Happy Feet! Foot Care For Women In Midlife And Beyond

As we get older, it becomes even more important for us to take care of our feet!

Did you know that women have about four times more problems with their feet than men do?

Did you know that together the feet have 52 bones. That's a lot of bones! 😀

The foot and ankle together contain 33 joints and over 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments.

Out of a person’s entire body, a quarter of their bones are in their feet!

The bones in our feet are super delicate, yet we rely on them to take us wherever we want to go and to withstand up to three to four times the weight of our body, e.g. when running.

And we women often don’t treat our feet very well! No wonder they rebel and hurt!

Did you know that the feet can tell a lot about a person’s general health?

Foot ailments can often indicate health issues in other parts of the body, for example, nerve or circulatory disorders. I had a back issue show up as a foot issue! As we get older our discs in our spine can get less healthy and show up as tingling or numbness in our feet! as the nerves are being irritated.

As women approach midlife and beyond, our feet can give us early indicators of things going on in our bodies that we should be aware of.

Also super interesting is that feet have a lot more nerves per square centimeter than any other part of the body - about 8,000 nerves. No wonder foot massages feel so great and we're often the most ticklish there!

Here's a stinky fact (LOL), our two feet have about 250,000 sweat glands! No wonder we have sweaty feet! Our feet can produce about half a pint of moisture every day.

As I mentioned at the start, women experience way way way more foot problems (four times more) than men. And why is no surprise! It's our shoes!

As women get older, foot problems tend to show up as a result of how we’ve treated our feet throughout our life! I wish I had understood this earlier. I wouldn’t have worn super high heels for almost 30 years!

We don't have to be podiatrists to know that high heels and shoes with with pointy, narrow toe boxes can't be good for feet and in fact do cause multiple foot issues! But don't get me started on that issue!

Next post - how to take care of our feet in midlife and beyond!