Chapter One
Look Younger,
Live Longer
Give Yourself the Energy and Looks
You Had Ten or Twenty Years Ago
Thousands of Americans are younger today than they were five years ago. How is that possible? They have joined the RealAge Revolution. They have given themselves a makeover from the inside out. By following the specific age-reversing recommendations in my book RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be?, people who were previously much older physiologically than their calendar age have now taken ten, fifteen, up to forty years off their biologic age. (Men can be twenty-five years younger and women, twenty-nine years younger than their calendar age.) This is what we call giving yourself a RealAge Makeover: you can significantly transform your health, looks, and life.
And it can be so easy. For example, just developing the habit of calling friends in times of stress can actually make a real differe
Chapter One
Look Younger,
Live Longer
Give Yourself the Energy and Looks
You Had Ten or Twenty Years Ago
Thousands of Americans are younger today than they were five years ago. How is that possible? They have joined the RealAge Revolution. They have given themselves a makeover from the inside out. By following the specific age-reversing recommendations in my book RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be?, people who were previously much older physiologically than their calendar age have now taken ten, fifteen, up to forty years off their biologic age. (Men can be twenty-five years younger and women, twenty-nine years younger than their calendar age.) This is what we call giving yourself a RealAge Makeover: you can significantly transform your health, looks, and life.
And it can be so easy. For example, just developing the habit of calling friends in times of stress can actually make a real difference in your health and longevity. As word about the RealAge concept spread, and Americans started to see firsthand how small but simple -- and often fun! -- changes in their daily lives could transform their health, so many people have gotten the RealAge bandwagon that it's become a kind of revolution -- a revolution back to great health. And nobody has been more thrilled to see it happen than I.
Since publication of the first book, we've learned more about the process of aging. While our team has been hard at work interpreting data from the latest clinical trails to keep the RealAge program on the cutting edge, readers of RealAge have been hard at work getting younger. For example:
• Katherine M., a forty-eight-year-old nurse with a busy schedule and a RealAge of fifty-five, knew she wasn't getting healthy nutrition. So she started taking calcium, vitamin D, magnesium, and folate supplements. In addition, she added lycopene to her diet by having spaghetti with marinara sauce once a week. As a result, even though she now has a calendar age of fifty-one, her RealAge is forty-five. She has an added bounce in her step and feels the ten years younger she has become. (She made her RealAge ten years younger as she went from a RealAge of 55 to one of 45.)
• Kenny T., a high-powered attorney of fifty-eight with a RealAge of sixty-six, started a stress-reduction program that included yoga and meditation. In addition, he began walking and paying more attention to safety issues such as wearing a seat belt while driving and a helmet when bicycling. These combined factors made his RealAge six years younger.
• I am most proud of Betty G., who works in my old department. Betty had a three-pack-a-day smoking habit that made her RealAge eight years older than her calender age of thirty-nine. She felt more than fifteen years older, and looked it, too. No one thought she could quit. She'd frequently be seen outside on a smoke break with cigarettes in both hands. Betty eventually got fed up with feeling so old and tired, and decided to give herself a makeover. She started a walking program; then she quit smoking. It wasn't easy, but she did it with the method described in Chapter 6. After five years completely smoke-free, she is well on her way to shedding seven of the eight years she had originally aged due to smoking. She now looks twenty years younger than she did. In fact, her RealAge is fourteen years younger than it was just three years ago (she did more than just quit smoking). She has literally made herself over. Friends who have not seen her in three years have asked how she was able to afford plastic surgery. She is proud to tell them she hasn't had any surgery; instead, she has changed her appearance from the inside out.
I find it incredibly exciting to see people making such changes -- some easy, some difficult, but all crucial toward living younger, longer, healthier lives. This book updates what's been learned in the past several years and gives you all the information you need to transform yourself with a RealAge Makeover.
There's a lot in the realm of health and medicine we don't know, but we do know more than 80 percent of how to postpone, delay, or avoid the onset of age-related disease and the disability it causes. That's extremely exciting news! (It's different, however, from postponing aging itself. Postponing aging would mean living at the top of your curve to one hundred twenty or one hundred fifty years after your birth -- something very different from what we can do now.) We now know how to delay until age ninety or ninety-five those age-related diseases that keep us from living at the top of the quality-of-life curve. And that's what the goal of the RealAge program is all about.
What Is RealAge?
It's most common, of course, when someone rudely asks you your age, to think in terms of calendar age. You are very aware (and may even grumble) when you pass the big milestones -- for example, when you turn thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, or ninety. But this way of thinking -- couching age only in terms of calendar age -- does not do justice to the complex (and, happily, often reversible) process of aging. You have an age that more truly reflects how much your body has aged: your RealAge. It can be many years older or younger than your calendar age, depending on your choices -- how well you care for your health and well-being. If your RealAge is five years younger than your calendar age, for example, it means that your rate of aging is such that you are in the same shape physiologically as the average person who is five years younger than you. Likewise, if your RealAge is five years older than your calendar age, you have aged to the same biologic condition as someone who is five years older. But you do not have to despair ...
Continues...
Excerpted from The Realage Makeover by Roizen, Michael F. Excerpted by permission.
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