Aging Backwards_10 Years Lighter and 10 Years Younger in 30 Minutes a Day Read online

  PROTECT YOUR LEGACY

  Once you understand how your body ages, you will see that you absolutely do have a choice about how you live the rest of your life. One choice: Do nothing, and just allow yourself to slow down, get stiff, suffer chronic pain, and most likely lose your independence. Another choice: Stay young, vibrant, energetic, and independent. In this book, my goal is to share everything you need to make the choice to keep your body vital and engaged in the world for as long as you choose. By the end of this book, you will learn, beyond a doubt, that that choice is entirely in your hands.

  Helping everyone, especially older adults, learn to love exercise isn’t just my profession—it’s my mission. From a societal perspective, I believe we too often dwell on what we lose as we age instead of focusing on what we gain. I firmly believe we should never conceal our age—as though having lived all of our exciting years is something that we should be ashamed of! What we need to do is realize that, every day, we can be walking, living, breathing examples of lives well lived. We need to safeguard our health with exercise not only for the sake of our vanity but also to share our knowledge and protect our legacy. After all, the beauty of aging is that by the time we’ve hit our “second half,” we have become wiser, better people with a wealth of maturity and life experience. We learn to tolerate others’ perspectives, values, and outlooks. We may even come to celebrate these differences! Perhaps most important, we learn to forgive, and come to understand what is truly worthy of our time and focus, and what is not. Just when we are emotionally ready to make the world a better place and help guide the younger generation, our aging bodies can sometimes get in the way.

  What a shame it would be if all of your accumulated knowledge, gleaned from a lifetime of hard lessons learned, could be wasted because your body is not vital enough to stay in the game.

  Let’s not let that happen. The world needs your wisdom.

  You can make a different choice. You can choose to live a life full of vitality, strength, and joy. Whether you are a fitness lover or a casual walker, or even if you’ve never exercised a day in your life, you can make that happen—you just have to start now!

  The first step toward realizing the importance of your choices is to understand why some bodies begin the steady decline of age—and how, instead, you can protect your lifestyle, your brain, and your gorgeous body by learning to Age Backwards.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF LIFE AND OUR INNER FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

  A full understanding of successful aging must begin with the primary building blocks of your body: your cells.

  You are the sum of trillions of cells. The health and vitality of your cells are reflected in every single tissue in your body. Whether you can run and jump, or feel compelled to sing or laugh, whether you enjoy a calm and peaceful afternoon with friends, or stand on the podium in a room full of your peers to deliver a speech, the health of your cells determines how your body will respond to each of these activities. If your cells are well nourished and stimulated, your body’s natural response will be energetic; you will manage stress well; your blood pressure and blood sugar will be balanced; and you’ll stay physically youthful and vibrant. If your cells are not well fed and not well stimulated, they begin to atrophy and die, and you can start to feel sluggish, depressed, and in pain.

  With all of your trillions of cells, you might be tempted to brush off the significance of some cell loss—you’ve got more where those came from, right? But when it comes to Aging Backwards, every single cell counts—you don’t want to allow any harm to come to a single one of them.

  Among your body’s brilliantly and intricately arranged cells, there are various types: brain cells, nerve cells, blood cells, hair cells, egg cells, sperm cells—more than 200 major types of cells in total. All of these cells work in unison to keep one another and your entire system alive, healthy, and functioning—and there are many ways you can help them do just that. Before we learn how to keep them alive and thriving as long as possible, let’s first review a bit about cells and their function, so we can gain a full appreciation of how important it is to support their work, especially the work of the powerful and mighty mitochondria.

  ANATOMY OF A CELL

  Our cells are responsible for our every biological function, and they all share a few distinct characteristics. Each cell is surrounded by a cell membrane, inside of which you’ll find cytoplasm. To get a sense of the structure of a cell, think of a balloon filled with thick jelly. That balloon, the cell membrane, is made up of protein and fat, and it cautiously guards the materials inside the cell. Only certain things are allowed into and out of the cell—primarily, food goes in, waste comes out.

  Inside the cell, the cytoplasm is made up of fatty acids, sugars, enzymes, and amino acids, all components that help the cell do its work. The nucleus is the mastermind of the cell, housing our DNA, the master genetic code. The nucleus keeps busy by controlling the cell’s food intake, movement, and reproduction. Cells contain several other important parts, called organelles, each with its own function. The kind of organelle that is our chief ally in the defense against cellular aging is the dynamic, ever-changing powerhouse, the mitochondria.

  MIGHTY MITOCHONDRIA

  Every single cell requires a source of energy to power its life. This energy “power plant” is called a mitochondrion. Most cells have only a small number of mitochondria, but muscle cells have so many—in the tens of thousands—that scientists have not yet been able to count them all. The reason muscle cells hold the key to staying younger is that they house 95 percent of the body’s mitochondria. In recent years, scientists have discovered that not only do mitochondria power the cells; they also play a huge role in our rate of aging and the length of our lives. Mitochondria can keep us young—as long as we protect and nurture them.

  Mitochondria are the digestive system of our cells. They take in nutrients, break them down using enzymes and oxygen, and then create energy for every body part to use to fulfill its assigned task. This process of generating energy, called “cellular respiration,” creates adenosine triphosphate (ATP), an energy-transfer molecule. When a cell needs energy, the mitochondria convert carbohydrates (in the form of glycogen) or fat into energy and then ATP shuttles the energy to whatever part of the cell needs it. Almost every bodily function that requires energy gets it via ATP. While the amount of ATP in our body remains relatively stable, this stockpile of ATP operates like a battery: We use up the power and then we replenish it, with help from our mitochondria. Mitochondria are one of the most primitive parts of the cell—they may have originated as free-living single-celled organisms. They even have their own mini set of DNA, which can be affected by our lifestyle choices, just like the DNA in the cell’s nucleus.13

  With every move we make, we communicate directly with our mitochondria. Movement activates the mitochondria, turning them “on,” and a sedentary lifestyle deactivates them and turns them “off.” When we move our muscles or exercise, we actually increase the quantity of mitochondria, and this increase in turn gives us more energy to burn. But when we allow our muscles to become weak, we have fewer mitochondria, so we have less energy and fewer calorie-burning furnaces to keep us slim.

  People who are fit usually have a lot of energy, because their mitochondria are powered up and ready. By contrast, less fit people have a smaller supply of mitochondria that is barely sufficient to fulfill limited physical needs. As a result, they may have difficulty with basic tasks like walking up and down stairs, getting out of a chair, or even getting out of bed.

  This is the honest truth: The only difference between strong people and weaker people lies in what they demand of their muscles. Anyone can have strong muscles because, by definition, muscles are created to be strong and they can be made stronger with very little time or effort.

  Our bodies want to move. Our body’s natural state is to be packed with strong, energy-producing, fat-burning muscles.

  MITOCHONDRIA FUEL ALL CEL
LS

  Muscles control all of our body movements, whether voluntary or involuntary. In addition to the skeletal muscles that we control voluntarily, such as our arm, leg, and back muscles, we have other muscles over which we have no control, working 24 hours a day. These involuntary muscles include the cardiac or “heart” muscle, as well as the smooth muscles of our blood vessels, bladder, and digestive tract. These muscles continue working nonstop every day of our lives, performing tasks essential to life, including maintaining a rhythmic heartbeat and controlling our breathing. Even when we’re not exercising, every muscle in the body requires mitochondria to keep operating. So over and above the calories our muscles use during activity, the entire body requires energy to fulfill these day-to-day functions, serving all the systems of the body, such as the nervous system, digestive system, and skeletal system. We need a fixed amount of calories just to keep our trillions of bodily cells cared for and each of these cell’s mitochondria fueled. Even before we get out of bed in the morning, the calorie-burning, energy-producing factories are working away, and then regular exercise can stimulate these furnaces to burn even more calories.

  Do you need a bit of a motivational boost to stick with your exercise program? I like to picture my mitochondria as calorie-burning factories, and just knowing that 95 percent of these “factories” are found in my muscles motivates me to use my body more often. Or I envision my mitochondria as the fire underneath the cauldron of my metabolism—every step I take adds a piece of wood to the fire that’s “cooking” my excess pounds and keeping me slender.

  We create more and more mitochondria every time we walk to the corner store instead of driving, every time we take the stairs instead of the elevator, and every time we park farther away from, not closer to, the door of a mall or shopping center. Try to think of your mitochondria as you pull your own suitcases through the airport, as you garden, or as you push the vacuum to do your own housecleaning. Every single one of these opportunities concentrates the power of your energy-producing mitochondria.

  The more you move on a regular basis, the more energy you demand from your mitochondria, and the more alive and fired up they will be. When you run up and down stairs on a regular basis, you constantly demand that your existing mitochondria supply you with lots of energy. Repeat this often enough, and your muscle cells compensate by creating more mitochondria, so that everyday tasks become easy and effortless. Someone who regularly challenges her body will not be likely to get even the slightest bit tired running up and down stairs. But someone who never runs up and down stairs, whose body is unaccustomed to the strains of regular exercise, will have fewer mitochondria supplying energy and will therefore find this task very tiring.

  When people don’t exercise on a regular basis, any strenuous effort rapidly drains their few available mitochondria, zapping their energy and leaving their muscles sore and depleted. Their deconditioned lungs don’t have enough oxygen, and they feel winded. Their deconditioned heart feels overtaxed, and it might be racing. They may even be sweating from the effort. They would be likely to find themselves completely exhausted and incapable of doing more exercise or physical activity until the cells were replenished, a recovery period that could take several minutes.

  However, if these people persisted in running up and down stairs every day for a few days, their mitochondria would multiply, their muscles would strengthen, and they would rapidly find the task much easier to perform.

  The human body is remarkably resilient. We are designed to be strong and able to do things like run up the stairs with ease. That’s why, with relatively little effort and time, your muscles happily and eagerly strengthen, quickly making a task that was once a challenge an absolute breeze.

  The energy-producing benefits of mitochondria are obvious and immediate. But for many people who’ve struggled with cutting calories and portions to lose weight, mitochondria’s ability to speed weight loss is also a huge plus.

  MITOCHONDRIA REGULATE OUR WEIGHT

  To explain the relationship between mitochondria and weight loss, I often think of my body as a home furnace. Let’s say I decided to have a lazy day and not turn my mitochondria furnace on. The furnace would just sit there, inactive, not burning any of my calorie fuel, and the tank would remain full. If I then continued to order more fuel, the tank would fill up, running out of room. In order to complete the delivery, the fuel oil company would have to leave the extra fuel in storage tanks around my house. To reduce this unnecessary surplus around my home (and around my hips!), I’d have to turn my mitochondrial furnace on and burn the excess fuel, as well as go on a fuel “diet” and reduce my future orders from the company to ensure that I get only as much fuel as I need and no more.

  We do not need extra tanks of fuel hanging around our waistline. We do need to keep a balance, make an effort to burn what we consume, and not consume more food than we can burn. But even more than that, we need a furnace that’s burning bright, torching those calories 24 hours a day.

  If burning calories during exercise were the only weight management feature of exercise, you would find it virtually impossible to exercise enough to keep your weight under control. To give you an idea of how difficult it would be to rely solely on exercise as a means of burning calories, consider this case:

  Take a 150-pound person who runs for a half hour, moving at 10 miles per hour; she would burn approximately 600 calories. If she ate an 8-ounce steak (approximately 500 calories) and a 7-ounce baked potato (approximately 250 calories), her run would not be sufficient to burn all of the calories from even that small meal. She would have to run much, much more in one day to burn through her normal consumption of thousands of calories—sometimes almost two hours a day.

  Clearly, the idea of using exercise to counterbalance an overconsumption of calories is not going to work—you’d be facing an uphill road. If you want to keep a steady weight, you need to keep a clear head when it comes to consumption and manage portion sizes. As the saying goes, “You can’t exercise away a bad diet.”

  BELLY, HIPS, AND THIGHS—ENEMIES OR BEST FRIENDS OF WEIGHT LOSS?

  One irony about weight loss is that among your body’s greatest allies are your belly, hips, and thighs, the very body parts many women bemoan during their efforts to shed pounds. But the muscle groups in these areas and along our spinal column are the largest such groups in our bodies. The larger the muscle groups, the more mitochondria they contain, so the more we exercise our large muscles, the more calories we will burn. (Check out Chapter 11 for some simple weight loss exercises to help increase your calorie-burning rate by using these major muscle groups.)

  But the calorie-burning function of exercise actually does have an important role in weight loss. The primary role of exercise in weight loss is the prevention of cellular atrophy or death. Mitochondria loss after age 40 is the beginning of the unexplained weight gain that we tend to call “age-related” slowing down of the metabolism. But this metabolic slowdown has less to do with age than it has to do with a lack of activity—and a stubborn refusal to change habits!

  Many of us tend to eat the same portions throughout life. But when you enter old age without exercising regularly or adjusting your caloric intake, two things happen: Your muscle cells atrophy or die through lack of use, leaving you with fewer mitochondria than you had when you were younger; and your unchanged portions run smack into your greatly changed ability to burn them. Result: unwanted weight gain that steadily increases every year.

  You don’t need to feel helpless to fight a flagging metabolism. Understanding the relationship between cells, mitochondria, and regular exercise is the key to controlling your weight while empowering yourself to stay young forever. Let’s dig a little deeper into how our bodies age, and how our choices can play a major role in slowing, stopping, or even reversing the primary causes of metabolic sluggishness and physical aging.

  CHAPTER 3

  “WHY DO I SUDDENLY FEEL SO OLD?”

  HOW YOUR BODY RESPONDS TO T
HE BIG 4-0

  Many people dread turning 40. While there’s nothing to fear if you do take care of yourself, the cold hard truth is that if you don’t, two things begin to happen around this time: cell death and atrophy. These natural processes are not inevitable—we have ways of fighting back, and those ways are not at all difficult. You just have to learn what’s happening within your cells, so you can understand how to stop this process and turn back the clock.

  THE LIFE SPAN OF A CELL

  We begin our lives as cells with the union of a sperm and an egg, setting off a frantic but efficient multiplication of cells as they form our bones, heart, eyes, skin, and every other body part. All of those trillions of muscle, brain, nerve, and blood cells participate in this frenzy of cell division that takes us through the various stages of development, from fetus to infant to toddler to adolescent and, finally, to a mature adult.

  Throughout this time, cells don’t just spring into being and live indefinitely, of course. New cells are created and old cells die in a constant state of cell turnover. Cells are preprogrammed for apoptosis, or planned cell death, and they wait for a signal—from either inside or outside the cell—to initiate their own death. During development, apoptosis is the body’s way of building itself according to our genetic blueprint, acting as a sculptor’s knife to carve out our distinct features, such as our fingers and toes. Apoptosis is also what helps us learn new information and preserve our memory by pruning out unused neurons and decluttering the brain. Between ages 8 and 14, we lose 30 billion to 40 billion cells a day and constantly generate new ones.