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Healthy Aging Month might be a reminder for us to choose the healthy path, monitor our eating habits, and follow an active lifestyle — but whether it’s this month or any other, we should always prioritize our well-being and make time for healthy lifestyle choices.
From your cardiovascular health to your endocrine system and mental well-being, aging impacts your body and the many processes within. But aging can also affect your testosterone levels and cause unpleasant side effects, including low libido and erectile dysfunction.
This Healthy Aging Month, we want to help you keep your health and testosterone in check — even as you age. These healthy aging tips are particularly powerful if implemented slowly and intentionally so they can manifest into long-term habits and you can reap lifelong rewards.
Healthy Testosterone Levels by Age
The term normal testosterone is rather complex because the truth is that healthy testosterone levels vary greatly by age. According to guidelines by the American Urological Association, testosterone deficiency is defined as levels below 300 ng/dL, meaning that healthy levels should exceed this threshold.
Because testosterone levels decline as we get older, naturally you’d expect lower normal testosterone levels in middle age and beyond when compared to young males.
With that being said, testosterone levels vary by age so labs that test the patient’s serum total testosterone take your age into account, acknowledging the significance of this variable and adjusting reference ranges accordingly.
Healthy Aging Tips: Stay Fit and Support Your Testosterone
We all want to enjoy life well into old age so it’s critical we maintain a healthy lifestyle and nurture our physical and mental well-being. We have, therefore, compiled four pivotal healthy aging tips that can help you live your best life during your golden years.
(1) Watch Your Diet
Your diet is not only important for your overall well-being and healthy aging, but eating patterns can also contribute to imbalances in your testosterone levels. This Healthy Aging Month, let’s try to integrate more healthy foods into our routine and eliminate dietary patterns that rotate around the excessive intake of bread, pastries, and sweet treats.
Unhealthy eating patterns and refined sugars can impact your testosterone levels. But they are also bad for you because the high intake of sugars can lead to you developing diabetes over time, especially if your weight and BMI are steadily climbing. And who needs more risk factors if researchers agree that age is already a critical factor in the development of type 2 diabetes?
A lesson learned from some of the longest-living people on Earth is the 80/20 rule that suggests you stop eating once you’re 80% full. This rule stresses the importance of not overeating and intently listening to your body’s actual needs.
(2) Pick the Right Kind of Exercise
We all know that being active is much better for you than a sedentary lifestyle but as you get older, you may lack the motivation or energy to hit the gym or run a marathon like you used to. The easiest way to keep being active is to build your activity into your everyday routine.
Whether it’s a brisk walk to the grocery store, rather than taking the car, a quick bicycle ride downtown, or taking a flight of stairs rather than the elevator, the key is to make physical activity a natural component of your life.
Exercise is particularly important because it boosts immunity, slows down cellular aging, and even supports maintaining your cognitive abilities.
But physical activity has also been shown to nurture your testosterone health with acute changes in serum testosterone levels observed in men after resistance training.
(3) Tobacco and Alcohol Intake
While genetics play an important role in the aging process, the way you live your life can either accelerate aging or slow down the pesky side effects of aging. Thus, this Healthy Aging Month, let’s talk about the many lifestyle factors that can exacerbate aging and testosterone levels.
Tobacco products, for example, mark a risk factor for an array of diseases and accelerate their occurrence — like that of cardiovascular disease and stroke. They can also cause inflammatory responses in your body.
In addition, alcohol has been proven to impact aging as became evident in a study with 245,000 individuals in the UK Biobank. Researchers found that participants with a history of alcohol abuse had much shorter telomeres — with the length of telomeres being representative of biological aging. High alcohol intake has also been found to reduce your testosterone levels.
(4) Sleep and Stress
Getting enough sleep every night is next on our list of healthy aging tips because after a long day at work, your body needs to recuperate and refuel. In fact, it’s recommended that adults sleep between 7 to 9 hours every night but sadly every third person does not get enough rest according to the CDC.
Sleep disturbances and deprivations appear to accelerate premature aging and simultaneously impair testosterone production. While testosterone decreases about 1% to 2% with growing age, a study that restricted sleep in young men, found that daytime testosterone levels dropped between 10% and 15%.
Similarly, chronic stress can wreak havoc on your health and trigger premature aging, draining your energy, and weakening your immune response. But stress can also impair testosterone production in the Leydig cells and cause a reduction in your levels.
Therefore, use Healthy Aging Month as an opportunity to welcome positive change and to identify ways to cope with your stress — or better even, try to eliminate some stressors from your daily life.
Use this Healthy Aging Month to Get a Head Start
The aforementioned healthy aging tips can set you on the right path to nurture your testosterone health even when your age is working against you. Lifestyle modifications can be particularly powerful and bear the potential to significantly contribute to your overall well-being.
Don’t forget to make it a habit to attend annual check-ups to monitor your testosterone levels, as well as other important lab values that may be impacted by your age. Healthy Aging Month should be an opportunity to assess your status and reinforce healthy patterns so you can fully enjoy every bit of your golden years.
Does the link between testosterone and aging intrigue you? The male hormone is vastly diverse and has many functions. You can learn more about testosterone by signing up for our newsletter here.
