Corrie Ken keeps positively fit
I’ve never gone in for extreme diets or exercise. I just take a balanced, common-sense approach and try to keep my sense of humour. People who throw themselves into extreme diets may be missing out – because if we focus intensely on one thing, we’re neglecting something else.
A little bit of eating the wrong things and not exercising is OK – we don’t have to feel we have to get up at 6am for a run, then eat cabbage leaves all day! We do have to enjoy life, to enjoy what we do, and if we don’t enjoy doing something, we don’t need to do it.
Before we look at the practical steps to wellbeing, we need to look at beliefs. Take ageing, for example. Ageing is a belief system within the collective consciousness of humanity. It’s what we’ve collectively decided about age and what it means for our body and our lifestyle. We don’t have to age and die at a certain time. We can extend our lifespan by pushing Bill in 1953 the parameters of the belief that we’ll only live to 70, 80 or 90 years. Many people are now living for 100 years or more, and this can change our reality. If it continues, more and more people will start living to be 100, 120, 130, 140. It can happen.
Maybe I could live to 120 and still be in good health. I’m certainly open to that! Eventually we’ll live to be 200 years or more. I’ve barely had a serious illness in my life. I once had a small duodenal ulcer that burst, and I lost four pints of blood because it had gone straight on to an artery, but that was soon healed, and I’ve had no problems since.
My hearing has not been good, but that’s nothing to do with age. It’s the result of an accident when I was 21 and in the Army. I was on a three-inch mortar training course in Chiseldon, Wiltshire, when a bomb detonated close to where I was standing, which left me totally deaf for around three weeks. I lost 50 per cent of my hearing, but I’ve learned to live with it. When my eyesight began to deteriorate, I went to an optician, who said, ‘How old are you?’ I replied, ‘Forty-five,’ and he said, ‘That’s what it is.’
I decided it wasn’t that. And I got a book, Better Eyesight Without Glasses, and started exercising my eye muscles as it suggested. I could feel those muscles working, and I delayed my need for glasses by 12-15 years.
Smoking is really, really bad for your health. I say this as someone who smoked about 40 a day up to the age of 40. To give it up, I made myself watch films about lung cancer.
Never kid yourself – smoking kills you. It causes cancer, it causes emphysema and it causes a whole lot of other illnesses. I saw this first hand with Annie Kirkbride. I drank for England in the 1960s. I just thought it was normal to come home and have a couple of gin and tonics, half a bottle of wine with dinner and maybe a brandy afterwards, and that was every day. I have just the odd glass now on special occasions, but that’s me. Again, everything in moderation.
I recently took up golf again, which I play regularly. Every Thursday and Saturday I also attend a one-hour ‘fun fit’ session where we’re really put through our paces – running, walking, basketball, boxing – it gets the heart rate up and raises a sweat. I’ve found all this has worked for me. At 86, I feel good.