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6 Habits for Getting Healthier With Age
Most of us carry a quiet assumption
The research tells a more interesting story. In one 12-year study of more than 11,000 seniors, almost half either got faster at walking or performed better on cognitive tests more than a decade after their 65th birthday. Walking speed is linked to better outcomes in older age, so this wasn't a fluke of measurement. Improvement, it turns out, is not only possible but common.
That raises an obvious question: do our habits make improvement more or less likely? Some health conditions are simply beyond anyone's control, and it's worth saying so. But endocrinologist Dr William Hsu, chief medical officer at L-Nutra, told HuffPost UK that a handful of habits "consistently stand out" among people who get healthier with age. Here are the six.
## 1. They don't treat decline as inevitable
This one is about mindset, and the evidence backs it up. In the same study, people with a more positive view of ageing were more likely to see improvements after 65.
But it isn't just optimism. Hsu's observation is that these people are active participants in their own health. They pay attention to what their bodies are doing, make deliberate changes, and then measure whether those changes are working.
That last step is easy to skip. Plenty of people start a new routine and never check whether it's doing anything. The people who improve treat their health more like an ongoing experiment: try something, look…
