Healthy Aging Month 2022: You Are The “Driver” Of Your Health And Wellness

Healthy Aging Month 2022!

September is designated as Healthy Aging Month! Let us celebrate healthy aging month 2022 and imbibe some real healthy aging tips early to live healthily during our later years. So, super genes or not, this healthy aging month or beyond, you are the driver of your own health and wellness! 

No Matter Whether You Are A Ferrari Or A Kia 

Were you born with super genes, and a body like a Ferrari or an unbreakable Mercedes Benz? If so, good for you! You got lucky! Nobody gets to choose the body they come to this world equipped with, but regardless of your genome, we now know that you have more control over the number of miles you will be able to travel through life than previously thought.  You see, a body is like a car, and with its proper maintenance and tune-up, we can outlive a poorly maintained Lamborghini even if we are only a Kia.  

We are also blessed to live in times where so many useful tools and advances in medicine and pharmacology are available to most of us. Doctors and surgeons, like car mechanics, can help us extend our life by putting a new part or organ in, and save us from life-threatening accidents, plaques, viruses, emergencies or spare us pain. They can also help increase our lifespan and treat, manage, or even cure diseases. Still, they are not able to help us on the level we can ourselves have the most impact.  

The science of epigenetics as well as many longevity scientists and experts now know that our lifestyle choices have the most impact on the way and rate with which we age, and often even more than our DNA.

You Are The Driver Of Your Own Health And Wellness

Especially if you were not born with super genes, but want to age healthier and live longer, you have got to start with yourselves, your mindset, and lifestyle, and not with a doctor and medications.  Science has already proven that we can add many quality years to our life by making simple changes in the way we live. Studies show that with lifestyle interventions, we can reduce about 80% of chronic conditions, which ultimately lead to disability and eventually slow, often painful, expensive, and premature death. 

So, in this healthy aging month 2022, taking personal accountability for our health and wellness and relying on ourselves for preventative care, and not just on doctors and annual check-ups, should be the basis of a wellness plan or wellness GPS.  

Physicians are limited in what they can and can’t do.  They are limited by insurance companies, politics, time constraints, and even by their training. For the most part, they are not able to catch a disease before it becomes symptomatic, and even then, it is often hard to figure out what caused it and how to treat it.  Again, their job is to treat disease, help manage it, and not prevent it.  To prevent or delay it is your job. Remember that!

Maintenance, Maintenance, Maintenance

Even though our hearts have a certain number of beats per lifetime, and our organs, tissues, and cells have a limit as well, the way we “drive” can help us extend our life and health spans. Everyone will agree that maintenance and prevention are much easier than repair or treatment of what has already broken down. The same is true for our own bodies. 

Chronic conditions, 80% of older adults have at least one and 68% at least two, take a long time to develop.  They do not just happen overnight, but most people won’t think about them until a doctor tells them that they have one.  88% of the US population, including children, are now afflicted with at least one metabolic syndrome and high blood pressure, high blood sugar, body fat around the waist, or abnormal level of cholesterol or triglycerides.  Metabolic syndrome is not the beginning of a chronic condition, which is what most people seem to think, but the first symptom a doctor will treat.  Do not wait until you are labeled with a pre-existing condition and a higher insurance rate.  

Empower yourself with knowledge, and with some discipline in this healthy aging month of 2022.  Learn or find out how you can change the trajectory of where you are headed and instead of chronic conditions, head towards healthier aging. If you do not do that, you will be one of the many people who have to trade work, hobbies, and time with family and friends for more and more frequent doctor’s appointments. I know you might think it is a part of aging, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  

You can become a better “driver” of your own health and wellness, and put a brake pedal on the speed with which you age and deteriorate instead. For the most part, it is you who decides how you want to spend the last decade of your life, and if it is at a nursing home or not.

Aging Is Something You Can Slow Down Or Accelerate 

If you decide you would rather enjoy your retirement longer surrounded by family, friends, or even pets instead of nurses and doctors, you must start with your mindset and attitude.  Healthy aging is not about the outside, and not about Botox, liposuctions, or diets. Aging is about what happens on the inside. 

Harvard professor David Sinclair wrote in “Lifespan”, that aging is a disease.  In fact, aging is cumulative unhealed damage to our organs, tissues, cells, DNA, and entire body.  This process of cumulative damage starts even before we are born. It is the reason why some babies come to this world already sick. Something somewhere causes the division of their cells and their DNA to be damaged.  Sometimes what seems to be obvious, for instance, when a mother uses drugs, but that’s not the case always.  

If everything goes well during pregnancy and fetal development, we enter the world as the cleanest and most pristine, and healthy ecosystem we will probably ever be. Only then do we start to accumulate more and more damage from the environment we live in, from our lifestyle, as well as via wear and tear. The older we get, the faster and the more damage we accumulate.  With time, the process of aging starts to accelerate on many different levels.  This is a very important concept to understand.  

Things Start To Break Down Like In An Old Car 

Like in an old car, with age, things simply start to deteriorate and break down. For example, when our mitochondria or powerhouses wear off, we start losing energy and become chronically fatigued. As our cells get damaged, they become less and less capable to regenerate and eventually lose their ability to function altogether. 

We speed up this process by, for example, the constant influx of glucose and insulin from the food we eat and by eating non-stop.  We not only start accumulating extra pounds but also more and more cellular damage that can not only bring on diabetes but also other diseases, such as the heart, kidneys, and even the brain.  

If you smoke or inhale a lot of toxins, you abuse not only your lungs, and start having a hard time walking up the steps as you become short of breath, but you also overwork your liver which is responsible for the removal of those toxins from your body’s blood supply. If you add alcohol to the mix and consume unhealthy foods, your liver will have even more toxins to work through. At some point, your body will overflow with waste causing once again damage to the cells, tissues, and organs that will impair your health.  

Accumulation of cellular waste is a big part of aging that causes genetic errors and improper responses to as well as repairs of these errors. When this happens, your “weakest link” gets damaged. For some, it will be their heart, for others might be their brain.

“Corrosion” On The Outside 

That being said, you will probably start seeing wrinkles on your face first before your internal health problems start to emerge.  This is why we tend to focus on the outside and not the on the inside. When we look at a face, it is hard to picture the changes that happen underneath it, but it is those changes that actually impact how our face looks as it ages. 

Those wrinkles are caused by the damage in the extracellular matrix and due to the loss of collagen or elastin fibers, and facial muscles tugging on and causing all those creases.  No face cream is going to make your jowls disappear either. A plastic surgeon can help us fix some of that, but surgery or an aesthetic procedure will not help you live longer or age healthier.  If you are going to choose this route to feel better about yourself, make sure you also address your inside in addition to your outside. The same goes for our bodies. 

Women are especially mostly concerned with their weight. They do not pay much attention to the importance of their muscle mass and strength, yet after the age of 30, they begin to lose as much as 3% to 5% of this precious mass per decade. That muscle gets replaced with fat, and if it is on the hips or legs, it won’t be so bad, but if it is the visceral and unhealthy belly fat, it will be the one that will eventually contribute to inflammation, constriction of vessels and a high chance of a stroke or heart attack.  

Even though men start losing bone mass at a slower than women rate at first, they catch up to them around retirement age. Just like women, they become susceptible to muscle loss or sarcopenia and bone loss or osteopenia and osteoporosis.   Do not wait till your joints start to ache, bones start to fracture and break. Start now in this healthy aging month 2022!

Repairs Are Expensive

Make sure you go to your annual check-ups and get the necessary tune-ups but remember that maintenance is the key to a longer healthier life and to getting more miles out of your “engine” or your “transmission” and even your “exhaust pipe”. Unless you do that and take personal accountability and preventative care into your own hands, your vitality and your functionality will slip away faster and diseases, such as dementia, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, sarcopenia, cancer, and chronic heart issues, to name a few, will eat away the quality of your life. 

Now is the time to put good fuel into your body and avoid bumpy roads.  If you feel lost, get a GPS and have someone help you map out a road to health and wellness. Best if you can do it before you get sick and need to send your car off to a mechanic. Repairs can be really expensive, and I am sure you would rather spend your money on something else, but even if you have a lot of miles on you, it is probably not too late to get a game plan and start thinking of your future. 

Start making deposits into your personal health and wellness bank account this healthy aging month 2022! Make sure that your maintenance and tune-up include these most effective life interventions that will not only help you look better and feel better but also have an effect on your health to prevent, manage or even reverse chronic conditions by addressing the core of the problem and having positive effects on your cell and your DNA.

The Importance Of The Right Fuel 

The easiest thing you can do to age healthier and live longer is to start putting the best quality fuel in your car by eating healthy.  This is your lowest-hanging fruit. A nutrient-dense diet that helps repair the damage, not calorie counting, should be your first step.  This might be difficult to do for a typical person who has been yo-yo dieting and struggling with weight issues for a while, but when people focus on deprivation and on counting calories or macros, instead of nutrients your body needs to function well, they not only end up packing on the pounds back plus more, but also unknowingly contributing to the wear and tear of the organs, tissues, cells and even that DNA they might have lucked out to have.  

In order to live healthier longer, and look and feel younger, you might need to change your mindset and start thinking in terms of feeding your cells the nutrients that will heal, build and repair the body. Nutrients are responsible for the billions of chemical reactions that are happening in the body at any given time.  Instead of a dieting and deprivation mindset, think from an abundance mindset and what fuels to nourish your body with, and whether it will help you live healthier longer or feed diseases and speed up the process of aging. Change your mindset this healthy aging month 2022!

Healthy nutrition starts with a healthy mindset and not with counting calories. That being said, when you focus on providing your body with nutrients and not calories, you will also feel satisfied faster and crave less of the unhealthy junk that causes you to gain weight. With this mindset, and with time, but without having to obsess about it.

Your Body’s Best Tune-Up 

Another great thing you can do to help you age healthier is to help your body “take its garbage out”. With age, more and more waste products build up in our tissue, organs, and cells. An unhealthy lifestyle speeds up the accumulation of this waste and the amount of senescence aka zombie cells in the body.  At some point, we will have accumulated so much junk inside of our bodies, that it will start causing them to break down.  

Eating less often, fasting, or time restrictive eating are strategies that can help you live healthier and longer.  Incorporating fasting into your lifestyle will, in fact, help you get rid of the nasty zombie cells that accumulate in your body from the toxins as well as from the wear and tear. Even though fasting has been practiced for thousands of years, and studied for many, it was not till later that it became popular.  

In 2016, Yoshinori Ohsumi was awarded a Nobel prize in physiology and medicine for his discoveries of the biological removal and recycling pathway called autophagy. This is when fasting became known as one of the best ways to activate the mechanisms of autophagy. 

In other words, fasting is like a housekeeper that can clean up the mess in your car or a good tune-up or oil change. It helps your body regenerate and reset to its healthier state by cleaning out the debris, and toxic waste while promoting cellular repair. Additionally, fasting has many more benefits including but not limited to helping reduce your inflammation, improve insulin sensitivity, heal your gut, boost your immunity, metabolism, and brain functionality, as well as reducing the risk of chronic conditions. 

To sum up, it is not only how much and what you eat, but also when and how often you do it. While it is generally safe to give your digestive system a break anywhere between 12 to 16 hours, prolonged fasts can be not only unpleasant but also unsafe. You should never rush into fasting mindlessly. It is best to build up to them over time and do the long ones under medical supervision.  So, why not start it now on healthy aging month 2022!

Make Sure You Shift Gears

Another way to not only stimulate autophagy and help regulate cellular senescence and remove toxic build up but also improve health and help us age healthier and live longer is exercise.   Exercise and movement help our lymphatic, cardiovascular, and pulmonary systems. They improve our neurological and cognitive functions.  They boost our metabolism and immunity.  If we do not move, we can not only get fat and less fit, but we do not stimulate our body to renew and regenerate our organs, tissues, and cells.  

Exercise causes temporary stress to our bodies. This type of positive stress, known as eustress, brings on hormesis or positive adaptations to the stress that benefit our health on many levels, and not only make us look and feel better. It is truly one of the best longevity tools that can help you function well longer and improve your outside and your inside.  

If you already have a chronic condition or metabolic syndrome, exercise will help you treat or manage it by mitigating oxidative stress, and reducing inflammation, and repairing your body on a cellular level. It is a way to stimulate your stem cells, activate your nutrient-sensing pathways, help your mitochondria create more ATP and energy, and get rid of senescent cells. 

The best type of exercise you can do is high-intensity interval training called HIIT as well as weight training. Weight training is especially good for the bones because it can help build new bone cells.  HIIT is best for mitochondria as it brings on mitohormesis or the mitochondrial stress that leads to more health and viability within an organism, tissue, and cell.  With that being said, walking and parking your car further, and taking steps instead of an elevator will all add up and add to your health span. No matter what age you are and how fit you are, start moving and exercising. Every single step counts, and if you only have a minute, you can make the most of it this healthy aging month and HIIT it on this healthy aging month of 2022!

Practice Defensive Driving 

While stress from exercise is great, unless you overdo it, you also want to practice “defense driving” and stir clear from physical and emotional stress as much as you can. It is estimated that about 90% of all diseases are related to both our emotional and physical stress.  In fact, our body does not differentiate between the two. Both emotional and environmental stress triggers the release of cortisol hormone in our body which sets off a cascade of harmful reactions. It is the reason why most of us are constantly under chronic stress and why our body never gets a chance to recover from it.  

We are living in a world full of toxic heavy metals, pesticides, herbicides, unhealthy fumes, and toxins that enter our body through the digestive system, but also through our airways or even our skin. We are not designed to constantly filter out so many toxins.  Most of us also live under various emotional stress.  It is this chronic stress that is the root cause of health issues for most of us or at least accelerating their development. The more toxic stress our body absorbs, the faster it will reach its upper limit, indicated by the genes, and the faster it will age. 

It is imperative to find ways to destress and learn how to manage emotional stress in the ways that fit our schedule, lifestyle, and our liking, as well as detox from the environmental stress.  Even if we can’t eliminate pollution, and all the environmental toxins we are surrounded by, we can always make healthier choices when it comes to what we eat, put on our skin, or what cleaning products we use and thus decrease the toxic build-up in our bodies. If we are not mindful of that, our bodies will resemble the blowout in the Gulf of Mexico from years ago which was one of the biggest environmental disasters.  

Your body is an ecosystem.  If you do not want it to look like a blowout, start cleaning your internal environment. You can start now, this healthy aging month of 2022! Put high-quality fuel in it and choose healthy organic foods. Detox your body with fasting and try to refrain from physical and emotional toxins. Be mindful of the pollution inside your body, just like you should be about the pollution of our planet.

Do Not Kill The Engine 

Last but not least, and some might think the most important tool for healthy aging and maximizing your health and lifespan, is sleep.  A good night’s sleep not only makes you feel, function, and look better the following day, but it repairs your body on the inside. If you do not sleep well, you do not feel well and are less productive, moodier, and even dangerous to be around.  Most accidents happen due to sleep deprivation.  Chronic lack of sleep ages us and brings on many diseases and disorders, such as cardiovascular or neurological diseases. It also weakens the immune system making us more susceptible to diseases. It wreaks havoc on our hormones and puts stress on our entire body.  

Lack of sleep is unfortunately a pandemic these days, and there is a barrage of sleep gadgets, supplements, and medications on the market that target the sleep deprived, but sleeplessness has many different origins and what might work for one person, will not work for another. Many people who suffer from sleeplessness have at some point suffered from a traumatic experience that triggered their chronic sleeplessness.  

Taking something to regulate their circadian rhythms or drinking wine to put themselves to sleep will not fix the problem. Medical interventions, that for the most part, come with side effects might be necessary and even lifesaving. That being said, every one of the above-mentioned lifestyle interventions will also impact the way you sleep as sleep is tight to your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual and holistic health. Make it a priority this healthy aging month 2022!

You Can Be A 1965 Auto Show Mustang Or A Corvette 

In addition to the above tips, there are many other things you can do to help yourself live healthier and longer.  Diagnostics, smart supplementation, and even recent innovations in both medical as well as wellness spaces may one day help us age slower and live longer than is now possible.  Jeff Bazos and Silicon Valley are already on a mission to hack aging. For the time being, the longest on record person to have ever lived died at the age of 122 in 1997, and our chance of living to even the age of 125 is now estimated to be only one in 10,000.  Still, there are many things that we can do to not only live longer but also age healthier. 

Lifespan is not the same as health span.  You can be that 1965 Mustang or Corvette parked in the garage, or the one you can proudly drive.  Even though a bat mobile is still considered a fictional car, there are many things we used to consider sci-fi that is now a reality. Could aging be one of them one day, too? Maybe, but for the time being it is not.  What is certain is that improving your diet, adding exercise, prioritizing your sleep, and removing toxins as well as stress from your body can all help you live longer and age healthier.  By simply not smoking and not being obese, you can live 7 years longer. Walking alone for about 75 minutes a week can add 2 years to your life. Where will you start today and what will you do to embrace aging?