After seeing a photo this morning of a movie star (who shall go unnamed) with flab under the jaw, I decided to pass along some of my favorite double chin exercises.

These exercises help firm up not only aging baby boomer chins but also  those flopping around on any fat young people reading this.

And these double chin exercises are free, unlike expensive plastic surgery that could go wrong and leave you looking like one of the critters in District Nine. Whoa, yuck!

Enough babbling. Let’s get to the “how to” instructions.

To tighten a double chin, work with some of these exercises several times a day…

• Open your mouth, tilt your head backwards gently, and then slowly slide your bottom lip up and over your top lip.
• Similarly, without tilting your head, move your lower lip upwards as if you were going to try to wipe your nose with it. Oh, gross! But don’t worry, I’ve never met anyone yet who could actually get their lower lip all the way up to their nose.
• This next one is kind of fun… stick your tongue out over and over again, like a lizard on Valium, moving it slowly and leaving it out for a bit and then bringing it back in. Doing these motions with your tongue will strengthen face and mouth muscles and helps to firm up a double chin. An hour of French kissing will accomplish the same thing, or at least that’s what Babet Petit told me back in 1967 on a memorable double date that I remember to this very day.
• Finally, resisting with your neck and head, put the palm of your hand on your forehead and push until you feel your neck and chin tightening.

I hope you paused and tried these exercises while you were reading them. If you didn’t, stop and take a moment or two right now and do so.

Oh, if you have a double chin exercise you’d like to share, click on the comment button below and type away.

Do you want more blog posts like this? Comment below telling me you want it...

Tags: double chin exercises

I haven’t posted a good meditation lately, so let me  make up for that lapse right now.

For today’s meditation, we turn east to Tao Te Ching, The Book of the Way, where we learn…

I have just three things to teach: Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and in thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.

Great peace will be yours once you bring simplicity, patience, and compassion into your life by meditating on them.

How do you do that?

It’s easy.

Sit back quietly, slow down, breathe deeply, hold, relax, let go.

Repeat three times.

Then… breathe simplicity into your life.

Hold.

Relax and breathe out the things that are complicating your life and making you unhappy.

Use the same technique with patience and compassion.

See, it’s simple.

Be sure to subscribe to my free meditation newsletter if you like the meditations I share here on the blog.

Does this help or do you have a problem with this?

Tags: Meditation

Today I’d like to share a healthy sleep tip from my free newsletter for overcoming insomnia…

Wiggle Your Toes!

If you’re not relaxed, you’re not going to fall asleep, so today I’m going to show you how to relax by wiggling your toes.

Obviously, you need to be lying in bed on your back.

Now, and this is so simple it’s absurd, simultaneously wiggle your toes on both feet up and down a dozen times or so.

Whoa, that really does relax you, doesn’t it?

Here’s a bonus tip… Wiggle your toes before getting out of bed every morning and then come back to this blog entry to leave a comment to let me know how that worked for you.

Oh, one more thing… click here right now to get a FREE 18-minute MP3 sample of my powerful NightTrain Sleep System CD.

If you think of anything I left out of this post, please feel free to put that on the comment.

Tags: Insomnia

I want to share a few extracts from a press release I read recently about Baby Boomers and self-esteem and then make a comment or two.

First, the article…

Self-esteem Declines Sharply Among Older Adults While  Middle-aged are Most Confident

WASHINGTON – Self-esteem rises steadily as people age but starts declining around the time of retirement, according to a longitudinal study of men and women ranging in age from 25 to 104.

“Self-esteem is related to better health, less criminal behavior, lower levels of depression and, overall, greater success in life,” said the study’s lead author, Ulrich Orth, PhD. “Therefore, it’s important to learn more about how the average person’s self-esteem changes over time.”

Self-esteem was lowest among young adults but increased throughout adulthood, peaking at age 60, before it started to decline. These results were reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association.

On average, women had lower self-esteem than did men throughout most of adulthood, but self-esteem levels converged as men and women reached their 80s and 90s. Blacks and whites had similar self-esteem levels throughout young adulthood and middle age.

In old age, average self-esteem among blacks dropped much more sharply than self-esteem among whites. This was the result even after controlling for differences in income and health. Future research should further explore these ethnic differences, which might lead to better interventions aimed at improving self-esteem, wrote the study’s authors.

Orth doesn’t think baby boomers will skew self-esteem trajectories as the majority of that generation reach retirement age. But with medical advances, they will be healthier longer and, therefore, may be able to work and earn money longer. “It is possible that the decline in self-esteem might occur later in life for baby boomers,” he said.

Article: “Self-Esteem Development From Young Adulthood to Old Age: A Cohort-Sequential Longitudinal Study,” Ulrich Orth, PhD, University of Basel, Kali H. Trzesniewski, PhD, University of Western Ontario and Richard W. Robins, PhD, University of California, Davis; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 98, No. 4.

(Full text of the article is available from the APA Public Affairs Office and at http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-98-4-645.pdf)

Well, I’m 62 years old as I write these words and I’ve personally not noticed a decline in self-esteem.

I have noticed that young people are treating me differently than I used to be treated, however.

Perhaps it’s the gray hair that’s replaced the once luscious brown locks atop my head… and the wrinkles on the old face that used to be so smooth and handsome no doubt contribute as well.

But for whatever reason, the younger set are occasionally treating me as if perhaps I needed some help…

For example, nobody ever used to ask me if they could wheel the groceries to the car when I had finished checking out at the supermarket.

But the past nine months or so  (can’t remember exactly how long – hahaha) four young whippersnappers have asked me, “You need some help with that?” after they finished bagging my groceries.

I’ve haven’t laid my fist onto the nose of any of these kids yet, but that may happen one of these days if someone smirks like George W. Bush at me!

I bet you have thoughts about aging boomers and self-esteem…

Please let me know what you thought of this post... I'm dying to find out...

Tags: self-esteem

If you’re a baby boomer like me, you’re already keenly aware of just how self-reliant our generation has always been.

I mean, seriously, I didn’t like depending on anyone other than myself from almost as far back as I can remember.

Which was yesterday.

Joke! Just kidding. My memory’s fading, but it’s not that far gone!

Anyway, I stumbled this morning on an interesting study that confirms how self-reliant we aging boomers are… and will continue to be… and I’m going to share it with you here:

Baby boomers aging to be self-reliant

Universite de Montreal demographer offers prediction of boomer future

Montreal, April 26, 2010 – Baby boomers are retiring healthy, financially secure and with a desire to travel. According to Université de Montréal demographer Jacques Légaré, baby boomers will remain among the most self-reliant generations to reach their golden years.

“They’ve been independent their entire lives. They won’t stop being self-reliant when they get old and sick,” says Légaré, noting he’s ready to back his hypothesis as he’s done at various national and international conferences.

Baby boomers were born between 1946 and 1966. In Quebec, they are credited with overcoming religious and sexual barriers. They built the modern infrastructure we know today and set up most social institutions. They have very few children, and according to Légaré, they don’t plan on counting on their progeny to look after them in their golden years.

“They are usually well educated and have great financial means,” says Légaré. “They benefited from generous pensions and have contributed to RRSPs for decades. They plan on taking advantage of that and they will.”

Traditionally, when someone gets sick their spouse will care for them. If the spouse can’t do so, or if the person lives alone, they will turn to their family or rely on friends.

Boomers, however, could rethink this hierarchy. What will the boomer reliance system look like? Légaré believes boomers could live together in plush houses where they share the cost and services of a private nurse or independently. This cohort is referred to as the Silver Economy in the United States.

Légaré also believes aging baby boomers will radically change our health-care system. “We won’t put as much money in specialized medicine seeing as demand will mostly be for primary care.”

Massive investments in cancer treatments or artificial hearts, says Légaré, aren’t justified. “If a 72-year-old dies of cancer, it’s a shame but it’s not tragic,” he says. “We all have to die of something. Faced with an aging population, we will have to make such choices.”

“Life expectancy in Canada is 80-years-old. This reflects on the quality of life our country offers. We will have to stop investing in costly treatments that extend life, oftentimes, to inhumane conditions.”

I’m glad to hear so many of our Canadian boomer brethren will be able to retire financially secure. I’m sorry to say I don’t think that’s going to be the case of many American baby boomers.

It’s awful, but a lot of aging boomers in the U.S. who worked their asses off their entire lives have had to put off retirement (including poor old me) because the Greedy Bastards in Wall Street and in Washington have built an economy based on smoke and mirrors — absurd home loans, credit card debt beyond belief, commercial real estate deals so complicated Einstein’s brain would shoot off sparks just trying to figure them out, bailouts to guys making bonuses every year the size of Vermont, deficit spending that grows by millions by the day, and so on and so forth until even a sane, non-violent person wants to jump in the air and come down stomping with both feet on those who are jeopardizing the future of our children and grandchildren.

Regarding health care, I can only speak for myself. My intention as I age is to continue to do as I’ve done my entire life: take responsibility for my own health and avoid doctors and the medical establishment like the bubonic plague.

As far as living in a plush house with other baby boomers, I don’t know about that. You may be different than me, but I have enough trouble living with the people in my own family… people I’ve known and loved my whole life.

So — at least at my current age of 62 with my senses still more or less intact and functioning — living with other aging boomers in the same house (no matter how plush) seems a bit problematic.

With that said, I admit that when I’m looking quite a bit further down the road I do give occasional thought to the idea of at least exploring the viability of setting up some kind of mutually supportive community living consisting of a small group of self-reliant and similarly-thinking men and women.

Well, enough already.

Research and ranting aside, baby boomers are going to have to be more self-reliant than ever during their Golden Years.

Of that I have no doubt.

Well, those are my thoughts for this beautiful Saturday morning here in my neck of the woods.

Now it’s your turn.

What do you think about all this? Speak your mind by replying and commenting below.

Chet

Hopefully these tips have been helpful. What do you think?

Tags: self-reliance

As an “Army brat,” I went to 20 different schools between first grade and graduating from high school.

Obviously, we moved a LOT when I was growing up.

I hated moving so often, and even today at age 62 I’ve been unable to totally forgive my father (may he rest in peace) for constantly requesting transfers because he always hated what he was doing and for his entire life maintained the self-delusion that work (and life) would be more tolerable “as soon as we moved to a better place.”

That was never the case, of course, because the grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence.

In fact, if you can’t be happy where you are with what you have, my experience is that you’re not going to be happy somewhere else with something different.

Although I’ve believed what I just wrote for my entire adult life, I’ve also struggled with negativity and hyper-sensitivity to all kinds of various things.

And, yes, this struggling often led to thoughts of “I could be happy somewhere else in different circumstances.”

I guess the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree, eh?

In any event, I’d like to share now an article I read today that provided confirmation of what I’ve always believed… that moving as a child is NOT a good thing and that all that moving does affect the way a person turns out.

Moving repeatedly in childhood linked with poorer quality-of-life years later

Lack of quality long-term relationships related to poorer well-being

WASHINGTON – Moving to a new town or even a new neighborhood is stressful at any age, but a new study shows that frequent relocations in childhood are related to poorer well-being in adulthood, especially among people who are more introverted or neurotic.

The researchers tested the relation between the number of childhood moves and well-being in a sample of 7,108 American adults who were followed for 10 years. The findings are reported in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association.

“We know that children who move frequently are more likely to perform poorly in school and have more behavioral problems,” said the study’s lead author, Shigehiro Oishi, PhD, of the University of Virginia. “However, the long-term effects of moving on well-being in adulthood have been overlooked by researchers.”

The study’s participants, who were between the ages of 20 and 75, were contacted as part of a nationally representative random sample survey in 1994 and 1995 and were surveyed again 10 years later. They were asked how many times they had moved as children, as well as about their psychological well-being, personality type and social relationships.

The researchers found that the more times people moved as children, the more likely they were to report lower life satisfaction and psychological well-being at the time they were surveyed, even when controlling for age, gender and education level. The research also showed that those who moved frequently as children had fewer quality social relationships as adults.

The researchers also looked to see if different personality types – extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism – affected frequent movers’ well-being. Among introverts, the more moves participants reported as children, the worse off they were as adults. This was in direct contrast to the findings among extraverts. “Moving a lot makes it difficult for people to maintain long-term close relationships,” said Oishi. “This might not be a serious problem for outgoing people who can make friends quickly and easily. Less outgoing people have a harder time making new friends.”

The findings showed neurotic people who moved frequently reported less life satisfaction and poorer psychological well-being than people who did not move as much and people who were not neurotic. Neuroticism was defined for this study as being moody, nervous and high strung. However, the number and quality of neurotic people’s relationships had no effect on their well-being, no matter how often they had moved as children. In the article, Oishi speculates this may be because neurotic people have more negative reactions to stressful life events in general.

The researchers also looked at mortality rates among the participants and found that people who moved often as children were more likely to die before the second wave of the study. They controlled for age, gender and race. “We can speculate that moving often creates more stress and stress has been shown to have an ill effect on people’s health,” Oishi said. “But we need more research on this link before we can conclude that moving often in childhood can, in fact, be dangerous to your health in the long-term.”

###

Article: “Residential Mobility, Well-Being, and Mortality” Shigehiro Oishi, PhD, University of Virginia; Ulrich Schimmack, PhD, University of Toronto Mississauga; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 98, No. 6.

(Full text of the article is available from the APA Public Affairs Office and at http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-98-6-980.pdf)

Now that’s pretty interesting reading, isn’t it?

If you moved around a lot as a child, I hope you’ll take a few minutes to share your thoughts on this interesting topic by leaving a reply on this blog entry and research summary.

Chet

Please take a moment to comment below.

Tags: moving

I’ve had several friends who’ve given serious thought to retiring in Mexico, and I know this is a topic of interest to many aging boomers.

With that in mind, I though it would be helpful to post the following press release I ran into this warm Friday afternoon:

Retirees in Mexico Cut Off, Study Says

They Live in Enclaves with Little Contact with Home or with the Mexican Mainstream

Montreal, Quebec – June 2, 2010 – Baby boomers retiring in Mexico may find it’s cheaper to live there than in Canada or the U.S., however, a study suggests retirees are often isolated both from their families back home – and from the mainstream of Mexican life.

The study, by Jesse O’Brien of the University of Calgary, will be presented at the 2010 Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences taking place at Montreal’s Concordia University. O’Brien’s study looked at how Canadian and American retirees in a small, unnamed town in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula have adapted to life as expatriates.

“It’s an extremely important topic as baby boomers come of retirement age,” says O’Brien, adding that many people will want to retire somewhere warm and cheap. He adds that living abroad will become especially attractive if the value of people’s pension plans drops. “Moving to a cheaper place like Mexico is going to become a viable option for some people,” he says.

But moving to a new country – even if it’s an inexpensive tropical paradise – is never easy, and O’Brien says people go through several phases as they adapt to their new life. They start out, he says, by thinking they’re going to be living like kings in paradise; eventuality, reality sets in.

For most expatriates, reality is that they end up living in a pleasant but isolated enclave.

O’Brien says the expats in the community he studied had essentially recreated a North American lifestyle in one small corner of the Yucatan. “They are living exactly the same life they’d live at home, but in a different location,” he says. Most “absolutely love” the life, but his study showed some problems.

The first, he says, is that the expat community is negatively affecting the local population “even though they don’t notice it themselves.” For example, he said the expats often make no attempt to learn Spanish, and expect to be dealt with in English. And their relationships with the locals are based on service, not friendship. As a result, says O’Brien, the expats’ relationship to the locals is often condescending.

He also explains that expats have surprisingly little contact with their families back home. “It’s kind of shocking,” he says, adding that most people he talked to report that missing family members is the most difficult part of living abroad. Part of that may be due the fact that the community he studied was not on the tourist circuit, and therefore not as easy to get to as some of the cities or resorts.

On the plus side, O’Brien says the fact of living in an enclave and being cut off from family results in the creation of unusually strong community ties. People who wouldn’t normally meet back home are thrown together, and because of the circumstances, friendships develop.

O’Brien notes the case, for example, of a burly former biker who became best of friends with an elderly gay man who had moved to Mexico to start a bed and breakfast. The fact of being North Americans together in Mexico often trumps other differences, he says.

In many respects, this study interests me because it’s long been my feeling that aging boomers (as well as younger people) in the United States are becoming more and more isolated, even within their own communities and neighborhoods.

I mean, seriously, when I was growing up in the 50′s, everyone in the neighborhood knew everyone else.

We kids ate lunch at each others house, with our moms rotating that duty during the summer.

Our moms visited each other mid-morning to have coffee and to talk.

Life has certainly changed. I’ve lived in my current neighborhood for twelve years now. It’s sad to say, but I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of neighbors I’ve actually talked to enough to say I know something about them and their lives.

And this isn’t because I’m unfriendly… I’m not.

Taking breaks from my work-at-home job, at various times during most days I walk one or more of our three dogs, strolling a 1.3 mile circuit around the subdivision from mid-morning to dusk.

Once in a great while, a neighbor will be outside, but it’s a very rare occasion when one of them has the interest (or, more likely, the TIME) to stop and shoot the breeze.

There’s a great deal more to all this, of course, but the point is that we’re all becoming increasingly isolated… and it doesn’t matter if we’re living in Mexico or in a settled old suburb in a small town in North Carolina.

And I think that’s a terrible shame.

If you have thoughts or experience about retiring in Mexico or about the topic of aging and isolation, I hope you’ll use the comment section below to share your knowledge.

What questions does this raise for you?

Tags: retire mexico

Geez, every once in awhile I come upon some music so unusual, so fine, so throbbing with life that it makes me want to jump in the air on these 62-year old legs.

Well, this morning, thanks to Roger Ebert’s wonderful blog, I came upon the most recent musical discovery I’d like to share with you.

And here it is…

Are you dancing?

Chet

Let's talk more about this... can you do me a quick 30-second favor and leave a comment below?

Tags: botswana music

I ran into this interesting press release this morning and decided to share it here on the blog since I’m a big fan of chili peppers, especially if they’ll help us lose weight. Whoa!

New Evidence that Chili Pepper Ingredient Fights Fat

Scientists are reporting new evidence that capsaicin, the stuff that gives chili peppers their kick, may cause weight loss and fight fat buildup by triggering certain beneficial protein changes in the body. Their study, which could lead to new treatments for obesity, appears in ACS’ monthly Journal of Proteome Research.

Jong Won Yun and colleagues point out that obesity is a major public health threat worldwide, linked to diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and other health problems. Laboratory studies have hinted that capsaicin may help fight obesity by decreasing calorie intake, shrinking fat tissue, and lowering fat levels in the blood. Nobody, however, knows exactly how capsaicin might trigger such beneficial effects.

In an effort to find out, the scientists fed high-fat diets with or without capsaicin to lab rats used to study obesity. The capsaicin-treated rats lost 8 percent of their body weight and showed changes in levels of at least 20 key proteins found in fat. The altered proteins work to break down fats. “These changes provide valuable new molecular insights into the mechanism of the antiobesity effects of capsaicin,” the scientists say.

Click here to download the whole article.

And eat some chili peppers tonight, why don’t you?

Chet

Let's talk more about this... can you do me a quick 30-second favor and leave a comment below?

Tags: chili peppers

Well, on Monday I’ll start the fifteenth week of my modified paleothilic eating experiment that I’ve named the Aging Boomers Diet.

Almost four months into this approach to eating, I feel fabulous. I continue to lose a pound every week or so, and at the rate I’m going now I’ll reach my goal weight of 154 by the first of October.

I guess the most noteworthy point to make about this low-carb way of eating is that I’ve had no cravings for the foods that I used to overeat on until the cows came home.

I mean, seriously, it IS such a relief to be able to pass the ice cream section in the supermarket without being tempted every time to grab a couple of pints of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia Frozen Yogurt.

This is most remarkable to me: almost four months into a new way of eating and I’ve not cheated even a single time.

Isn’t that amazing?

The Aging Boomers Diet at the moment is so simple it’s ridiculous… it consists of chicken, salmon, tuna, organic grass-fed beef, free range eggs, and fruits and vegetables. I do still eat some cheese and on occasion I’ll eat some pecans or almonds, but I limit my consumption of dairy and nuts because they tend to impede my desired weight loss.

I also have a cup of coffee every day, with a tablespoon of heavy cream in it. And on the rare occasions when I feel a bit hungry between meals, I eat half a cup of dried coconut flakes.

I drink a quart of water most days from my new Multi-Pure water filter — more if I mowed the lawn that day.

For the detail-minded, here’s exactly what I ate yesterday…

Breakfast

Half a grapefruit with a cup of coffee afterwards.

Lunch

Four strips of bacon
Three or four eggs fried in the bacon fat

Dinner

Chicken Salad Burritos –  wrapped in big Romaine lettuce leaves instead of flour tortillas, the chicken salad itself is made with 5 ounces of diced roasted chicken, two tablespoons of mayonnaise, two tablespoons of organic sour cream, two chopped celery stalks, half a chopped green pepper, 1/4 cup of chopped jalapeno peppers, ten chopped green olives, and two chopped radishes.

Evening Snack

1 cup of frozen or fresh blueberries
1 cup of tart canned cherries (no added sugar or preservatives)

Well, that’s all for now. I need to get the website update done, so I’ll stop here.

If you need scientific validation for eating the way I’m eating, I invite you to read a fascinating article Health Benefits of a Low Carbohydrate High Saturated Fat Diet by cardiac surgeon Dr. Daniel Miller.

That’s it for this update.

If you have any questions or comments, I hope you’ll use the reply function below to post them. I’ll answer in return as I have time.

Chet

Your thoughts?