@pollyanne Weight lifting is very important as we age, it helps us to maintain muscle. Now, if only the weights I have on order will come in it will be great, no one has any in stock. Maybe that was why I was controlling my weight better when I was going to the gym.
I agree you need a mixture. My sister is fixated on getting in 10,000 steps a day but doesn't do many other exercises. I have a friend who is also obsessed with 10,000 steps but she does lots of other things too. The crazy thing is that whole "10.000 steps" was actually a marketing ploy by a company:
"I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard University T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the lead author of a new study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, began looking into the step rule because she was curious about where it came from. “It turns out the original basis for this 10,000-step guideline was really a marketing strategy,” she explains. “In 1965, a Japanese company was selling pedometers, and they gave it a name that, in Japanese, means ‘the 10,000-step meter.’”
Based on conversations she’s had with Japanese researchers, Lee believes that name was chosen for the product because the character for “10,000” looks sort of like a man walking. As far as she knows, the actual health merits of that number have never been validated by research."
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/10000-steps-rule/590785/
Regarding statins, the doctor who prescribed them for me is sort of in the middle, age-wise. I think it probably also depends on how far up your cholesterol level is. I forget off-hand what mine was but it was not borderline. My BP is borderline and although my PCP would like me to take a BP medication I have resisted and he has not been overly aggressive in pushing it.
I would love to get out for a ride but I need to go to the bathroom somewhat frequently and I do not want to have to use a public restroom. 🥺
JK
@contentandwell I so agree with everything you say and yes we need to maintain that muscle. I have always thought the step thing was a fallacy and a marketing tool for the fitness watches and Apple watches. It doesn't make sense to me to be counting the steps you take all day towards your fitness level. I stick to walking my mile or two at a brisk pace each morning and then my exercises at home after my walk. I would probably go back to the gym 2 or 3 days a week if things were safe right now. I'm sure the weights at the gym did help you keep your weight down. They certainly kept mine down but I don't use such heavy weights as I was using at the gym. I also have to watch my energy level as I get very tired. I am a good hiker.
I have a problem with frequent bathroom visits in the morning and then I settle down. Like you, I don't want to use public bathrooms. I am always very careful even without the virus around. It is something that concerns me about flying right now. We are booked to fly to London and on to Athens in November but I read to not use the plane bathrooms. How can you not on a flight that length. We shall have to see if we will be able to go or not. We are supposed to be taking a cruise [Small ship] from Athens to Dubai and we would be visiting the Valley of the Kings and Petra and Wadi Rum which is one of my goals in my lifetime. We shall have to see if it is sensible.
As for the cholesterol, I know I am not too bad but it is difficult to know what to do for the best. Remember how the medical profession were handing out hormones to all the menopausal women and then some years later they stopped them because they changed their mind and said they were wrong and that they caused cancer. I always refused to take them but I went to a Naturopath Dr and was given plant based hormones made with completely different processing. So who knows, they may change again about cholesterol. If I start having angina pain I would definitely be taking them but so far so good.