Q: What can I do to feel younger?
A: You mean besides wearing your pants real low and downloading Ludacris to your iPod? We recommend the following steps. Take these actions now, and you'll live younger, healthier and happier.
Hoof it. Start walking regularly, every day. Start small, like 10 minutes a day and build about 20 percent more every week—12 minutes, then 14 minutes—for three weeks, and then 10 percent every week thereafter. Don't over do it, but don't make excuses. If it's raining, go to the mall. If you're too busy at work, go to the bathroom at the far end of the building. Walk, walk, walk. Build up to 30 minutes a day.
Be a dumbbell. Or at least use one. After walking 30 minutes a day for 30 days, keep doing it—but then get instruction about how to do weight training. It'll make your muscles and bones stronger. (Even 103-year-old people can learn to lift soup cans.)
Kick butt. Avoid smoking—and second-hand smoke.
Relax. Learn a stress control technique, like yoga, meditation, or deep breathing. (Ripping through Bob's Big Buffet like a tornado doesn't count as stress relief.)
Add nutrients. Take the right vitamins—especially folate (800 mcg a day), B6 (8 mg a day) and B12 (800 mcg a day), plus an RDA or DV multivitamin a day without iron.
Lower your BP. Talk to your doctor about getting your blood pressure down if it's not about 115/75. Add four fruits and five vegetables a day, and 600 mg of calcium and 200 IU of vitamin D and 200 mg of magnesium twice a day, or blood pressure control pills. Decrease salt intake as much as possible by not eating packaged or prepared foods.
Ask about the almighty pill. Talk to your doc about two baby or half-a-full aspirin a day (162.5mg ) with a glass of water (1/2 glass of warm water before and after). (See more below.)
Eat your plaque out. That is, in the form of:
- 4 fruits/5 vegetable handfulls daily;
- 1 handful of nuts daily—that is 12 walnuts, 24 almonds or 40 peanuts; and
- 14 ounces of fish every week. The mercury- and PCB-free fish are salmon (Atlantic or Alaskan, line-caught), freshwater bass, catfish, flounder/sole, herring, mahi-mahi, tilapia and whitefish.
Get control of your cholesterol. Talk to your doc about starting a statin if you have an elevated LDL (lousy) cholesterol, or if you are over 60. Also consider Coenzyme Q10 (200 mg 3 times a day).
Enjoy your joints. (Not that kind, mon.) For arthritis prevention, make sure you get 600 mg of calcium and 500 mg of vitamin C twice a day, and 400 IU of vitamin D a day plus 400 mg of magnesium.
Exercise your mind. New studies by the NIH found that you can re-grow neurons and increase all neuron function if you push and test your brain to its limits. It's called "pushing the threshold"—and you can do it with things that challenge your brain like bridge, math problems, mah jong, crosswords, or trying to figure out what the heck Bob Dylan is trying to say.
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