Month: December 2025

Not all health threats are obvious. Many medical conditions progress quietly for years before symptoms appear. For adults over 60, these silent dangers can reduce both quality of life and lifespan if they go unnoticed. The good news is that by staying alert, getting regular checkups, and adopting healthy habits, you can protect yourself and live longer, healthier years.

High Blood Pressure: The Invisible Risk

Often called the “silent killer,” high blood pressure damages blood vessels, the heart, and kidneys without causing noticeable symptoms. By the time headaches or vision problems appear, harm may already be done. The simplest protection is regular monitoring.

Home blood pressure cuffs are inexpensive and provide valuable data between doctor visits. Pairing routine checks with a low-sodium diet (watch those electrolyte packets and drinks!), avoidance of alcohol, exercise, and weight control keeps blood pressure in a safe range.

Diabetes: Hidden Until It Hurts

Type 2 diabetes frequently develops with few early warning signs. Many people only discover they have it after complications like vision changes, nerve pain, or kidney issues appear. Simple blood work – a fasting glucose test or hemoglobin A1C – can catch diabetes or prediabetes early. Prevention is powerful: maintaining a healthy weight, cutting back on sugary drinks, and staying active are all proven to lower risk.

Osteoporosis: Fragile Bones without Warning

Bone loss in women accelerates after menopause, and by 60 osteoporosis becomes a real concern. The danger is that bones may weaken for years without symptoms, until a sudden fracture occurs. A bone density scan (DEXA) is the best way to detect it early. To strengthen bones, include calcium and vitamin D in your diet, engage in weight-bearing exercise, and avoid smoking or regular alcohol intake.

Colon Cancer: Prevention Through Screening

Colon cancer is often silent in its early stages. By the time blood in the stool or abdominal pain appears, the disease may already be advanced. Colonoscopies remain the gold standard for prevention, as they can detect and remove polyps before they turn cancerous. There are also stool-based screening tests which can detect polyps. For adults over 60, staying up-to-date with colon screenings is one of the most effective life-saving measures available.

Cognitive Decline: Subtle but Serious

Memory lapses and slower processing speed may seem like a normal part of aging, but they can also signal early cognitive decline. Conditions like Alzheimer’s disease develop gradually, making early detection critical. Engaging in mental challenges, staying socially active, regular exercise, and prioritizing good sleep all help protect brain function. If forgetfulness begins to interfere with daily life, it’s important to seek medical evaluation.

How to Pay Attention to Your Health

Listening to your body matters. Fatigue, unexpected weight changes, unexplained or new “lumps or bumps”, or persistent discomfort should never be ignored. Scheduling annual wellness visits, staying current on recommended screenings, and monitoring blood pressure and pulse at home make it easier to catch silent problems before they become serious.

Enhancing Longevity

Longevity isn’t about luck – it’s about choices. Eating a diet rich in whole foods, maintaining an active lifestyle, managing stress, and protecting sleep all work together to prevent disease. Building strong social connections also supports both physical and mental health, giving life more meaning and joy.

The Bottom Line

Silent dangers may be hidden, but they are not inevitable. With regular screenings, attention to subtle changes, and a proactive lifestyle, you can reduce risk and extend both the length and quality of your life. Prevention is the ultimate investment in a healthier future.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

What screenings do you do regularly? Are there any tests that you haven’t done yet? Have you had any health scares in the past year?

As another year gently folds itself away and a new one begins to shimmer on the horizon, we often feel a familiar stirring – a quiet anticipation, soft but steady, like a hand on the small of our back guiding us forward.

At 60 and beyond, this feeling arrives with a particular sweetness. We have lived, learned, and loved enough to know that time is precious, yet we still hold hopes and dreams that beckon us onward. Our hearts whisper for renewal, for joy, for deeper peace – and for the kind of change that nourishes our heart, mind, body and soul.

The Rhythm of Life

The truth is, none of us know what this coming year will bring. Life unfolds in its own rhythm, sometimes gently, sometimes with unexpected force. But what we can choose – what remains entirely within our power – is how we meet the journey ahead. We can choose to trust the path even when we cannot see its end. We can choose to believe that life is not finished gifting us beauty, growth, and meaning.

This trust invites us to move with the current of our life rather than push against it. There is grace in loosening our grip. There is wisdom in softening our resistance. Instead of wrestling with what happens, we can allow ourselves to accept and embrace each moment in whatever way feels honest, kind and compassionate. We may not be able to control the events that enter our lives – but we can always choose the spirit in which we respond to them.

Let Life Teach You

For many years, I struggled against my own life. I pushed, I pulled, I resisted. I didn’t like how I felt. I didn’t like certain chapters that had unfolded. I saw life as something being done to me, instead of something happening for me. It wasn’t the events themselves that caused the deepest pain – it was the meaning I attached to them. It was my belief that life was somehow against me. And, in my own journey I discovered my path as a writer, fitness presenter and body confidence and joyful ageing coach.

If we allow our lives to love us, we may find that the journey leads us to become more of our authentic self, walking a path that lights us up and shines us forward.

Softening into Life

Something remarkable happens when we change the way we think: our emotions shift, our behaviour softens, and our whole experience of living transforms. Life itself is neutral. It ebbs and flows. It offers light and shadow, joy and loss, beginnings and endings. What gives it colour – what gives it shape – is the meaning we choose to assign.

Rise with Courage

At 60 and beyond, this truth becomes even more powerful. You have decades of wisdom behind you, and the unique ability to reinterpret your life with compassion. You know what it means to endure. You know what it means to rise. You know what it means to grow beyond something you once thought would break you. You understand that your inner world is where peace takes root.

For many years now, my mantra has been: I let life love me.

When I choose to believe that life is, in its own mysterious way, always supporting me – even when I cannot yet see how – I find a quiet, steady peace within. This inner calm doesn’t remove the challenges, but it gives me the strength to meet them with grace. It reminds me that each experience, even the difficult ones, can serve my growth, my resilience, and my understanding of myself.

As you step into this new year, I invite you to adopt this gentle mantra as your own.

Let life love you.

Let it surprise you. Let it hold you. Let it show you that so much beauty still lies ahead.

Accept with tenderness the things you cannot control, and take loving, deliberate action on what you can change. Honour your pace. Celebrate your progress. Trust your wisdom.

Wrap Yourself Up in Love

In every new moment, carry with you the quiet confidence that comes from a life well-lived and a heart open to love. Trust in your wisdom, honour your journey, and allow each moment – simple or grand – to remind you of your own strength and beauty. Let life surprise you, nurture you, and guide you forward, and may you always remember that you are worthy of joy, peace, and all the love the world has to offer. Step gently, breathe deeply, and let this year be a tender, radiant chapter in your remarkable story.

May this coming year bless you with heart-warming experiences, moments of deep peace, and a growing awareness of your own radiance. May you continue to discover just how extraordinary you truly are – because you are, and you always have been.

If you would love to share in more life wisdom and uplifting thoughts do join me on Instagram @romancingyourbody. I would love your company as we walk together through the years.

Wishing you a beautiful, joy-filled year.

May life love you even more than you ever imagined.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Do you try to push life where you want it to go? Have you tried loving life and enjoying it?

I’ve been mulling over something different to do this year on New Year’s Eve. For the past several years, I spent NYE surrounded with old magazines, a large piece of tag board, scissors and tape, constructing a vision board. Many times, I made it a party with friends, happily chatting while we taped pictures of our dreams on tagboard, and when finished, sharing what each picture meant to us. This process set intention for our future, clarifying individual focus for the year ahead.

There’s something powerful about a vision board. The first step to making one could be why. It involves searching the heart to answer the question “What do I really want in the year to come?” This question could be posed in several categories, like finances, homes, relationships or travel. Carefully cut and artfully displayed pictures of what we want on a piece of tagboard seems to cement the answer to that question to give hopes and dreams a solid base to develop into reality.

This Has Been Widely Successful for Me

As I look over vision boards from years past, it’s nothing short of amazing how many happenings and occurrences have lined up to those pictures. I’m humbled and awestruck how this has consistently worked for me and for my group of friends.

(Keep reading to find out the ONE thing that I’ve had on my vision board year after year that has NOT happened in my life. YET.)

Perhaps it’s not about cut out magazine pictures or the words I’ve scribbled around them, or the hope that dreams may come true. The time devoted to contemplating and visualizing what I truly want, is the catalyst that makes this work.This is what it’s all about. By self-reflection and then visualization, I found that I move from vague aspirations to clear, actionable intentions for the year ahead.

Keeping your vision board where you can see it, is part of making goals and dreams come true. The part of the brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS) is the brainstem network that acts as your brain’s filter, controlling arousal, consciousness, and attention, prioritizing sensory input and helping you focus.

“By consistently viewing your vision board, you value tag your goals, signaling to your RAS to prioritize your vision board content. This causes you to actively notice opportunities, people and ideas that align with your aspirations.”

Use Your Vision Board to Inspire and Guide Your Actions

Mental Rehearsal and Emotion

Visualizing your goals activates the same areas of the brain as experiencing them, creating a powerful emotional connection. This mental practice can increase motivation and confidence, as your brain begins to believe your goals are possible and even probable.

Motivation and Action

The positive emotions generated from visualizing success, combined with the constant reminder of your goals, can increase your motivation to take action. Seeing your progress can also boost your confidence, helping you to continue working toward your objectives.

A New Practice to Explore

This year on the NYE I will make a vision board, and I’m going to add something new. I’ve been contemplating the value of writing a letter to myself. In this letter, I will jot down how 2025 went, including successes as well as disappointments. The year held so many blessings, small wins, and lessons. It brought some heartaches that are hurtful and vivid.

I may forget about some of these events by the time December 2026 rolls around. In fact, I’m sure I will. Time moves on and so do circumstances, difficulties, successes. Everything will morph into something else after 12 months of moving forward. It will be interesting to read how I felt as this year ended, what impacted me the most, and then read the hopes for the year that were important one year ago. While focusing on the present moment, I’ll be looking ahead to the future year.

How to Write a Year-End Letter

Here’s a few pointers to help you write a letter to yourself.

1. List the fun you had.
2. Write your hopes, dreams, and vision for the year 2026.
3. If you’ve had tragedies or hurts, it’s ok to put them down. Write where each situation is currently – then add where you want them to be by the end of 2026.
4. Remind yourself how much you love you. Give yourself some love.

(As promised earlier in this article, here’s the one picture that I brought forward to a new board year after year. A small bright red Mazda Miata convertible!)

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Will you join me in making a vision board to view all year or writing a letter to yourself to be read one year from today? Have you done either of these in the past? What has made the most impact on your life? Please share the successes you have had with vision boards for inspiration!

I recently watched a podcast with bestselling author and Professor of Psychiatry, Michael Easter, discussing his book, The Comfort Crisis, in which he examines how our physical health and mental wellbeing have evolved as our lives became easier. I find the topic fascinating and satisfying in some ways because it ratifies what I believe.

Living in the Past vs Today

I was raised by first generation Americans, my father’s people lived for generations on a small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Life was harsh, staples were scarce and food was mostly grown or harvested from the ocean. Most chores were done by hand as fuel was limited and expensive, cooking was mostly over an open fire and people walked or rode animals rather than drive a vehicle.

These people were tough, strong and determined. They had to be to survive. They passed along a resilience to the generations that followed that remains in me, even though I live a modern, comfortable life. I suspect I have been hardwired for hard work and the desire to venture out into nature even when it’s less than pleasant in the winter.

Apparently, this is a good thing. According to Easter, there’s a disconnect between how we evolved up until the 20^th century and how we currently live. We don’t move our bodies as we once did, we don’t strain to lift heavy things, brave winter storms to hunt or gather food, endure spans of time with less than abundant provisions and build fires to stay warm. The majority of us have a thermostat, a car, a cozy bed and restaurants, delivery or a well-stocked pantry that allow us to be sedentary for most of our waking hours.

The Evolutionary Mismatch

Evolutionary Mismatch, defined by Wikipedia, is a biological concept that a previously advantageous trait may become maladaptive due to change in the environment, especially when change is rapid.

Life once took far more effort. Our food was varied, mostly eaten raw, and we usually had to walk a significant distance to find it. Our jaws were strong, our teeth were larger and our gut was filled with bacteria and microbes that turned whatever we found or killed into nutrition. Modern humans have mutated to have smaller jaws with weaker muscles and 70% of the current population are now born with no wisdom teeth. This evolutionary trend has accelerated over the past few centuries as a result of mechanized food production and a diet which is mostly comprised of soft, processed ingredients.

Additionally, our microbiome which is responsible for not only assimilating calories, but producing hormones that regulate a healthy body, has lost much of its diversity, resulting in a dramatic rise in digestive issues, hormonal imbalance and an increase in obesity and heart disease.

We engineered exercise into our lives when survival got too easy and we began to realize the threats to our health. Exercise is good, but we need to weave effort back into our every day. Anthropologists believe an early woman hunter gatherer was four times stronger than a member of the Women’s Olympic Rowing Team is today, a theory that supports Easter’s premise that constant effort matters.

How to Include Effort in Daily Life

Here are a few ideas if you’d like to put a little more effort into your day without adding anything more to your busy schedule.

• Walking to the market or at least parking as far from it as reasonable.
• Carry your groceries rather than wheeling them in a cart.
• Take the stairs rather than the elevator.
• Sweep or rake rather than using the vacuum or the blower.

To bring more effort into your eating habits try:

• Eat less, eat less frequently and allow your food to fully digest before eating more.
• Choose food that challenges your body, whole grains, seeds, fresh fruit and vegetables take longer to digest and feed your microbiome.
• Incorporate more raw foods and chew them thoroughly.

The Advent of a Temperature Controlled Environment

We’ve also evolved to avoid exposure to hot and frigid temperatures, which makes life much more pleasant but requires less from our metabolism to modulate. When we are exposed to cold our body produces not only adrenaline for our heart and muscles to respond to the stress, but norepinephrine, dopamine and endorphins which boost alertness, focus and mood.

There are also some studies reporting cold exposure stimulates brown fat activation, inflammation reduction, improved sleep and stronger immune response as a long-term benefit, all of which contributes to better health and longevity.

According to Easter, the key is to embrace short term difficulty for a long-term benefit, withstanding a little struggle and discomfort in exchange for a healthier, more fit and stronger body and a better quality of life in the long run.

It might be difficult to start, probably a little uncomfortable at times, but with the proper mindset, the benefits will be obvious, as we gain confidence in our ability and become much more capable of facing whatever adversity may come our way in the future.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Do you think you’re living a life of comfort? What comforts can’t you live without? How much strain and difficulty do you voluntarily include in your days?

What habits do we have, or wish we had? In business or our personal lives, most of our daily actions are completed out of habit without giving them much thought: our morning routine, our drive to work, our bedtime ritual. Have you ever caught yourself driving and asking yourself, did I stop at that stop sign back there? Did I close my garage door as I pulled out of my driveway? Did I lock my car door after I parked my car? Those actions have become so familiar that they have become habits that you do without thinking about them. You’re on autopilot.

Nose Blindness

Our brains are wired for survival, which is why they ignore the familiar in order to focus on what’s new and different. That fact is referred to as “nose blindness.” A few years ago, I designed a workshop called Behavior Change Bootcamp and in it I helped my audience better understand nose blindness with the following example.

Think of the last time you entered a room and smelled baking cookies, or homemade bread, or some other favorite aroma. Minutes later, your nose didn’t detect that aroma anymore. Yet if you left the room and came back into it again, you would smell it again.

That is an example of how nose blindness works, your brain ignores the familiar so it can focus on the new and different instead. It is that exact understanding of how our brain works that we can leverage in both our personal and professional lives to our advantage.

James Clear’s Advice

Take personal finance, for example, since it applies to all of us. If you can do things so routinely that you don’t think about them, voila! You have a new habit! So how do we leverage our brain to help us create good personal financial habits? To avoid the feeling of overwhelm, we need to take James Clear’s advice from his book Atomic Habits and think small. His advice is to break our desired habits into 2-minute actionable steps. By focusing on the system in place, one small step at a time, you end up achieving the overall goal.

My Wish for all Women

Let’s use my wish for all women to walk through an example. I wish every woman had a list of her financial resources; I call it My Net Worth Summary. It reminds you, all in one place, of your blessings and perhaps your challenges. And once it is complete, it also serves as your homework list.

If you tie your 2-minute actionable step to something you enjoy, you will get further faster. If you enjoy a nice cup of coffee, setting out to complete your Net Worth Summary, in 2-minute sittings, can be very doable even if finances aren’t your favorite thing to deal with.

Section One

For example, the first section is Cash, which generally means all accounts at banks or credit unions (or in the freezer or under the mattress!) that are not at risk in the stock market. As you sip your coffee, you fill in the first column with the types of accounts you have, one per line. If you have a checking account at the local bank and one at a credit union, for example, you will write Checking on two lines.

Keep sipping, and the next column has you list the titles of each account, i.e., joint, trust, or your name only and where they are located. Here’s where if you don’t know for sure (don’t guess!), you may take a few minutes to look up that detail on a statement or online.

Then, surprising to some, there is a beneficiary column. You can name a beneficiary (called a POD, Payable on Death) on checking, savings, money market, and CDs at the bank. Perhaps that becomes a homework item for another 2-minute session.

Lastly, finish your coffee as you fill in the Value column with the current approximate balances of the accounts you listed. No math needed, as the worksheet will tally it all for you at the end of the 4 pages. Yeah, one section of eight done!

Free Workshop

Now you can tackle the next section tomorrow! Or sometimes you find that wasn’t so bad and decide to make a little more progress faster by sticking with a small step longer than 2 minutes. Your call. Any progress is further ahead than before you started! I also provide a free video workshop (available on demand) to walk you through filling out the entire worksheet and to help understand the importance of getting the account titles and beneficiary designations correct and complete.

2-Minute Habits

I encourage you to think of every financial task or project in the same way. Just a 2-minute tackle until you complete it over time. Or some healthy financial habits, like reviewing your bank transactions online (for fraud detection as well as reminders of your spending habits), can be done on a regular basis for just 2 minutes at a time, while sipping coffee if you are me!

Let’s Start the Conversation:

What financial projects could you or have you broken down into small tasks? What financial habits could you do regularly for two minutes? And what enjoyable activity could you tie it to (or reward yourself with)? Let’s have a discussion.