Health And Fitness Tips You Can Learn From Your Grandparents
What I took away from observing my grandmother
W e tend to think of our grandparents as coming from a generation that over-boiled their vegetables, ate too much red meat and thought that drinking vast amounts of alcohol on a regular basis was a sign of sophistication and wealth. However, there are also a few things you can take away from how they lead their lives. Here’s what I learned from my active, spritely and happy grandmother.
Move more
Chances are, you either have a car to depend on or you spend a lot of time on public transport. We young people tend to see exercise as a seperate activity rather than something that is built into our lives. We do intense workouts and monitor our nutrition very closely sometimes, but outside of the gym, we’re not very active. Intense weight-lifting sessions and HIIT workouts are the flip sides of our desk jobs. We might leave the house to hike or swim, but then we go right back to sitting on the couch to binge Netflix and having our food delivered by someone else on a bike. Are there any small changes that could be made?
My grandmother walks a lot of places, and it’s a large part of what’s keeping her active. Up until recently, she also used her bike to get to and fro. Not only is that a good form of gentle exercise, it also continually challenges your coordination and balance. If you bike through the city and brave different weather conditions, it’s also a surefire way to boost your immune system.
Social activities don’t have to involve sitting down, either. My grandmother and her friends meet up to dance, bowl, or take walks together, and are having a lot of fun doing it (or they were before lockdown)! They have their champagne and their ice cream, but they’re also getting their steps in and breaking the occasional sweat while making social connections.
Eat seasonally
If you care about the environment, maybe buying locally-sourced produce is something that has crossed your mind before. My grandmother would never dream of eating kale in the summer or strawberries in the winter, even though these things are somewhat readily available year-round. Eating things when they’re in season where you live has many benefits, though. As a Northern European, strawberry season is a yearly highlight for me. A strawberry that’s locally grown will be a lot more delicious and quite possibly more nutritious than something that’s been grown in a greenhouse somewhere, is mostly water weight and has been on two trucks, a ship, and a plane to get to you. You can always find creative ways to prepare and freeze some of it to really reap the benefits of the season. You might even be surprised by what’s available where you live — if you’re lucky you might stumble upon a variety of tomato you hadn’t previously been aware of or a heritage apple. Or you might simply realise that what you thought was a season without harvests is far from it. Cabbages, root vegetables, spinach and spring onions come to mind for me. Switch it up a little!
No-nonsense food
On that note, maybe you would benefit from stripping your cooking down a little. Don’t be afraid of a boiled potato! Try to make simple ingredient lists into something spectacular! At the risk of sounding like a disgruntled elderly person myself, you don’t necessarily need protein powder and gojiberries and lentil pasta and zoodles and celery juice to get good nutrition. Basic balanced meals (maybe using butter and sugar a little more infrequently than your grandmother) are pleasing because they take the lot of the guesswork out of food, are refreshing because there’s no pressure of using a “superfood” or making it instagram-able and they can still be satiating and deliver proper nutrition. My grandmother isn’t the biggest cook, either, but she’s developed instinctual no-nonsense eating habits that give her everything she needs. Rather than forcing roasts and cookies on everyone at every turn, she will take care of herself in a modest way. She snacks on apples and yogurt, gets extra protein from boiled eggs and only has meat on occasion. She’s the healthiest among my elderly relatives, and I believe her healthy lifestyle is a contributing factor.
Sleep hygiene
“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy…” — how many people do you know that keep with this motto? A proper sleep schedule is definitely a big struggle of mine, and I know many people like me. Of course it’s not all our own fault. Stress, FOMO, noise and light pollution are keeping us awake. We all crave better sleep, though, don’t we? It’s being talked about everywhere, used to promote “body hacks”, posts and apps that monitor, evaluate and suggest alterations to your sleep schedule. We know how important sleep is to our health, but we never quite seem to get there. The main tip that I’ve gotten from healthcare professionals is to stick with a routine for a while (going to bed and getting up at the same time, preferably with a little ritual to end the day) until you form a habit. Many experts also describe things that my grandmother has been doing for decades. She doesn’t stay up when she’s tired, doesn’t stay in bed for a long time after waking up, and if she wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes, she will do something else until she feels sleepy again. There’s also not a single screen to be found in her bedroom…
Maybe we can find balance between the plethora of health and fitness tools we have at our disposal right now and a simpler approach that discourages overthinking. While we may know a lot more about fitness and nutrition than our elders, it’s also worth listening to them — after all, reaching old age and still feeling good is what we’re really aiming for.
