Carla Winston is a mother of seven and a fitness influencer in her own right, who has taken to social platforms to help people live healthier and more active lives.
Winston’s motto is simply: get up and get moving. She is a big proprietor of incorporating health and fitness into your everyday routine, and with your family.
On the topic of healthy aging, Carla says it’s important to incorporate some level of strength training to ward off the aches and pains that occur when we get older.
The National Institute of Aging has some general recommendations for how we can age more gracefully and relatively pain-free.
The first recommendation is to get moving. Physical activity is the cornerstone of healthy aging and scientific evidence suggests that people who exercise regularly generally live longer and higher quality lives.
A study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that adults 40 and older who take over 8,000 or more steps per day compared to taking only 4,000 steps were associated with a 51 percent lower risk of death from all cases.
This goes hand-in-hand with what Winston recommends. By simply integrating physical exercise into your own daily routine and into your family lifestyle, you can dramatically reduce adverse effects of aging, and age healthfully.
There was a point when Winston would feel pain going up the stairs or carrying groceries, but after a consistent amount of time training and building her overall body strength, she found that the pain started to go away.
When you start living a healthy life, other aspects of health begin to fall into line as well. The second recommendation by the National Institute of Aging is to make healthy food choices, and to follow a healthy diet.
There are many schools of thought on which diet to follow, and there is no one diet for everyone, but there is a general consensus that balance is key.
Eating fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, healthy fats and lean proteins has been shown to dramatically improve the health outcomes of aging people.
A low-salt diet is also found to deliver significant health benefits as well. It lowers blood pressure, assists with losing weight and reduces the risk of Type 2 Diabetes.
Finally, one of the most important recommendations that go alongside an active lifestyle and a healthy diet is sleep. Sleeping allows the body to recover and flush waste matter from the brain.
One study of adults over 65, found that people who had poor sleep quality had a harder time problem-solving and concentrating than those who got good quality sleep.
Another study, which looked at data from nearly 8,000 people, showed that those in their 50s and 60s who got six hours of sleep or less a night were at a higher risk of developing dementia later in life.
A 2021 study also found that naps don’t totally make up for lost sleep. In fact, adults that didn’t sleep enough and napped often were at greater risk of dying within the next five years.
In essence, healthy life is all about balancing exercise, healthy eating and rest, and Carla Winston won’t back down from helping people achieve it.
