Living Longer and Reversing Aging

Can you reverse aging and look younger? Yes, you can. People can live longer and healthier lives if they have a positive attitude and the determination to make changes in their lifestyles. In this book, we will provide a prescription to reverse aging, look younger, and live healthier and longer. You not only can reverse aging, but you can reverse diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, and muscle weakness. You can even prevent cancer. The prescription is a pragmatic code—or formula—based on my personal experience as a clinician and over forty years of practicing medicine, advising patients on how to maintain a healthier lifestyle. Additionally, my wife and I have lived by this code, and we indeed look much younger than our chronological ages. In this book, we want to share our code to looking younger, living healthier, and enjoying a happier life. What is important for anyone who wants to reverse aging, live longer, and stay healthy is to make a choice, have a positive expectation, and develop the discipline and attitude to be ready physically, mentally, and spiritually for such change while having a goal to be happy along the way. My wife and I believe that our biological and psychological ages are what matters. It is not the abstract number of chronological age that determines our lives, activities, and happiness. What is meaningful is how our bodies look and function and how healthy and happy we feel as we age gracefully. Although in our seventies, we both feel younger and healthier than when we were in our forties. We can say without hesitation, “We are as old as we feel.” We not only look twenty to thirty years younger than people of the same age do, we actually feel healthier. Many of my patients, friends, and family wonder how we do it. They ask us frequently what we eat or do to stay young and healthy. They want to know the “secret” or the “formula.” In reality, there is no secret; it is lifestyle that determines whether we feel happy, look younger, and are healthier. This is the reason for writing this book. It does not matter how wealthy or powerful you are if you cannot make choices to achieve the changes required to reverse aging and live longer. When it becomes clear in your mind that the reason you want to live longer and look younger and healthier is an intense desire to take care of your physical, emotional, and spiritual health and to pursue greater happiness, you are ready for this change. The first step to realizing these changes is to make your mind the center of creativity and direction. Everything starts when you channel your thoughts and direct them to change your internal and external environment and bring yourself into equilibrium. We will cover this topic more extensively in chapter 1. Your mind will direct you to make the adjustments and the changes necessary to reach your destination. For example, when women reach an age of menopause and hormones begin to decline, they need to make adjustments to slow down the decline and the symptoms associated with internal changes going on in their bodies. The same is true for men when low testosterone levels cause a gradual decline of their health and libido, which can cause significant consequences if not reversed in time. All this will be explained in more detail in chapter 7, about sexuality. Nutritional deficiencies, inactivity, poor diets, stress, and insomnia, everywhere in the world, may take a toll as well. We will explain the best diets for healthy living and weight loss and bad diets that may lead to cancer or heart disease more extensively in chapter 2. The importance of resting and taking a break to enjoy a moment and enhance happiness is explained in chapter 3. The influence of exercise as part of healthy living and prevention of weakness and improved brain function is explained in chapter 4. As we age, we lose strength, and muscles become weaker. But we can compensate for this loss through exercise. We address these issues in more detail in this chapter. We dedicate chapter 5 to stress, since this universal problem plays an important role in our daily lives. Learning to deal with stress and using meditation to improve our resilience is explained in more detail in this chapter. The importance of sleep to maintain our health and reverse aging is essential for a healthy lifestyle and is explained in more detail in chapter 6. We address how hormones released during a night of deep and refreshing sleep affect our bodies for healthier living in this chapter. We feel that sexuality and sex are important to achieve love and happiness. This will be explained in chapter 7, where you will find recommendations about hormone therapy and supplements to improve hormonal balance and libido to reach greater happiness. We couldn’t dismiss the importance of spirituality to make our lives whole. In chapter 8, you can find personal events and stories that help to illustrate the importance of spirituality in our lives. To bring all the brain and body functions into balance, there are steps you can take to reverse aging, prevent illness, and decrease the associated problems of these deficiencies. You will succeed, if you follow the prescription described in this book. The prescription is summarized with the acronym DRESS-SS, which stands for diet, rest, exercise, sleep, stress management, sexuality, and spirituality. This is a word that is easy to remember and is the code or formula that will guide you to develop a healthier lifestyle, look younger, and live longer anywhere in the world. The first chapter, about the mind-body connection, is followed by chapters about diet, rest, exercise, sleep, and stress management (DRESS). These are the basics when it comes to reaching your goals. To make the prescription more complete, two additional chapters (SS) are dedicated to sexuality and spirituality. We hope all these chapters become your secret weapon to preventing illness, looking younger, increasing longevity, and living a healthier lifestyle. In this book, you will also find valuable information to help you lose weight and information on healthy foods to prevent cancer and chronic illness, manage stress, and reverse aging. To learn more about recent research to improve longevity, genetic technologies, telomere, and DNA discoveries to improve health, we provide extensive information in chapter 9.