5 Ways to Stay Young

By Steve Edwards
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Youth It's not that we age but how we age that matters. We're all going to grow old and, from all scientific accounts, eventually die. Some of us will do it more gracefully than others. Although genetics will play a role, we have a lot of control over how the aging process affects us. Modern medical enhancements have allowed us to alter the aging process to a degree, but there is no reason to get upset if you can't afford a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, because nothing can modify the way you age like a few lifestyle changes. Here are five steps that will help you age more gracefully than Hollywood's elite.

Exercise harder (though not necessarily longer). Far and away, the most important thing you can do to offset the aging process is exercise. You don't need to spend a lot of time doing it, however. Short bouts of intense exercise are more effective than longer workouts. Long, easy workouts have their place in a fitness program, especially for aerobic efficiency and fat burning, but nothing comes close to high-intensity training for keeping your body young (try programs like P90X® and Turbo Jam®).

Your body loses muscle mass as you age. Resistance training creates hypertrophy (muscle building), which will offset some of that loss. Furthermore, increasing your heart rate to 90 percent of its maximum for short intervals (by doing things like jumping, sprinting, and heavy resistance training) raises capillarity, mitochondrial activity, and bone densityall important components to counteract aging.

Here's why high-intensity training can counteract aging. High-intensity training forces your body out of its comfort zone. Your heart rate rises beyond your anaerobic thresholdthe point at which you can no longer eliminate lactic-acid buildup and your workout time becomes finite (you'll fail in less than a minute, perhaps far less). When this happens, your body uses something called the Krebs cycle to produce energy without oxygen. During this anaerobic ("without oxygen") process, your body is pushed to its physical limitsand this creates a hormonal response to keep it going. The subsequent hormone production is in direct opposition to the aging process. As we age, our bodies produce fewer hormones over time, leading to the inability to rebuild ourselves, until we eventually break down and die. Intense exercise counteracts this by forcing our bodies to produce more hormones than are produced naturally at a given age. This keeps our muscles, bones, and organs from deteriorating as fast as they naturally would. The result is that, with continued exercise, the aging process slows down.

You may have heard of hormone replacement therapy. Intense exercise is the cheaper, natural way of doing the same thing. It's also more effective. Ten to 20 minutes a day of pushing yourself to your physical limit is all it takes for this response to occur. It's also addictive due, again, to hormone production. And of all of the possible addictions in life, this is the one that will benefit you the most.

This may be in contrast to what you generally hear about aerobic exercise being important, especially for the elderly. There are a few reasons for this misunderstanding, but most of what you hear is simple misinformation. Aerobic exercise is healthy and important. Aerobic is defined as "with oxygen," so this could be anything you do that is under your anaerobic threshold. However, this is a broad statement because there are actually many training zones that lie in your aerobic realm. Regardless, the overall point is the same. Lower-intensity exercise is generally safer than high-intensity training. It's also healthyvery much so. A steady diet of low-level aerobic training is a million times better than no exercise at all. It can be done by almost anyone, no matter their physical limitations; it's relatively easy and painless; chances of injury are low; and it will keep your heart and circulatory system healthy. Therefore, it's easy to recommend aerobic training to almost anyone. But it doesn't have near the effectiveness of high-intensity training. And, furthermore, the cardiovascular effects of high-intensity training are just as good for your heart, which must work overtime once your workout goes anaerobic.
Eat less food, especially sugar. A now-famous study was done on two monkeys, in which one was fed a yummy, filling diet (no overeating) and the other was deprived of calories. The monkey on the "normal" diet aged much more quickly. Even starker was the contrast in lifestyles—the calorie-restricted monkey was extremely virile and active into old age. Studies in humans are recent but seem to show a decrease in free-radical damage to proteins, lipids, and DNA. The older you get, the lower your caloric requirements. This doesn't mean you shouldn't eat, but small frequent snacking is the way to go, and calories should be altered daily depending on your activity level.

Calorie restriction is now popular enough that it has its own acronym, CR. And while many of its practitioners seem a bit wacko and have yet to gain the immortality status they're after, there is no denying, through science and lore, that eating less has its benefits. In fact, when we break down what CRers actually eat, they're hardly starving. Most average around 2,000 calories a day, which is around what the average American "claims" to eat. The reality of those claims (which came from numerous surveys) is a stark contrast to the 3,900 calories per person of food that we produce. So unless half the food we produce goes uneaten, chances are, we're overeating, which is also pretty easy to confirm using nothing but anecdotal evidence.

CR practitioners are fastidious eaters. This seems prudent for anyone limited in the number of calories they are eating. If you aren't going to eat much, what you do eat had better be packed with nutrients. And we don't need science to tell us that eating high-quality foods is healthier than eating junk, which brings us to the easiest way to eat less food: eat less sugar.

Sugar is the single largest caloric source we consume. And it's bad for us. It hastens the aging process because eating sugar hinders our bodies' natural production of growth hormonesone of the key players in the aging process. GH (growth hormone) levels decrease as we age. You can supplement HGH (human growth hormone), but studies are still inconclusive as to whether or not this has adverse side effects. It's also expensive. The natural way includes intense exercise and eating less sugar and other starchy junk foods because all high-glycemic carbohydrates reduce GH production.
Supplement your diet with aging in mind. As stated above, nothing increases hormone production as well as exercise. Second on this list is doping—also know as anti-aging medicine that includes hormone injections, which some professional athletes such as Barry Bonds purportedly use (though apparently not Roger Clemens). The cheaper—and safer—alternative is to use natural food supplements. Remember that hormone production is a natural process and that the healthier your body is, the less quickly hormone production will diminish as you age. Therefore, almost any healthy dietary supplement is a plus. This means that simple multivitamin and mineral supplements help with the anti-aging process, as do pretty much any positive changes that you make in your diet through foods, drinks, or supplementation. Here are a few that are more directly responsible.

Amino acids. Even if you get plenty of protein in your diet, supplemental ornithine, arginine, and glutamine will help increase your body's GH release. And an arginine/citrulline mixture has also been shown to work as a vasodilator, which can help with alertness, playing sports, and sexual performance.

Fish oil. Its fatty acids, EPA and DHA (which have become increasingly scarce in our diets), are two of the more important nutrients for myriad functions. Furthermore, our diets have become unbalanced in relation to how much omega-3 fatty acid we get compared to omega-6. Balancing our omega consumption will help reduce chronic inflammation brought on by a poor diet, smoking, drinking, breathing unhealthy air, etc. This is not the same type of inflammation that you get when you, say, sprain your ankle. Chronic inflammation is a state that weakens your body's ability to stave off disease. Being stiff and achy, which we often associate with getting old, is often a sign of chronic inflammation.

Melatonin. A hormone that your body makes less of as you age. Melatonin, known more as a sleep aid, has powerful antioxidant properties that have been shown to stimulate the immune and endocrine systems. Since your natural levels drop radically beyond age 30, supplementing with small dosages (under 2 mg) a few times a week can counteract this process, and may also help you sleep better. On that note . . .
Improve your ability to sleep. Sleep also increases GH production, along with many other things that repair breakdown from the rigors of living. Sleeping 7 to 8 hours a day—along with short naps when you can manage it—will keep your body tuned and ready to run. Deep sleep is where we make the most dramatic changes in our bodies' physiologies. Those changes are directly related to what we do when we're awake but, if we don't take the precautions to ensure we get a good night's rest, our hard work can get sidetracked.

Here's what happens in a nutshell. When we're awake, our bodies are constantly wearing down. During sleep, our bodies vary their behavior to rebuild themselves even more efficiently. Among other things, we make more proteins and release hormones at different rates. So while we tend to think of sleep as a passive process, it's actually very active. It all begins with our brains. Instead of shutting down for the night, our brains signal our bodies about what to do during the various stages of sleep. In short, neurotransmitters (one you've probably heard of is serotonin) signal the body that it's time to switch modes. Once this occurs, our bodies begin a five-stage rebuilding process that we call sleep.

The main things that affect our sleep are food, exercise, medications, chemicals, and temperature. The neurotransmitters that tell us to sleep are all influenced by these factors and can be misled. Some of the more obvious examples of things that affect our sleep are caffeine, which we often consume when we want to stay awake, and medications, which usually provide warnings on their labels. But what's also important to consider here is how some of these things affect our sleep cycles. Certainly "sleep aids," such as alcohol, make it easier to fall asleep but harder to get into deep sleep. Improving your ability to sleep is generally as easy as improving your lifestyle. The biggest factors affecting sleep patterns are diet, exercise, hydration, and the ability to relax and unwind.
Take care of your skin. Your largest organ, your skin, needs both internal and external protection, and most of the steps listed above help keep it smooth, elastic, and youthful looking. Another huge factor is hydration, which, conversely, helps all of the other processes as well. Drinking enough fluid, water to be precise, is a huge factor for overall health, but nowhere will the effects of dehydration be more obvious than on your skin. You should drink six to eight glasses of water per day, at a minimum, and more when it's hot or you're exercising.

Daily moisturizing can also keep your skin soft and vibrant. It's best to apply it as soon as you get out of the shower, and do your best to make this a ritual. Post-shower, when your natural oils have been washed off, is a vital time for moisturizing. Even if you're pressed for time, taking a few minutes to add moisturizer to your entire body is worth it, since your skin absorbs it best when it's warm and damp. You don't have to limit this to once a dayyour skin would be pressed to get too much lotionbut after a shower is by far the most effective time.

Try finding products free of fragrance and parabens. Also, don't buy products that contain mineral oil or petroleum. Both of these will clog your pores and can trap sweat and dirt, thus causing acne. For your face, you should also try to use a moisturizer that contains sunscreen with an SPF of at least 15. Small doses of sun are good for your skin, but overexposure is as bad as advertised.