How to Age Well

When we're younger, we want to look older. When we're older, we want to look younger. But there are some simple things you can do to age well.

When I was growing up in my teens, I was always told I looked quite a bit older than I was. When you're that age, you take that as a huge compliment.

But when I got into my mid to late 20s, it started to get annoying when you were told you looked older....like ten years older....

Up until my late 20s, I ate well, started sunbathing less in my early 20s and stopped it completely by about 25.

Ate fairly healthy but didn't exercise much. Had a few foods that were my vices.

In my late 20s I decided that it was time to look forward to my 30s and start creating some more healthier habits. To eat healthier 90% of the time and to make exercise a staple of my life.

My thought was that if I started making these type of habits in my 30s, it would put my on a good path of setting a foundation for those good habits to a healthy lifestyle through my 40s and beyond.

I had come to this by watching friends, co-workers, and acquaintance that had bad habits through their 30s like smoking, eating unhealthy, etc., but that overall still looked pretty good and seemed to be aging well.

But right after they would hit 40, things started to change and to me it looked as though the aging process had caught up to them...and beyond.

Ever notice how you can tell whether someone smokes by looking at their face before you even smell the cigarette smell on their clothing? Here's an interesting facial comparison picture of the same person with one side being if they smoked and the other side if they did not.



There was a recent study that came out talking about habits that can age you by 12 years and I think it really shows some simple things you can get rid of to not only help you live longer but also to look younger.

It really shouldn't come as a surprise as to what these four habits are when combined, can age you by 12 years: smoking, drinking too much, inactivity and poor diet.

The researchers tracked 5,000 British adults for 20 years.

Overall, 314 people studied had all four unhealthy behaviors. Among them, 91 died during the study, or 29 percent. Among the 387 healthiest people with none of the four habits, only 32 died, or about 8 percent.

Now granted, I guess you could argue that even having all four of those habits still only resulted in 30% of them dying. That's fine if you want to look at it that way but, the article unfortunately, didn't go into whether the other 71% had additional health problems other than death that they people who didn't have those four habits didn't have.

The risky behaviors were: smoking tobacco; downing more than three alcoholic drinks per day for men and more than two daily for women; getting less than two hours of physical activity per week; and eating fruits and vegetables fewer than three times daily.

Staying away from these healthy habits seems quite doable for anyone and the long term benefits seem pretty clear:

"You don't need to be extreme" to be in the healthy category, Kvaavik said. "These behaviors add up, so together it's quite good. It should be possible for most people to manage to do it."

(The picture of Susan Sarandon is a comparison to how she looked in 1995 and in 2008. She's 63 now and looks pretty darn good and I verified, doesn't appear that she's had plastic surgery).

I never smoked, I have a drink or two throughout the week, have been getting the veggies and fruits in for years and most definitely get exercise. Has it paid off?

Absolutely. I'm probably healthier now then I've ever been and when it comes to how old I look, people who meet me for the first time tend to say I look like I'm more in my mid to late 20s rather than in my late 30s.

I don't want anyone reading this to get discouraged and think that they missed their opportunity in their 20s and 30s to start a foundation for good health and aging gracefully. It's never too late to make changes and you will most definitely get health and appearance benefits no matter what age you take that turn to a healthier lifestyle.

A quick note about one unhealthy habit that came to my mind when reading this article on how to age well that they didn't list was: sunbathing/tanning.

I know. People like to have a little color on their skin.

That might look okay short term but, I see people out there where it's evident that they tan quite frequently and to be honest, sure you've got some color, but to be blunt, the wrinkles you're getting from all that tanning is making you look 10 years older than you are. Maybe you don't see it but, it's there (and I won't even go into the increased risk of skin cancer issue).

If you're looking for solutions on how to age well, start with getting rid of these four unhealthy habits (get rid of that other one that I mentioned as a bonus). They aren't that hard to incorporate into your life and your body will thank you in the long run.

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Stretching Before a Workout

Whether it's before a weight lifting routine, a run, a walk, or getting on a bike, it seems like everyone follows the natural routine of stretching before a workout.

I've never been a fan of static stretching before a workout. An example of a static stretch would be like bending down and trying to touch your toes and then holding that position for a period of time.



The thought is that by doing this you're "warming up" or preparing that particular muscle for whatever activity you're about to do.

But the problem that I've always found is that if you are stretching a muscle that doesn't need stretching, is there really any benefit?

Picture a muscle like you would a rubber band. When you stretch a new rubber band, it's can be fairly tight. But if you continue to stretch that rubber band, it becomes longer in the "relaxed" position. Continue to stretch the rubber band some more over time and at some point it will snap.

The same could be said about stretching a muscle statically that doesn't need to be stretched. If you continue to stretch it, you could essentially weaken it and risk an injury if the right stimulus came around.

I'll give an example. Back a couple of years ago, former Detroit Tiger (and now Philadelphia Phillie) second baseman Placido Polanco would do a stretch of his arms over his shoulders before each pitch when he was at the plate (he'd also grit his teeth for some reason..). It was his routine.



During the 2006 season, he ran out to right field to try and catch a fly ball. He dove, caught the ball, and landed on his shoulder. He ended up separating it and missed 34 games.

What was interesting though is that when he came back after recovering from the injury there was one thing that was missing: he no longer was doing that arm stretch over his head anymore before each pitch when he was up to bat.

I won't argue for sure that the recurring stretch is what caused the injury, but at the same time, I think it would be hard pressed to say that the stretching he was doing was helpful in any way.

I bring all this up because there's more evidence coming out that static stretching before a workout isn't what it's been worked up to be over the last umpteen decades.

Traditional stretches, like when people bend over to touch their toes or stretch their legs on a fence, often cause the muscles to tighten rather than relax — exactly the opposite of what is needed for physical activity.

The body always works towards balance so this completely makes sense.

When you stretch before exercising, your body may think it's at risk of being overstretched. It compensates by contracting and becoming more tense. That means you aren't able to move as fast or as freely, making you more likely to get hurt.

The researchers are NOT saying that you should not stretch at all. They are just saying don't do static stretching before a workout. If you want to static stretch after a workout or at some other point in the day, that's okay since you're not doing an activity right after that might increase your chance of injury (at the same time, I'll take it a little further though and again say that if a muscle doesn't need stretching, then there's no reason to static stretch it).

This is probably the most important part of the article to dispel the myth that static stretching before a workout reduces the chance of injury:

In the last few years, several studies have found static stretching before playing a sport makes you slower and weaker.

And when experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention combed through more than 100 papers looking at stretching studies, they found people who stretched before exercise were no less likely to suffer injuries such as a pulled muscle, which the increased flexibility from stretching is supposed to prevent.

Does all of this mean that you should just throw on your shoes and start working out?

No, I wouldn't advise that.

These studies that we are talking about are only dealing with static stretching.

The more effective warm up or stretch to do before a workout would involve dynamic stretching.

Dynamic stretching would be doing movements that resemble more along the lines of what kind of activity that you're about to do.

If you're ready to run or walk, do some forward lunges, reverse lunges, squats, side squats, etc. If you're ready to do some bench presses with dumbbells, do pushups beforehand.

These types of movements will help get your body ready in a more practical manner to the exercise that you're about to do as well as increase your core body temperature. Which means overall, your entire body will be prepared and not just individual parts statically stretched in a movement that doesn't resemble the movement that you are about to take on.

Also, a quick note that also is talked about in the article: yoga.

Those types of stretches are commonly used in yoga, which emphasizes how the body is aligned during stretches, not just flexibility. Many yoga poses involve the whole body and focus not only on stretching a particular muscle, but the ligaments, tendons and joints around it.

Meaning, yoga is a different animal and it's not just all about statically stretching individual muscles, it's about stretching the body as a whole. So don't take this kind of study to mean that yoga is a bad or a potentially dangerous exercise to do.

Static stretching before a workout has been common practice for a long time and I'm glad to see that it's getting more press that it's not all up to what it claims to be.

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Weight Loss for Busy Women

We live busy lives. Get up in the morning, get the kids ready for school, go to work, come home from work, take the kids to their after school activities, cook the family dinner, help the kids with their homework, get the kids into bed, and then try to decompress for a little bit before going to bed ourselves. Wake up in the morning and repeat that cycle.

Where can you find time for exercise in all that?

It doesn't help that a study comes out that states in order for women to fight the flab, they need an hour a day of exercise.

At least an hour of moderate activity a day is needed for older women at a healthy weight who aren't dieting. For those who are already overweight — and that's most American women — even more exercise is called for to avoid gaining weight without eating less, the study results suggest.

One hour each and every day is a pretty tough sell. In a follow up to the article above, many women tend to kind of scoff at the idea:

Dr. Mary Tillema, 42, a neonatologist at the medical center, said an hour a day of moderate exercise will be tough. "I think that's a lot to ask of the typical person. If I don't watch what I eat, I gain, even though I try to consistently exercise."

Which is important to note that the study only dealt with looking at women that were exercising and not changing their diet. Diet is the most important part of weight loss. You can add in all the exercise you want but if you continue to eat a pizza a day, you're not going to see the scale drop much.

What makes me a bit curious though is that the study only talked about "moderate" exercise. According to the article, "moderate" exercise is defined as something such as brisk walking, leisurely bicycling and golfing.



Those are fine to do but, what if you were able to exercise at a higher intensity, for less time?

I had talked about a little bit ago in a post about interval training studies where subjects that did six interval training sessions of a 30 minute workout on a bike over a period of two weeks was just as effective as doing 10 hours of steady state cardio over the same period of time.

Meaning, you could cut the "moderate" exercise of 10 hours over a course of two weeks to three hours over two weeks if you increased the intensity to a "high" level.

30 minutes a day, three days a week of a high intensity workout to fight the flab.

Does that sound more doable for a weight loss program for the busy women of the world?

I've got a new product that is the PERFECT fit for this.

It's called the 30 Minute Workout.



It's a workout you can do three days a week that will take 30 minutes to complete AND it's a workout you can do right in your own home with the only exercise equipment that you'll need is a stability ball (which should only cost you between $10-$20 to purchase).

The workouts are intense, but, they use only your bodyweight as the resistance that you'll need to burn more calories than you would if you were to take a "moderate" walk for an hour.

Every month you'll get a new workout that will tell you exactly what to do, when to do them, and give you a description of each exercise so that you have the perfect form.

Actually, you'll get TWO workouts a month: One that will always be for a beginner, and the other one will be either an intermediate or an advanced workout (they will rotate from month to month).

The program also comes with a fat loss nutritional guide because as I mentioned, if you're not going to change your diet, then the exercise you add in isn't going to make much difference in your weight loss.

The cost? For the first month it's just $4.95 and after that it's $11.95 a month.

Think of it this way. This is a workout that you can do at home, with nothing more than a stability ball. No need to get in your car and spend the money on gas to go to a gym. No need for a gym membership. No need to hire a personal trainer.

It's a workout plan you can do right in your own home for less than $12 a month.

Still unsure?

How about if I let you tryout a 30 Minute Workout first before committing. In fact, I'll let you try out THREE workouts for FREE before committing one penny.

Just go to link below and you'll see a place where you can fill out your name and e-mail address and then you'll be able to download THREE sample workouts to try out and see if it's something that works for you.

Weight loss for busy women can be tough if the experts say that you need to exercise 60 minutes a day. But with the 30 Minute Workout, you can get BETTER results in more than HALF the time.

30 Minute Workout

You've got nothing to lose in at least trying these out for free. Give it a shot. You'll be shocked as to how effective they really are.

30 Minute Workout

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Adaptation in Humans

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

-Lou Holtz

I really find human evolution amazing and find it even more interesting when looking at the adaptation in humans that we've gone through and continue to go through.

When you think about it, the body so easily adapts to a change in the environment, what kinds of food you put in it, what kinds of movement or stress you put on it, etc.

I have a client of mine who is in his mid-50s that is in one of my classes that came up to me last night and told me that it had been one year since he had a heart attack.

It was a real eye opener for him and he said he felt lucky to have a second chance to turn things around from being unhealthy to being healthy.

He said he had always been overweight and in his words "I thought I was immortal. No matter what I ate or how little exercise I got, there weren't going to be any consequences to that."

But after that heart attack, he quickly changed his mind.

He started eating better, started exercising, and a year later, he dropped between 70-80 pounds and when he went to the doctor the other day for a stress test, the doctor was amazed at how healthy of a transformation he had made in just one year.

That's the amazing part about the adaptation in humans.

Even if you've been living an unhealthy lifestyle for 10, 20, even 30 years, of eating horrible foods, gaining weight, being sedentary, etc., in the big picture, it does not take long for your body to adapt positively when you start making healthier decisions about what you eat and how you move your body for exercise.

It's great to hear that client of mine talk about how much better he physically feels now that he's making better choices about his health. How it puts a smile on his face to be able to chase after his granddaughter that he might not have been able to share time with if that heart attack had been a little worse.

The bottom line is that:

1) no one is immortal to unhealthy choices you make on how you treat your body. The effects might not be immediate, they might not even show up within 10-20 years, but at some point, it WILL catch up to you.

2) it's never too late to start making healthier choices AND if in the big picture, you stick with it CONSISTENTLY, your body will reward you fairly quickly to those healthier choices that you make.

For the most part, we don't control much that happens in our lives. We don't control whether we get hired for a job, laid off from a job, lose our health insurance, or see a loved one get seriously ill.

But the one thing that all of us have control over, is the ability to decide how well we treat our bodies.

Your body is your gift and it's your choice whether you want to treat it well or not.

FRIDAY LINK:

Just a quick link to an article that might surprise you on bad breakfast foods.

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Effects of Food Additives

I'm not a big fan of processed food and all the effects of those food additives.

I think you can get by in life simply eating meats, fruits, veggies, nuts, and some oil.

But I found a good article that goes over the effects of food additives and which food additives are the best to avoid. I'm not going to go over all of them but a few caught my eye to talk about a little more.

1. Artificial Sweeteners. Shockingly, I'm not horribly against these when taken in very LOW dosages. Granted, I guess i'm kind of biased since I have a one Diet Coke a day requirement an hour or so before my daily workout, just for the caffeine energy boast. Regular soda is bad and if I'd like to see any progress on decreasing the amount of regular soda and it meant people switching to diet soda and not water and just continuing to drink regular soda, I'll pick diet soda.

2. High Fructose Corn Syrup. Very simply, I hate HFCS. Don't see anything good about it and I hate the fact that at the same time our government talks about improving the health of Americans they are giving massive subsides to the farming communities to make more corn, to then be processed into High Fructose Corn Syrup, to then be turned into this fake sugar, that in turns is helping lead the way to larger American waistline.

3. Hydrogenated Oils. These are pretty much where the Trans Fats come from and thankfully the FDA now requires that food manufacturers actually list on the nutritional labels how much trans fat is in a product. Studies on trans fat pretty much show that it causes your LDL cholesterol (bad stuff) to increase and your HDL cholesterol (the good stuff) to decrease. So stay away when you see it listed on a food label.



The article gives some pretty good tips for how to evaluate the ingredients for the bad food additives and they're pretty simple.

1. Choose foods that don't have a lot of ingredients listed and the ones that are listed are recognizable.

2. If your grandmother wouldn't recognize the ingredient, then it's more than likely man-made so stay away from it.

3. Probably my favorite and one I always preach: if you can't pronounce it, then it's more than likely processed.

There's a lot of bad effects of food additives so be careful of what's inside the foods that you think are healthy but might not be. Read the labels using the above criteria and that should help you make healthier choices.

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Sample Interval Training Workout

I was doing some reading on a few interval training workout studies last week that were conducted by some Australian researchers and experimented with a few options and thought I would give you a sample of what they were so you could give them a try yourself.

The first interval training workout I tried had you go at a high intensity for 24 seconds, and then recover at a lower intensity for 36 seconds.

I first started off with a slow warm up for 3 minutes and then at the 3 minute mark went high for 24 seconds, then slowed down for 36 seconds, then high again for another 24 seconds followed by another low intensity for 36 seconds. I continued doing this until the clock had reached 20 minutes and then did a cooldown for 3 minutes.

It was a good workout and I definitely felt spent when I was done.

I was doing this workout on an upright stationary bike and it might be possible to do this on a treadmill but the bike seemed more practical since you could easily switch between the high intensity and low intensity fairly quickly (by the way, resistance is more important with these when using a bike rather than speed. Try to pick a resistance that you can only pedal between 70-80 RPMs on the high intensity bouts).

A couple of days later, I tried another interval training workout based on what the Australians did where the high intensity is 8 seconds and the low intensity is 12 seconds.

Again, I warmed up for 3 minutes on the upright bike and then started with the intervals after that until the clock said 20 minutes.

This was a good workout but I didn't like the practicality of it.

It takes at least 3-4 seconds to reach the appropriate RPM range so you're really only getting about a 4 second burst.

This workout is completely impractical on a treadmill and even if doing this outside on a track or something seems impractical since again, it's going to take you at least 3-4 seconds to reach your top speed.

Overall it was a good workout but, I just thought the intervals were just a bit too short for practical purposes.

The last interval training workout that I tried was meeting in the middle of the other two: 16 seconds at the high rate, 24 seconds at the lower rate.

I did this on the upright bike again, started out with the 3 minute warm up and then did the intervals until the clock hit 20 minutes.

This one felt harder than the 24-36 intervals and I felt the most spent from this one compared to the other two methods, which kind of surprised me. Again, I'm not sure how practical this would be on a treadmill, but might work if you were doing sprints outside.

For overall fat loss, I dropped quite a bit of weight last week when incorporating these (along with staying in line with my eating) so the fat loss results working with these are pretty impressive.

As I mentioned in a prior interval training post, you can get good results when doing these types of routines without going completely all out. You need to push yourself but you don't necessarily have to go at a rate that you would if someone was chasing you with a knife.

Overall, I would suggest using the 16-24 method and the 24-36 method for a good interval training workout. Give them a shot and let me know what you think.

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Heart Disease in Women and Men

It's estimated that in 2006, there were 81,100,000 case of heart disease in women and men in the United States. Granted, this number takes into account anyone with high blood pressure to all out cardiac arrest but, when looking at that number, it's still pretty staggering.

I'll spare you my soapbox against the argument that red meat is to blame for this and talk about a new study that came out showing a connection between eating simple carbs and heart disease in women and men.

This study looked at not only the number of carbs ingested by people, but also looked at the glycemic index of those carbs.

Taking in foods that are higher on the glycemic index are associated with higher levels of triglycerides and the lowering of HDL cholesterol (the good kind) which in turns can increase your risk of heart disease.

The Italian researchers in this study had over 15,000 men and 32,000 women fill out questionnaires of their dietary intake and then followed them for 8 years.

What they found:

..the researchers found that women who consumed the most carbohydrates overall had about twice the incidence of heart disease as those who consumed the least. Closer analysis showed that the risk was associated with higher intake of high-glycemic foods.

"Thus, a high consumption of carbohydrates from high-glycemic index foods, rather than the overall quantity of carbohydrates consumed, appears to influence the influence of developing coronary heart disease," the researchers wrote.

What's really interesting is that they didn't find this same connection between high glycemic index foods and heart disease among men.

The researchers speculated that:

The difference might be due to the action of sex hormones....Male hormones, androgens, appear to slow the transformation of carbohydrates into blood sugar, whereas the female hormone estrogen speeds the process, she said.

The researchers concluded that women need to focus not only simply low in carbohydrates but low in simple sugars.

"Look at the label," Steinbaum said. "It says 'carbohydrates.' Under that, it says 'sugars.' When you have a high number for sugars, that's a way to know what the glycemic index is."

I REALLY don't like that simplistic view of how to connect a food to it's glycemic index, and I'll go even further to say I don't even like the use of the glycemic index when evaluating whether a food is "good" or "bad."

Here's an example of what I mean.


An apple. Using what she says and only looking at the sugar content of a cup of apple, out of 22 carbohydrates, 16 of them are sugar. So using what she is saying, that must mean that the glycemic index on that apple is high and should be avoided.


Then let's look at white bread. In 40 grams of white bread, there are 30 carbohydrates and out of that only 7 grams are sugar.

But when you look at the actual glycemic index of both of these foods, an apple rates anywhere from 28-40 (which would rank as low out of a scale of 100), and white bread is ranked anywhere between 70-100 (very high).

So I think the researcher's try at simplifying things won't work for a lot of different foods (especially fruits since they tend to be for the most part, composed of simple, natural sugars).

The whole glycemic index might be useful in some ways but from a practical standpoint, it can just make things more confusing. Most of these foods would show the estimated spike in blood sugar only if the situations were right: empty stomach, it was the only food being eaten, and you ate enough of it.

But most people rarely find themselves eating foods all by themselves. If you add protein and fat to carbs in a meal, that protein and fat slows the absorption of that carb (even the high glycemic index carbs) into the blood stream.

In the end, a lot of carbs are processed and the best thing we can do is just stay away from them.

I think it would go a long way in changing heart disease in women and men in this country if you stuck with eating just meats, fruits, veggies, nuts, and oils and for the most part, leave out the rest.

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