Maintaining an ideal body weight is essential as we grow older. However, it becomes hard to achieve a healthy body weight. It is either aging adults become underweight or overweight. While a healthy body is beneficial you need not be able to achieve it yourself. The followings are ways an assisted living community in Mauldin, SC can help you achieve a healthy weight:
Encourage Physical Activities
You cannot replace physical activity with anything. It is important to your health and helps lower your chance of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and other chronic complications.
As an aging adult, you will remain energized and stronger if you are always active. Asides from strength, it will help maintain balance and coordination.
At least you should engage in physical activities like walking, biking, and swimming for more than 2 hours. You can also try some weightlifting activities to build your muscles and strengthen your bones.
Assisted living centers ensure you are committed to engaging in these activities daily. Since they know your health condition, they can determine the right activities for you. However, if are completely healthy you can choose any activities of your choice. You can decide to dance, do yoga, or join a Tai Chi class.
Encourage Hydration
Many aging adults experience a reduced level of thirst. Once you grow older you rarely feel the need to drink water. However, this does not indicate you are properly hydrated.
Older adults can be ignorant of this, and assisted living communities are fully aware of developments like these. Team member in these centers encourages hydration by ensuring older adults drink eight glasses of water every day. They also include water-rich foods in their diet to ensure residents are hydrated.
Staying hydrated ensures you don’t eat excessively as you might mistake thirst for hunger.
Healthy Diet Plan
Your eating habit is crucial if you want to keep a healthy weight. With age, the ability to burn calories decreases so you need to know how much you can handle in a day. These communities have dieticians and nutritionists as team members so they understand the number of calories needed.
While cutting calories might seem easy doing too much can make you fatigued and slow down your metabolism. On average, older women need about 1,600 to 1,800 calories a day. While older men need around 2000 calories a day.
In these centers, it becomes easier for you to substitute some of your food for healthy ones. They encourage foods like vegetables and fruits for aging adults. These communities also incorporate proteins and calcium into your diet.
Social Engagement and Companionship
Isolation has been linked to unhealthy weight loss for older adults living alone. On the other hand, living alone can lead to excess weight. Older adults tend to overcome boredom by overeating. While there are cases of aging adults who don’t eat meals regularly because of cooking stress.
Residential communities overcome these situations as they foster social engagement. Instead of filling up with inappropriate eating, you will be able to interact with other residents. In addition, they offer an excellent dining experience so you don’t have to undergo the stress of making your meal.
