How To Help An Elderly Adult Live A Happy And Healthy Lifestyle
Everyone aspires to live their best lives irrespective of their age and health conditions. Older adults who may be homebound due to mobility limitations, injury and illness may feel a hindrance to this desire. However, there are many ways you homebound elderly can live a full and healthy life, even in live-in care. Are you wondering how this is possible? Here are a few tips you should consider.
- Encourage exercise
Routine mild exercises suitable for elderly adults improve their overall health by improving their mood, making them more relaxed, increasing energy levels, and helps them enjoy better sleep. Be sure to avoid workout routines that would stress their bodies. Take your time and gradually ease them into a working out habit. Before starting the workout routine, you may contact a professional physiotherapist to offer advice on which workout routines will meet your senior’s needs, build their strength, be balanced and prevent them from getting injuries.
- Help them cut out unhealthy habits
Another way to make your elderly relative comfortable and healthy while caring for them at home is by helping them cut out their unhealthy habits. Many older adults have carried various unhealthy habits from their prime. These include practices such as excessive smoking and alcohol consumption. Such habits are very detrimental to one’s health- especially as they age. These habits cause various health problems among older adults, such as heart disease, lung disease, osteoporosis, diabetes, and respiratory problems.
You can also help your seniors cut short their online shopping sprees and abuse their prescribed drugs. Most adult drugs have a substance called opioids which is highly addictive. It is used in the management of chronic pains. To prevent your seniors from abusing their prescribed medications, you need to monitor their drug intake schedules.
- Provide them with nutritious, healthy meals
Improved nutrition will help your seniors live their best lives. While you prepare fresh and healthy meals for your elderly, you help them avoid additional health concerns associated primarily with ageing adults like diabetes, heart problems and blood pressure.
A sure way of getting the nutrition aspect right in the meals you prepare for your senior is to pay attention to nutrition facts on labelled products. Better still, you may speak with the nutritionist at the nearest health centre to prescribe meals less in fat, cholesterol and more in fibre, vitamin c and calcium. The ideal thing to do is to try and reduce blood sugar levels while planning meals.
- Help them work their minds
One of the tips to make your homebound senior happy and healthy is to help them work their minds. Keeping their minds performing at the highest levels possible will help you while you take care of them. You may entertain them with word games like puzzles and scrabbles or creative art drawings. The catch is to help them reduce a decline in their cognitive abilities.
Taking care of an elderly relative at home can be challenging. However, with these tips, you would ensure they live a happy and healthy life.
