Three Pillars for Living longer and younger: nutrition, fitness and sleep
These elements of wellbeing are often written about as if they are separate subjects, but really they are parts of a whole. Good food without fitness or sleep won’t make you healthy. Working out every day but starving your body of nutrition and rest won’t make you strong. Sleeping eight hours a night but not eating well or moving enough isn’t going to keep you bright-eyed and alert. But if you do all these things consistently on a daily basis, you will be amazed at how your entire being responds.
Fitness and food and sleep are integral parts of a whole. Stress is a trigger that can bring the whole house down. In this blog, we’re going to focus on the way food, movement, and sleep work together to build our bodies from our cells up.
Three pillars i.e. of living long are —nutrition, movement, sleep—is the most important tool we have to protect ourselves as we age. Our health is largely determined by how well we balance the energy we consume, the energy we expend, and the rest we get in between all these activities. (Energy spent equals the processes that keep us alive, like our metabolism and our beating heart, plus the energy we exert by walking down the block or reading this blog.)
Here we are suggesting that nutrition and fitness and rest work together to promote cellular growth, repair, and energy production, allowing all the body’s systems to function optimally. You will be better equipped to manage whatever challenges come your way, whether illness or injury, if strength is on your side at the outset.
A World Health Organization study of more than 150,000 individuals, nearly half of them women, concluded that for people over sixty, good nutrition can extend life. What we eat affects how long we live and how we feel every day we’re alive.
First Pillar of longevity Fitness
- As we age, our bodies are less primed to build muscle than they were in our youth. When you were young, your body was made to build muscle: every couple of weeks, half of the proteins that made up your muscles were automatically renewed. Then comes your thirty-fifth birthday, and renewal, while still possible, gets a little more challenging, because your tissues become less sensitive to the exertion that builds muscles. At the same time, your body’s protein-producing factory starts to slow down.
- Consistent fitness and nutrition can reverse the muscle loss that accompanies age. Your nutrition plays an important role in supporting your muscles, and what your muscles are hungry for is protein. But your body can’t store protein over long periods the way it can store fat (or store carbohydrates as fat). Since you can’t rely on protein stores, you must make it a point to eat protein at every meal to give your muscles the building blocks they need for repair and growth.
- No matter how old we are, we have to keep moving. We’ve got to be active—which means going to the gym and working up a sweat on a regular basis but also just moving more often throughout the day. If you’re someone who sits at a desk all day and then drives to the gym for an hour, you are still at risk for the illnesses associated with being sedentary. The majority of research on exercise and aging has come to the same conclusion: fitness offers protective benefits for our mental ability as well as our physical agility at any age.
- Physical activity may prove to be the difference, as we age, between dependence and independence.
Nutrition and fitness and rest work together to promote cellular growth, repair, and energy production, allowing all the body’s systems to function optimally. You will be better equipped to manage whatever challenges come your way, whether illness or injury if strength is on your side at the outset.
Second Pillar of longevity: Nutrition
- Across the animal kingdom, nutrition is health, it is life, it is destiny. The food your mother ate when you were a foetus influenced your mental and physical development; the food you ate growing up provided the basis for your health as an adult, and the food you eat today and tomorrow will influence how you feel as a young person.
- What we eat affects how long we live and how we feel every day we’re alive. We know it to be true intuitively on a day when we’ve eaten well, because our stomachs don’t hurt, and we have the energy to work and move and be active.
- We also know it to be true intuitively on a day when we need to curl up for a nap in the middle of the afternoon because all our physical energy is being utilized to digest a pile of red meat and cheese. We all love a little indulgence. But when we indulge too often, we suffer the consequences. When we feed our bodies the nutrition they need, we reap the benefits.
Many studies have shown that a Mediterranean diet—which focuses on eating fresh produce, whole grains, lean proteins and healthy fats—lowers your risk for heart disease, colon cancer, and stroke. One recent study even linked a Mediterranean diet to improved cognitive health.
Researchers who tracked subjects following a Mediterranean diet over a four-year period found that participants of both sexes had reduced their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease by half! The evidence is clear: a Mediterranean diet is beneficial for your mind and body.
Key matrix for eating: Mediterranean diet
| Never eat or Drink | Sugary drinks. Processed foods. Late at night |
| Eat sparingly | Fats and Oils. Red Meat Juices Drinks without fibre |
| Always enjoy | A glass of wine with dinner |
| Always eat | Breakfast Lean protein at every meal Lots of vegetables Plenty of whole fruits Nuts Legumes Whole grains Olive oil Plenty of water |
Third Pillar of longevity: Sleep
- When you allow your body the time it needs to recover after a long day, it can perform its essential task of refreshing your cells by clearing out the waste generated by all your metabolic functions. So how much sleep is enough? A survey of more than one million people proved that for optimal health, seven is the magic number. Getting less than five or more than nine hours per night has been linked to a laundry list of health issues. Want to be your brightest, shiniest self today and in the years to come? Aim for seven hours of sleep each night.
- We spend a good portion of our lives asleep—or trying to sleep—and the quality of that time spent sleeping determines our mood and our mental sharpness, not just the next morning but over the next years of our life. Because sleep is not just a by-product of being awake. It is a whole other way of being that heals our bodies and our minds.
The biggest insights from the forefront of aging research today are that the simple things we’ve all been hearing since we were kids—to go outside and run around, to eat our vegetables and our protein, to play well with others—are exactly what we should be doing to age well. And as our grandmas always said, so is a good night’s sleep.
Bottom Line
Only one element of the trifecta of strength is not enough, and two out of three won’t cut it, either. Letting these basic needs become imbalanced hurts our hearts, hurts our brains, and speeds up the rate of aging in our cells and organs. Try to balance them and become young all of your living age.
Enjoy the life.
Three Pillars which help in living longer with young age
| Symptom of age | Goal | How fitness helps | How nutrition helps | How rest helps |
| Muscles Loss | Build muscles loss and strength | Exercise puts stress on your muscle which help them grow. Regular exercise is key to building new muscles. | Complex carbohydrates provides energy for the activity. Eating protein helps in repair of the muscles and rebuild after the workout. | Sleep allows for tissue repair and healing which your muscles recover after use. |
| Brain degradation and memory loss | A sharp mind. | Physical activity strengthens the parts that oversee the thinking and memory. It builds our brains against neurodegeneration. | Plant based nutrients in vegetables and fruits offer a variety of brain functions. | While you sleep brain washes the sticky plaque build-up that can lead to Alzheimer and memory loss. |
| Loss of Energy | Energy and Vitality | Regular exercise means more mitochondria. More of it means more energy. | Complex carbohydrates and fats provides macronutrients for your cells which gives energy. Fat gives twice the energy of Carbohydrates as its more energy dense. | Sleep energizes you and builds your immunity. |
| Depression | Better Moods | Exercise lowers stress hormones and secretes serotonin production ,and releases endorphins which provides instant mood upliftment. Which provides instant mood upliftment. | Eating junk makes you depress and listless. Heavy sugar eating leads to heavy depression. | Sleep releases our depression and makes us relaxed |