Every high school and college graduation speaker talks about
"setting goals," and "planning the rest of your life." This
is a great time for young graduates to ponder their future. Now that I've
passed the age of 60, I realize that there's another special time in life to
set goals. At the age of 60, the kids are gone, and we aren't as active as
before.
My career of 30 years included daily exercise, sometimes up
to four or five hours a day. I was always as fit as possible. It wasn't until I
retired from teaching aerobics that my body started showing normal signs of
aging. My cholesterol started to climb, my weight went up, and I had to see a
doctor. He acted like it was normal to write prescriptions for high blood pressure
and cholesterol. He didn't say a word about my recent weight gain or lifestyle.
As we age and our habits begin to affect our future, we need
to set new goals as though we are graduation from school, however, this is a
new type of graduation ... The Golden Years!
When setting goals, they need to be realistic and
achievable. Why would you set them? When the doctor told me that he was going
to prescribe a statin for high cholesterol, my first response was that I would
try harder and let's wait. What happened? Nothing. I didn't go on the
medication and my cholesterol didn't go down. On my next visit, the statin was
prescribed, and the side effects were not agreeable.
After a couple of false starts, I set out to solve my
medical problems before I officially became a "senior." I was
specific. If I didn't lower my cholesterol through nutrition, I would have to
be on meds for the rest of my life - and they made me feel lousy. I decided to
set the goal of getting my cholesterol lower than 175 without medication. I
signed on to a calorie counting app. As I counted calories, I wrote down the
breakdown of nutrients in every bite. Wow. What a wakeup call. I thought that I
was eating a rational number of calories, but there was a lot of animal fat in
the form of yogurt, carrot cake frosting, and ranch dressing dip and chicken
tenders. Chicken is healthier than beef, right? Oh yeah, but not with panko
breading, fried, and dipped in ranch dressing. This documentation was the most
valuable part of my plan. I had to get real about what I had been eating and
what I needed to eat. I set realistic goals. This meant lowering my calories by 75%!
When I set goals for my future, here's how it went; "I
am going to give up caffeinated drinks which lead to a growly, hungry feeling
within 6 months. I am going to lose 40 pounds in the next year. I am going to
lower my blood pressure within one year without medication, and I am going to
try to lower my cholesterol from 225 to 175 in one year without
medication." The next questions were if these were realistic goals, and
what was it going to take to achieve them? It was time to go to work.
Now, let's talk about the present. This is two years later.
Whew! It was a great experience to go over my documentation for the past couple
of years. I wish that I could help everybody that I know walk that walk.
My first goal was to give up coffee. I had become a heavy
coffee drinker. Not only did I drink it all day, even up until bed time, but I
added real Half and Half to every cup. God, I LOVED that coffee. The problem with it was that although I drank
it for years, as I got older, it made my heart beat really forcefully, and
seemed to drive my blood pressure up. It was hard, but DONE! I just stopped
drinking it.
I gave up coffee cold turkey. I was right that my stomach
wouldn't get those hunger pangs that I was using as an excuse to eat. My next
goal was a multi-goal. This would include losing 40 pounds, and lowering my
blood pressure and cholesterol through diet. This was where I made my first
mistake. I decided to go off of all animal fat and become a vegan. Lots of
people are vegan, how hard could it be? VERY HARD is my answer. If you don't
have recipes, or even understand how much protein you need, or what contains
protein, you could go straight into the ditch!
If I had known then what I know now ... Anyway, I bought a
bunch of processed soy products and came up with some awesome recipes. The
volume of carbs that I was eating surpassed the calories that I had eaten in
cheese and yogurt! I thought that if I wasn't eating animal products, I'd lose
weight. Period. Just the opposite happened. I gained weight. I was obviously
doing something wrong! I wondered if eating vegan was going to work for me. I
missed yogurt and cheese, and gave up on the vegan idea.
This is where I decided to meet with a Registered Dietician.
It was the most important decision that I could have made. Although she was not a Vegan Dietician, she
understood my goals and agreed to work with me. She made it clear that processed
foods should be kept to a minimum. So, all-you-can-eat tofu or tempeh is out of
the question. She helped me to change the balance on my plate. This included
less pasta, more sauce. When making tacos, it included less tempeh, and more
salsa and cabbage.
I discovered tons of recipes that seemed bland and boring in
the beginning, but are now some of my favorite things. Recovering from fat and
sugar habits is hard! Not having sour cream or cheese on a taco is REALLY
harsh! Over time, I've come to love a tempeh taco with red cabbage and chunky
salsa.
So, with my goals still not completely attained, I have lost
39 pounds, my blood pressure medicine is less than half of what it used to be,
and my cholesterol is 187 without medication. Being so much lighter, I exercise
harder, and intend to achieve that one last pound of weight loss, and a few
more points of cholesterol before the summer is over.
My life is nothing like it used to be. I'm trim. I exercise
hard. I have lost all talk about "getting old." GOALS. Set them. Make them lofty. If you're
over 60, NOW is the time to set the most important personal goals of your life!
