Time, effort and resources are needed to create an adequate retirement plan. If you neglect to include a healthy lifestyle in your plans, you may not have the health you need to take advantage of everything you’ve worked so hard to achieve.

     Hi there, it’s Elaine Gardner, the founder of DesignYourHealthyLife.com. I received an article last week from my financial planner. I get a newsletter every quarter and there’s various articles in there. I got excited because the headline was all about protecting your health so that you can enjoy your retirement. But I was incredibly disappointed when I opened it up and started to read the article because it talked about staying fit and early screening, and nothing about prevention, which I believe to be the most powerful tool we have available to us.

     Many of the compromised health statuses and significant illnesses that people face these days do not develop overnight by chance. They are lifestyle diseases, things that develop over years and years and years. So you put all of this time and attention and investing into your retirement, but if you’re not focused on your health and prevention, then you can get to retirement and think you have plenty of money, but no health to enjoy what you’ve saved for and what you envisioned for your life. And if you do face significant health challenges, you can end up losing all of the money you’ve saved for retirement. So it’s an incredible tragedy, in my mind, that we don’t talk about prevention because we have so much power over our health and it gets so little attention.

     And again, because this is a progressive type of thing, you want to be working on your health now, every day, every month, so that when you get to retirement you can take advantage of what you’ve put aside in money and really enjoy your life and have the health that you need to have the quality of life that you deserve, that you’ve worked so hard for, for so many years. It’s not rocket science, you don’t have to be leading an unhealthy life and making terrible choices to still be setting yourself up for risk of serious health consequences. We just have so many things working against us in our modern world, like poor choices in our food. So even if you’re choosing healthy foods, if you’re not eating organic foods, you could still be getting pesticides and chemicals and synthetic fertilizers – things that don’t support good health. And you thought you were making a healthy choice with salads and vegetables and things like that.

     So it can be a little bit tricky, and I understand it requires some effort, but you only have one body. It is so worth your effort on a day to day basis. And educate yourself, and choose healthy foods, and reduce your stress, change the way you manage your stress, have things in your life that help you release stress, drink lots of high quality, filtered water on a day to day basis, and get plenty of sleep. Sleep is so underrated in our society. I’ve heard people say they don’t have time to sleep. And that’s just insanity to me. Not only does sleep refresh your brain but your body is doing so many critical functions while you’re sleeping. It’s non-negotiable. Your body is detoxifying, rebuilding, breaking down and repairing. You cannot have good health unless you get adequate sleep.

     And again, these things aren’t complicated but they do require effort. But it’s so worth your efforts. You’ll feel better now and significantly reduce your chances of getting into retirement age and experiencing complications and problems. You don’t want your money to run out before your time is up. So invest in your future, save for retirement, but invest in your health so when you get to retirement, you can enjoy your life the way you deserve to.