Also, the nutritionist on the panel said that it isn’t our weight that matters, but WHERE the weight is and WHAT makes up our weight, e.g., body fat % vs. lean muscle. Well, she mentioned the wasit-hip ratio, and that you want it at .8 or less. As you approach 1.0 you start to get into trouble for heart disease. That night I went home and discovered my waist-hip ratio is 0.9!!!!!! Well, tht was enough to get me to start exercising again… I don’t want to be an apple! (My weight, BMI, blood pressure, and cholesterol are all great, but I’ve always gained weight on my stomach. Now that my metabolism is slowing down more, the fat lingers instead of disappearing after a few days of healthy eating.)

The ideal solution is to find something that works fo you, ie that you enjoy, or can at least tolerate. Maybe you hate gyms: buy some dumbbells or a treadmill and workout at home. Maybe you love watching lots of TV: stretch and do knee pushups while watching your guilty pleasures.

Also, Robert, you have somehow found a way to make articles infused with death fun and enjoyable. What a great talent!

Happiness always adds on to your life and you get in places you never would think.

Great work on exercising! Definitely something my wife and I need to work on in the new year.

My grandfather died recently at the age of 95. He died at home, active and fully independent for all but the last few weeks. And all of this despite living with multiple chronic health conditions for two decades.

He’d been physically active his entire life, and volunteered 20 hours a week for his 30 post-retirement years. The volunteer job kept him mentally active and helped him build new friendships as the friends of his youth passed away.

The reality is that no matter what – money, relationships, health – the decisions we make individually have a huge role in our sucess. While we obviously can’t personally control everything, we can put the odds in our favor with good decisions.

In the end, if we don’t have health, the other areas of life – including wealth – are going to be severely compromised. Best to make good decisions and enjoy every single day.

I look at those calculations and see that I’ve got to make sure we sock a lot away in order to not worry about being a burden when I age.

Although ironically, I guess if I worried about it more, my life expectancy would drop and it’d be less of an issue, huh?

But it was neat to see the things that add to or take away our lives. I guess none of it was particularly surprising, but still, neat to see what the doctors say in action.

And like you, I need to get more sleep.

I had a leash for “Droopy” and we would walk around the neighborhood.

Every walk, some adult would slam on the brakes and ask what type of dog was that and why did it walk so wierd?

Eventually we made the local paper with a story and a picture.

Just one little concern: It says you’ll get an extra year of living just by sleeping an extra 2 hours a night, right?

If you life to 83, that means you’ll be here for another 40 years.

2 hours extra sleep for 40 years
is almost 30,000 hours… or 3.5 years…

So you’ll have to spend an extra 3.5 years sleeping, just to gain 1 more year of life! As much as I love sleeping, there’s something not quite right about that

I will still continue to save in case the worst happens, but I don’t think I’ll look at those retirement calculators with the same sense of dread anymore.