Ernestine Shepherd just turned 84 years old this year and has a body that most women would kill for. While other women her age (we still love them) are pushing strollers, she has been spotted around the world lifting weights and posing in bikinis.
Aging is inevitable but Ernestine Shepherd has taught us all that you can choose to age gracefully. Here are ten ways to go about it,

1. Physical Exercise

You don’t have to copy and paste Ernestine Shepherd’s gym routine to stay in shape. Exercise is not limited to the gym. You could choose to walk your dog for thirty minutes every day and still have the same effect as someone who has had 30 minutes of cardio each week.

Exercise keeps your heart rate up, blood circulation throughout the body, and helps remove toxins from your system. All of these things are important in keeping you young looking.

By exercising regularly, it makes you look younger. Many studies have shown that the activity you do daily plays a significant role in how you will age. It also helps to strengthen your muscles, which, in turn, will help you become more mobile.

It also improves your digestion and prevents you from getting constipation, which is another problem that tends to affect older people. So, not only is exercise good for you, but it also helps to slow down the aging process as well!
Just don’t overdo it. You want to stay as active as possible, but you don’t want to overwork your joints or bones. Just as other parts of your body change color during exercise, your skin will do the same thing.

2. Eat Healthily

This does not mean that you forsake the cakes and ice-cream, but you will have to control their intake. Dieticians and nutritionists agree that if you want to slow aging, eating healthy can do just that.

This means eating fresh fruits and vegetables all the time and taking in moderate portions of healthy proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

It does not matter whether you are trying to lose weight or trying to maintain your current weight. You need to eat healthy regularly if you are going to live a healthy lifestyle. It is essential to keep in mind that a good diet can help you live longer.

3. Mental Exercise

Just like your body, your brain needs exercise as well. As we get older, our minds naturally begin to dull and lose their energy, so mental exercises can be an important way to make sure your mind stays sharp and alert. It helps you to concentrate better and also helps your brain to process information better.

It is well known that the best exercise for your brain is to do something as simple as reading for 15 minutes a day. This will do wonders for your brain. Mental exercises don’t only benefit your brain. They can have a significant positive effect on your mood and
Other ways to improve your brainpower and how it works are through playing games. The most popular ones are chess, puzzles that focus on memory, reasoning, problem-solving, and creativity (namely music and drawing).

4. Sleep

Sleep is vital for our nervous system and immune system to function correctly. It is now well known that sleep is an integral part of our body’s process of regulating our internal body temperature, and in many ways, it acts as a thermometer.
Sleep helps regulate our body temperature because our bodies need time to recover after our night’s sleep.

If you are a person who is sleeping seven or more hours each night, then you are going to slow down the aging process. However, if you are sleeping closer to the average of six hours per night, you will increase your lifespan.

5. Take Your Supplements

Anti-aging supplements such as Retinol, Average, Retinol, and Neutrogena have been proven to work effectively in reducing wrinkles and improving skin tone.

However, these pills do not stop aging; they only slow down your aging process for a couple of months. However, when you take an anti-oxidant or supplement such as Vitamin C, A, E, or zinc, you can see the effects in immediate terms. These supplements help prevent the formation of age-related diseases such as arthritis, heart disease, and cancer. See our top 10 supplements recommended to stay healthy as you age.

6. Avoid Smoking

As it turns out, smoking is one of the major causes of problems associated with premature aging. The smoking habit in itself is bad enough. Still, it causes many issues, such as reducing the body’s ability to produce even more specific proteins, damaging the skin, and increasing cancer risk.

Prolonged smoking causes damage to vital organs, such as the heart, lungs, and kidneys, as well as causes problems with blood circulation.

Quitting smoking is not an easy task, especially if you have already spent your entire life smoking – an experience that most people never get to have. Fortunately, there are many support groups online, where you can find people who have been through the same experiences and offer helpful advice.

7. Have a Social Life

No man is an island. It is often said that having social relationships with good people who care about you as a person and not just your career helps you stay active, in shape, and mentally healthy even as you get older.

The benefits extend beyond the obvious benefits to married people who have friends and family to support them as they age; it is said that friendships formed while growing up in school or college carry through into adult life, helping people cope with the changing pace of modern life.

Having a life with plenty of social contacts can help cope with the loneliness that sometimes accompanies advancing years. It also provides a sense of purpose that we sometimes lose as we become more sedentary.

Of course, it has been argued that socializing with others can also help fight the onset of Alzheimer’s and other mental disorders that take hold in later life. Alzheimer’s and other illnesses can be traced back to insufficient social interaction, and perhaps that is the real reason why such problems arise in the first place.

If we can learn how to slow down aging, perhaps we could reduce the numbers affected by such diseases in future years. Maybe we should all try to make socializing with others a priority in life.

8. Moisturize, Moisturize, Moisturize.

The skin is a living, breathing part of your body, and so it deserves good care, just like any other part of your body. By taking the proper steps to take care of your skin, you can extend suppleness and elasticity. That means if you are looking to find a product that contains anti-aging ingredients, you need to make sure that the product is safe and all-natural.

The best anti-aging skin creams contain hyaluronic acid. As we age, the amount of hyaluronic acid produced by our skin cells decreases. To counteract this, the product you select should contain extracts that stimulate collagen and elastin production. Collagen and elastin are the proteins that give the skin its youthful appearance.

The way that an anti-wrinkle cream work is that it provides your skin with the proteins that it needs to replace the ones that are lost during the day. If you keep your face moisturized throughout the day, you can prevent the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, and you can also keep your skin from becoming dry and leathery.

9. Emotional Balance

Emotional balance is vital to your health and well-being. Without it, you can find yourself quickly becoming ill, disoriented, and mentally frazzled. Many people do not realize that one of the most significant factors contributing to aging is how you think.

One great way to get on the right track towards getting the emotional balance is to learn how to meditate. Meditation not only helps you to relax and get in tune with yourself, but it can also help you to cleanse your mind of all of the negative energy that is affecting you both physically and mentally.

Getting balanced emotionally is very important to your health and well-being and can be accomplished quite easily. So if you are one of the many people who are beginning to notice that they are aging, take a look at how you are managing your life, and you may find that you are slowing down a bit and living a happier and more fulfilling life than you might have been.

10. Acceptance

If asked by somebody the most important things in life are, very few people will answer that they are happy with their age, let alone answer how you accept that you are aging.
It is sad to say that most people don’t know what they want to do with their lives. They live in the moment and rarely think that age will one day catch up with them.

According to US News Money Report, less than 31% of millennials not plan for retirement. This, later on, leads to a state of dissatisfaction as they age. To mitigate this, young people need to accept that everything in this world ages.

Conclusion

These tips do not only apply to staying young but also to be healthy as an older person. They are easy to follow, and anyone can do them on their own.

However, there is one thing that you have to remember when doing them. The more you practice them, the better your chances of maintaining a healthy life in your later years. If you are serious about living a long and healthy life, you must take time for yourself regularly