23 August, 2024

Lively octogenarian has tips for fellow seniors

Former PE teacher, financial adviser and life coach Leigh Elder is these days on a mission to help seniors improve the quality of their later years. Helen Vause reports.

Close to home… Leigh Elder has pulled together a research group of fellow William Sanders residents to trial some of his healthy-living ideas

Residents of the William Sanders retirement village will be aging in better fettle if Leigh Elder can persuade them of the merits of his message.
The 81-year-old health and wellbeing champion believes that while many seniors are extending their life spans, their latter years are marred by preventable disease and health conditions that reduce the quality of life.
The slim, vigorous octogenarian is a familiar sight to fellow residents at the retirement village and also walking regularly around the streets and beaches of Devonport.
And while he’s been peddling his message of diet and exercise for some years, he has discovered an extra professional benefit in living in the thick of his own demographic – whatever shape they are in.
He has pulled together a group of residents who are over the winter months following some or all of his healthier-living guidelines and will soon be reporting back on their progress.
While his little research group of neighbours goes about their tuned up eating and exercise lives, Elder has made good progress on writing a book targeted at seniors with a working (often changing) title: Growing Old Gratefully – Enjoy an extra decade or more of good health.
His contention is pretty straightforward, and has made sense to those who have taken up his challenge to actively review their diet and exercise patterns.
“Twenty per cent of your future health lies with your inherited genes. The remaining 80 per cent is down to how you choose to live. Taking advantage of these great odds takes both know-how and staying power,” Elder says.
He has always been driven by an interest in optimising wellbeing and working with others to help them help themselves. But he has lately become focused on helping seniors improve the quality of life in their later years, and is pursuing his seniors health-maintenance project not just with his fellow residents but also in the public arena.
Elder started out as a physical education teacher, but at 40 became a financial adviser. Later again, he explored the world of life coaching.
He spent much of his working life in the central North Island, but with his second wife Kate moved north and together they bought a rest home.
That gave Elder a new field and a different demographic to work with.
He was impressed at the joy, empathy and kindness he found in that setting. But another lasting impression was the sad truth of the circumstances of many residents and how they’d ended up where they were in their lives.
As a rest home owner for “five poignant years”, Elder says he will never forget the looks of bewilderment on the faces of new residents crossing his establishment’s threshold for the first time.
“Many of these people were old before their time and suffering from one chronic illness or another as early as their late 60s and early 70s. They hated leaving the comfort of their own homes and familiar surroundings and were forced into it by their now-despised lack of their ability to live independently,” he says.
“Former high-functioning adults reduced to rubble, and sad to think that many of these people – if they had had the know-how and had made a few key lifestyle changes – could have easily got a decade or more of good health.”
He says health data in New Zealand shows an average life expectancy of 82, but puts the average age from which chronic illness is suffered at just 69 years.
That means that for many the last decade or so of life cannot be lived as well or happily as it might have been.
There had to be a book in this, thought Elder.
The time to follow through on that thought came after he and Kate discovered Devonport and decided to change their own living arrangements by buying an apartment in the William Sanders village.
In his life-coach days 25 years ago, Elder found a recurring issue with his clients would be concern about weight problems.

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“Twenty per cent of your future health lies with your inherited genes. The remaining 80 per cent is down to how you choose to live.”

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So his first books and a business, ‘Eat for Keeps’ were launched.
For the Eat for Keeps (EFK) programme, he developed a website and online courses and taught EFK strategies at workshops.
“We got very good data back from this programme. Medical markers really improved with things like diabetes, and of course with weight loss.
“If you can reverse the direction diabetic people and pre-diabetic people are heading in, obviously they’re likely to be enjoying better health as they age.”
Seeing the need for exercise to go with diet changes, Elder also developed an exercise and movement programme suitable for seniors.
Putting it all together is how he hopes to turn lives around for his generation along with younger people – and for his group of around a dozen people at William Sanders that he has recruited onto the journey so far.
Elder says his formula is simple, practical stuff that even those with the wobbliest motivation can embrace.
To add to the motivation factor he has collected inspirational stories of much older New Zealanders , some of whom, like famed athletics coach Arch Jelly, have made it to a century and more.
Jelly came to speak to the village residents about his life and times at 102 years old and reportedly acquitted himself well in a game of bridge before he left.
“I needed to know the secrets of people around his age so that I could share them in my book. There is so much commonality among the group of people who age so well,” Elder says.
Unsurprisingly, before he gets down to the business of working to wind back the biological clock, Elder wants to have a word about matters of the mind.
In his book’s opening chapter, he echoes widely accepted common wisdom: “I believe that this whole mind thing lies at the heart of all things in your life.
“Mind over matter is the situation where someone can get control of most physical conditions, situations or problems by using the mind. The key to getting your mind around how to get the best out of your life is to get absolute clarity in your mind on how the rest of your life could look, and make a plan of attack.
“Although your chronological age has certain expectations of your physical and mental health, your biological age (snapshot of actual physical health) can confound these expectations.”
As Elder moves briskly around the village, often bounding up stairs in preference to taking lifts, he says he feels there is a lot at stake in trying to make a difference to the way seniors are living. “I feel I have to get this right.”
He calls his exercise programme BAFFS, which stands for balance, agility, flexibility, fitness and strength.
He talks about starting with tiny tweaks, such as getting up out the chair more often, or perhaps standing on one foot at the kitchen bench.
It’s probably nothing too new to aging ears, but the difference is it’s a message being delivered right where they live, by one of their own who is a compelling ambassador – a man on a mission with a track record in the art of persuasion.