This past week I’ve had a fascinating back-and-forth discussion with an acquaintance who’s recently become a coaching client about the most critical health and wellness imperatives for someone over 40.
Admittedly the over 40 is a purely arbitrary line in the sand; he happened to frame the discussion that way as we both happen to be (quite happily I might add) north of 40, though you could just as easily argue that, given the health status of most North Americans these days, the discussion equally applies to those over thirty-five, or perhaps even thirty.
To expand the backstory a bit here, this gentleman sought help initially with “dropping a few pounds that I just can’t lose”. As we dug a bit deeper into his issues, he was carrying at least 80 more pounds that he probably should, but much more critically he was a metabolic mess, with several markers of glucose intolerance and lipid derangement that were frankly alarming.
He was an admitted “carb-junky”, needed an infusion of quickly-metabolized carbs every two hours or so during his waking hours, and recounted the litany of complaints we’ve all experienced at some point: poor sleep, heartburn, fatigue, mental cloudiness, joint soreness, myalgia (muscle pain), lousy endurance, decreased sexual arousal and performance, and at times a sense of aimlessness and even depression.
To his credit, and that of his very supportive physician wife, he finally came to the point that he knew deep in his gut (perhaps even literally) that something (actually a lot of things) needed to change.
Part of our process has of course been defining several key health restoration objectives for him to strive toward, and that in particular is how we arrived at the (now somewhat lengthy) discussion of what indeed are the most important health imperatives after 40.
This has been such a fascinating discussion I’m going to open a series here on the Older Bolder Life laying out some of these critical health imperatives after 40 over the next few weeks. Most of us will find most if not all of the key points applicable in our own lives, though of course their order of importance will vary pending your own unique physiologic and metabolic issues.
Critical Health Imperatives After 40: Taking an Honest Appraisal of Where You Are Now
My key point in sharing this quick story as a matter of introduction is a simple one – to get started on any journey to reclaim or improve your health, at some point you will have to do what my acquaintance / now client did – you’ll have to sit back, roll up your metaphorical sleeves, and take an honest, insightful, and hopefully damned objective measure of where you are now.
For some of us, that’s a pretty tall order. It’s not necessarily the easiest thing to admit we’re not where we’d like to be in life, and sometimes we need the thoughtful input of someone close to us or with compassionate expertise to help us take stock of the issues at hand.
And thinking specifically of the “fat but fit” mantra that seems so pervasive in today’s culture, even among classically trained health care professionals, part of taking an honest appraisal of where you are will likely involve objective measures of your metabolic health, including a thoughtfully targeted lab panel.
Only by understanding where you are today can you put together a plan to get to where you want to be.
More to come.
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