The Most Important Thing For Living A Long And Healthy Life

I have thought about this topic many times, and always come to the same conclusion. The most important thing to living a LONG and healthy life is keeping your weight down. And I am not going to preach about dieting and exercise, although those are certainly important ideas to help keep your weight down, but simply watching what and how much you choose to eat. Keeping your body weight down simply reduces an enormous amount of stress and work on the body’s systems, including the skeletal and cardiovascular system, the two systems that you need to live a LONG and ACTIVE life. Let’s admit it, we all want to live long and be that active elderly person that we all smile at.

Let’s look at the cardiovascular system. The hearts beats about 100, 000 times per day, pushing blood thru vessels. Now take a guess at how many additional MILES of blood vessels you make the heart pump blood thru for every pound of body fat you have?............7 MILES! So if you lost 20 pounds, that’s nearly 150 less miles, and a great deal less stress on the heart!!

Now how about the skeletal system. In particular your joints, like the knees and hips and lower back. Many people think that the cartilage that allows these joints to work properly and pain free for your life gets ground away over time, which is incorrect. Cartilage is like a sponge that when squeezed or massaged, like what happens to our cartilage when we move around, absorbs nutrients from the blood and stays healthy. When we weigh too much, the pressure on the cartilage squeezes it fully but does not release and allow it to absorb nutrients from the blood, so it dies and disappears a little at a time, eventually making our joints bone on bone.

I hope this makes sense and gives some of you the final reason to make the effort to make some good choices.

Thanks for reading and have a great day.

Dr. Mckim