The Baby Boomer Anti-Aging Diet

What did you eat this morning? Was your breakfast a cup of coffee and maybe a bagel (loaded with cream cheese, of course)? What about the rest of the day? Did you eat a well-balanced diet full of whole grains, lean proteins, vegetables, and fruits?

You are what you eat. And what most Americans eat is the greasy, fatty, high-sugar-content fast food diet. Even if you live elsewhere, you probably aren’t eating a diet that’s rich in the foods that are important to your aging process.

If you are eating foods like this, whether you realize it or not, your diet is killing you prematurely. As a Baby Boomer, you have plenty of life still left in you, so why are you cutting short your time on this planet by following such a terrible diet? Just look at what it is doing to you …

• If you have a larger midsection to your body, then you have a high risk of having a heart attack due to heart disease. Just a few extra pounds is all it takes.
• If you consume a diet that is rich in salt, you are destroying your kidneys as well as some of the other organs in your body.
• If you are eating fatty foods, you’re killing you heart by suffocating it under layers of cholesterol.

If all of this scares you, which it should, isn’t it time to consider changing your diet? We’re not talking simple weight loss. We’re talking a major change in your eating habits.

If you simply want to lose weight, you can find weight loss diets everywhere you look. The bad part is that they tend to go from one extreme to the other — high protein (puts your heart at risk because they increase cholesterol) to low fat (doesn’t provide you with protein to build muscle mass, which actually helps you to burn fat). Extreme diets like this rarely work.

Enter the Baby Boomer’s Perfect Diet

The important thing is not to think of the Baby Boomer Diet as, well, a diet. Instead, think of it as a better way of eating because it is not something you’re ever going to give up or throw aside. It is a way of life.

There are some things you will have to give up, but it is still one of the easiest diets to follow. In fact, if you do decide to eat something that isn’t good for you, just go back to eating well from there out. It’s all about controlling how much of the bad stuff you take in and making sure that the good stuff outweighs the bad.

Here’s how to do it. Split up the foods that you eat into a pie graph — 50% of what you eat should be good carbohydrates, 25% should be lean proteins, and the final 25% should go to fats.

This way of eating is enjoyable and it’s easy to follow. Here are some more specific points to keep in mind:

1. The carbohydrates that you consume should be made up of mostly fruits and vegetables.
2. The proteins that you eat should be from beans, tofu and other types of plant sources. About 1/3 of the protein you eat should come from animal meat and then it must be lean.
3. For fats, you want to obtain this from good fats, such as olive oils and nuts instead of fats that come from animals. Look for poly and mono saturated fats.

That’s it. You pick the foods and as long as they fit within this diet regimen, you know you are working on creating a healthy and anti-aging diet that will propel you to health and wellness.