Successful Aging”. My next few posts will describe and explain each of these habits in greater detail and suggest some avenues and options to more successfully include them in your lifestyle. The first of these habits is

“Stay Strong!” 

Having recently returned from the excellent International Council on Active Aging Annual Conference in San Diego, I have been thinking about and talking even more than usual about lifestyle 'behavior' and how it relates to independence and quality of life in our 'Second Fifty. Here's the result of all that pondering! Back in 2004 the then Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Richard Cardoma was quoted as saying

When we want to ‘make a difference’ in our lives (get more active, get fit, lose weight, reduce stress etc), we go to an ‘expert’ for advice, guidance and, often, motivation. After all, an expert is usually someone who is highly trained and highly knowledgeable. This means that they know what to do. More importantly they know what YOU should do, what you ought to do (and of course what you have been meaning to do for some time!).

In recent years building 'Wellness Cultures' in Senior communities has received much attention, and the benefits of adopting what has come to be known as a 'wellness lifestyle' has been confirmed and reconfirmed from a wide variety of 'evidence-based' research. There can be little doubt that for senior residential and retirement communities wellness cultures, appropriately designed and developed, can elicit a whole range of lifestyle, health and even economic benefits for the facility, the facility residents and the facility staff.

A few weeks ago I was a guest on the Pat McMahon Show, AZTV 7, Cable 13. It was a lot of fun - Pat is a great guy with a sense of humor and a talent for relating to people of all kinds. I was there to talk about ActiveRx a company that does excellent work with older adults - pro-actively working with them to optimize physical and wellness function. During part of our interview Pat asked some general questions about wellness and though I was happy to answer them as best I could in the time we had, they prompted some more detailed thoughts that I wanted to share in this post.