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EONS is working on it....

There's a glitch. There are TWO "Fitness Over 50" topics. Please join "Fitness Over 50 (1)" That's where most of the posts reside! EONS is trying to fix the problem.
Rad's profile
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Anyone interested in this topic?

I have been moving slowly downwards since 01, I have made lifestyle changes and very very slowly have seen the pounds go away. I did't want to lose weight, I wanted to remove it, never to find it again. I had done that too often in the past. I am within 6 lbs of my goal of 140 lbs. finally. I'm looking for others who are doing this type of weight loss, not crash dieting but changing habits to keep the weight off.

Walking in my main activity, but I do ride a hybrid bicycle as well and do some weight training, but not regularly enough.

joellaco

joellaco's profile
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Where 'fitness' and medicine are one

You know you can be 'fit' and not healthy but if you are healthy, you WILL be fit! I am SO SO excited to find this group. I am 54 (well, in Nov. and PROUD of it!) and made a mid life career change.

I worked in dialysis for over 20 years, loved resistance training for even longer than that. Always 'health concious.' I left the 'disease model' that is our current medical model to prevent people from ending up on dialysis. We had lots of Type 2 diabetics with end stage kidney disease. I got tired of watching them lose their toes, and feet and legs and vision...

I became a personal trainer through the American College of Sports Medicine. I specialized in health and fitness for women in mid-life. For some reason, there is a dirth of information that really works for middle aged women!! I was the largest revenue producer at the sports resort where I worked because I gave seminars with MDs about health AND fitness. They SHOULD be one and the same but they aren't.. yet!

I now work in a cutting edge medical clinic. Dr. Mike Nichols works with nutrition and exercise to reverse chronic diseases. Rad, I didn't get to read all the info you posted but seeing you had something about VO2max. Yuppers! the ability to carry oxygen is THE definitive measure of vitality.

What's happening is the tools we use to diagnose our health status are changing. It's very expensive but we can now know enough about a person's health status through blood work, scans, V02max measurements and medical history to reverse coronary calcium deposits, insulin resistance and especially CAD!!

Our clinic has been operational for over 4 years and I can tell you this... Find out what your insulin level, triglyceride level, lipid sub-particle profile, V02max, testosterone, HGF-1, cortisol, ferritin and CR-P levels are and you have a look at the tip of your health iceberg.
Leseetsa's profile
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Success Story

This link view link will take you to my success story which is now published on Youngernextyear.com. I hope those of you over 50 and out of shape can use it to see the new picture of you. Or pass it on to those who are prematurely OLD....somebody in their 40's perhaps.

Eventually we all end up in the same place, but you don't have to die younger than the creator intended. You don't have to live your later years lying around feeling sorry for yourself. You don't have to fear being vibrant.

OLD people can be vibrant if they WORK at it! I AM LIVING PROOF of it! Instead of fearing my 60's and 70's I'm looking forward to those years. But I'm going to enjoy the rest of my 50's!

An elderly man I knew told me, "Enjoy your 50's because when you reach 60 things start to go wrong." The thing that goes wrong for many is that the accumulation of their bad habits catches up to them. They have no regrets about smoking or being overweight until the big man start to turn off the lights.

I used to think that I didn't want to be old because OLD PEOPLE suck! They smell. They sit around all day. They can't do squat because they're constantly having health problems. MODERN science now tells us the truth, many of those problems were self-inflicted. It's like blaming McDonald's for being fat. McDonald's may be giving us bullets, but people pull the trigger on their own. Worse yet we teach our kids to eat that McCrap. I did and I'm truly sorry.
Rad's profile

newbie

new at this site. been reading some of your posts and recommendation on books. 58 male, walk 5 to 10 miles per day, e-machines and recumbant bike daily and free weights and machines. Recently (7 mos) quit smoking. tried jogging but shin spints and right knee pain really shut me down. gained 25 lbs when i quit smoking and now at 200 which really kills me. At 6'1" really want to get back to about 175. any suggestions out there. How is this site? Larry from Oklahoma

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Stop the Pounding!

Like a lot my generation, I grew up pounding the heck out of my joints with high-impact sports....running, basketball, tennis, soccer. Great fun, great ways to keep in shape --- but ultimately, unless you are a freak of nature, the knees and other joints start to give way. It was incredibly tough for me to give up my first loves (basketball and running) and move over to low-impact cycling.....but WOW, do I love it now. First of all I can do endless hours of cycling with virtually no pain, secondly whether I'm indoors (spin classes) or outside (road/mountain biking)...I'm doing it with other folks normally, and it gets the competitive juices flowing. When I see people my age (51) still running, and often wincing in pain while they're doing it, I want to scream "try cycling" (or rowing, swimming, skating...the other "low-impacts").

Pryor's profile
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Better ON-line discussion

check out youngernextyear.com view link and Menshealth Forum view link

Both of these websites have been organized and forums....the YNY group is for us older folks, while MH is written for and by all....it's got alot of childish stuff, but there are some very knowledgable people posting...

Word of caution, always ask multiple people for advice....because some of it is bogus!

PS. I've noticed that there are few people posting fitness articles on EONS.com. Partially, because it's a cumbersome process to review and explore the postings. UNTIL EONS.COM gets a better forum system it will not succeed.
Rad's profile

Nutrition

This is an excerp from a new book called for Champions by Michael Colgan. I've been a long time reader of Dr. Colgan. He changed my life.

Please comment on his ideas. If you want information on the book. Please contact me.

"Our Food is Killing Us

A little over 10,000 years ago, the advent of agriculture began to make fundamental changes in our food. Since that time, until the last century, gradual development of crop production, animal husbandry, food processing, and transport slowly, almost unnoticeably, distorted the nutritional make-up of food. Acceleration of food technology over the last 100 years worsened the distortions beyond measure, and has presented us today with a vast selection of edibles that bear little relation to our ancient nutrition.1-2

Our genome, however, evolved on that ancient nutrition over at least six million years, from the hominin, Sahelanthropus tchadensis, to the emergence of modern man, Homo sapiens, some 50,000 years ago. About 99.92% of our present genetic heritage, was already developed long before there was agriculture. Genetically, we have had insufficient time to adapt to modern food. Our genetically determined biology is now in direct conflict with most of the food we are offered to eat.1-3 Supermarkets bursting with taste delights, are hard put to supply us with the biochemical essentials for healthy Homo sapiens.

At best this conflict between our genetic design and modern food hampers physical and mental performance. At worst, numerous researchers now believe it is responsible for most of the chronic degenerative diseases of Western life.1-7

The Foods that Cause Disease
Among many other research facilities worldwide, over the last 20 years the Colgan Institute has identified eight key detrimental changes in our food.

First came the introduction of cereal grains, a rare item in our ancient diet. Worse, as technology advanced, rough breads and flours deteriorated into highly processed flours, breads and cookies, cakes, chips and bits; from which most of the micronutrients and fiber have been removed.2 Cereal grains not only robbed our diet of vitamins, minerals, and fiber, but also changed our mix of macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins, fats) dramatically, by adding a grain carbohydrate load never before experienced in our evolution.

The second big change in our food came from animal husbandry. Domestication of animals produced dairy foods and cultivated meats, non-existent items in our ancient diet. Cheeses, butter, and cultivated meats changed the composition of our fat intake with the addition of large amounts of saturated fats, which also displaced essential fats.

The third change was sugar. Even with the occasional honey and the sugars in seasonal fruits, sugar was a minor item in our ancient diet. Refined sugars were non-existent. Refined sugar and its 1970s’ progeny, high-fructose corn syrup, pushed our glycemic load into the stratosphere, and distorted our macronutrient mix even more than cereal grains. It also distorted the acid/alkaline balance of our food, greatly increasing acidity.

The fourth change was salt. As we will see ahead, except for occasional ingestion of seaweed and saltwater, ancient man rarely used salt, and did not mine it or put it in food. Now over 80% of the salt we ingest has been added to food.

Salt did a real number on us by reversing the sodium-potassium ratio (Na-K ratio) from low sodium-high potassium in our ancient diet to high sodium-low potassium in modern foods. Our kidney function and blood pressure are genetically programmed for the low sodium intake of our ancestors.

The fifth change in our food was the introduction of processed vegetable oils, another non-existent item in our ancient diet. As we “progressed” technologically, these fats became more and more artificial. Now, most processed vegetable oils are high in trans-fatty acids, which are worse for your health than saturated fats. As they replaced fresh vegetables and nut oils, the fat composition in our diet veered wildly from high essential fats to high saturated and trans fats.7

The sixth change was loss of fiber. Fiber totaled about 100 grams per day in our ancient diet. It came almost exclusively from roots, fruits, nuts, and other bits of vegetation.

Now we are lucky to get 20 grams of fiber a day, and from a very narrow range of sources.9 No surprise that deadly colorectal cancer is rampant. There are 60,000 deaths per year in the US and 150,000 cases, even though research shows clearly that colorectal cancer is more than 90% preventable, by a diet high in fruits and vegetables and low in saturated and trans fats.10

Seventh came the loss of micronutrients. At the University of Auckland in the 1970s, I was on the research team that first found systematic reduction or removal of vitamins, minerals and polyphenols in over 70 common foods.6 We documented how processing removes and destroys nutrients. It seemed like a revelation then, but is now accepted without question.

The final change that damages us is increased acidity. Our ancestors ate a basically alkaline diet of mostly unprocessed vegetarian foods. The modern combination of cereal grains, processed carbohydrates, dairy foods, cultivated meats, salt, sugar and processed vegetable oils, and very low levels of micronutrients and fiber, overwhelms our genetically programmed mechanisms that regulate acid/alkaline balance. Now our gut is far more acidic. Acid reflux disease and indigestion make a $7 billion dollar industry in the US alone, but it’s a lot more costly than that for your health.

This book shows you that the ideal nutrition is the food on which our genome evolved. The closer we can get to that today, the better our health and performance. As Stephen Hawking explains so eloquently in, The Universe in a Nutshell:

There has been no significant change in human DNA in the last ten thousand years. Our nutritional needs therefore, were encoded into DNA before agriculture began. Technology has now changed most of our food so that it bears no relation to the ancient diet upon which we evolved. That pre-agriculture diet is the only food which can fully support our genetic design. It is the only diet which will enable us to live 130 healthy years."
Rad's profile
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Performance declines with age....

From Athlete's Performance.com:

Following are two lists (one regarding cardiovascular performance; one related to muscle strength and endurance) of potential diminishing physical attributes caused by aging. The lists are depressingly longer than you would like for them to be, but just keeping telling yourself that two other lists will include ways to offset the negatives in the bad news lists.

Cardiovascular Bad News

VO2max (maximal oxygen consumption) decreases by approximately 5-15 percent per decade beginning at the age of 25-30.

Maximal heart rate decreases by about 6-10 beats per minute per decade.

A reduction in stroke volume during maximal exercise in older adults also contributes to the decline in cardiac output.

Left ventricular contractility (the ability of one of the chambers of the heart to contract properly) appears to be reduced in older adults during maximal exercise compared to young adults.

Blood vessel capacity and blood flow regulation diminish, resulting in a reduced capacity to utilize oxygen.

Blood pressure tends to rise with age.

Cardiovascular Good News

Older adults can adapt to a program of aerobic training as well as younger adults. They can achieve the same 10-30 percent increase in VO2max in response to endurance training.

The degree of adaptations depends on the intensity of exercise. Low intensity results in marginal changes. Higher intensity, within reasons, provides higher training effects.

To improve cardiovascular fitness as you age, the American College of Sports Medicine recommends exercise intensity of 55/65-90 percent of maximum heart rate for 20-60 minute periods 3-5 days a week. The lower ranges are for sedentary or frail individuals.

Aerobic training, even during older adulthood, causes favorable changes in lipid profile, blood pressure, and body composition.

Muscle Strength and Endurance Bad News

In the absence of strength training, humans lose muscle mass (sarcopenia) with age. By the age of 50, ten percent of muscle volume is gone.

After the age of 50, muscle mass loss accelerates.

Muscle strength diminishes with age - 15 percent per decade in the 60's and 70's.

Individuals are more susceptible to loss of balance, falls, and fractures with age - and this begins to happen well before what most consider old age.

Ability to regulate body temperature diminishes.

Metabolism slows.

The number of functional motor units declines.

Muscle Strength and Endurance Good News

Older adults can make significant gains in strength. Strength can be doubled or tripled in a 3-4 month period of resistance training.

A modest increase in muscle size is possible among older adults.

Increased muscle strength usually results in increased levels of spontaneous activity.

Strength training has a positive effect on insulin action, bone density, energy metabolism, posture, balance, and functional status.
Rad's profile
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Why You Can't Eat Your Spinach

Still baffled...the FDA seems to be having a difficult time with the spinach debacle. They just can't figure out who or what to blame.

I have a suggestion for them. I think no matter how this shakes out, the FDA can blame itself. E. coli infections in spinach are nothing new, it just hasn't happened on a large scale before. In fact, the recent outbreak is the 20th time in the past 10 years that leafy greens from California have been contaminated by the deadly 0157:H7 strain. Just this past November, the FDA sent a letter to growers, packers, processors and shippers warming them to improve produce safety.

In my opinion the deaths, sickness, panic and economic disruption of the past couple weeks could have been avoided if the FDA wasn't sitting around waiting for something like this to happen. And sending out a letter is not enough.

I rest my case on the single bag of spinach found in a victim's refrigerator in New Mexico. After determining that this spinach was indeed infected the FDA was able to trace its origin by using the lot number printed on the bag. They traced it to NINE large spinach farms in California's Salinas Valley. I repeat, NINE farms!

How could the spinach in one puny little bag come from so many different farms? The answer is that corporate conglomerates like Earthbound Farm (the nation's largest "organic" producer) process all their products in one large centralized place. Earthbound washes and packs both it organic and "natural" spinach in the same plant and thus the spinach in one bag can indeed come from multiple farms.

This same problem cropped up a few years back when E. coli infected the hamburgers sold by Wendy's. Only this was even worse as the hamburger in one patty can actually come from as many as 10,000 cows!

So, you see, no matter if the contamination originates from run-off water, the unwashed hands of a laborer, or from improperly processed fertilizer, the massive impact would never have happened if it wasn't for the fact that the FDA has allowed the evolution of larger and larger, centralized food processing plants.

So there.
davbunnell's profile
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