It was mid-morning on Grand Cayman Island as I sat reading in a lounge chair in the shade of a casuarina pine. The sun was out, there was a slight breeze, and very few people were on the beach.
I looked up and saw him running like I had so many times before. I had watched him for several years, running the same route at least three days a week. He never wore a shirt, and the skin under his hairy shoulders was almost black from years of sun exposure. He was trim, muscular, and his stride was not all that fast, but it was consistent. I guessed him to be in his early sixties.
I got up out of my chair to trot along beside him and ask about his exercise routine. But when he saw me approaching, he stopped to talk. I couldn’t believe how healthy and muscular he looked up close. He was Italian and had grown up in Italy, but he had worked in Saudi Arabia and Alaska for a worldwide contracting firm. He had been transferred to this island thirty years ago to help construct hotels and for the past ten years had stayed here in retirement. He was the epitome of good health.
I complimented him on his health, and that is all it took to turn on his “brag button.” He immediately began telling me about his lifestyle. He ate mostly vegetables. He had weights and a stationary bicycle in his home. Three days a week, he was on his bike two hours in the morning. Three days a week, he jogged six miles on the beach. When he worked hotel construction on the beach, he would use his lunch break to swim a half mile straight out into the ocean. “Of course,” he said with his Italian accent, “I had to swim the same distance back.”
He had recently been tested physiologically. “I tell you my results,” he said with his accent that made me smile. “I am seventy-five, but the machine say I am sixty-one. I’m younger than I am.” He flexed his arms and pulled his shoulders back. “Most of my friends my age on this island are old. They sit around and drink, and play cards, and watch television. Plus, they’re fat—most of them.”
Then he made the statement that made me admire him the most. “I want to be active when I die.” He smiled and trotted off down the beach, waving with one hand without even glancing back.
That said it all. He didn’t want to be active until a year before he died. He didn’t want to be active until he died. He wanted to be active when he died. I don’t know what the rest of his life is like, but I want to be like him physiologically.
With the Prescription for Life plan, you should be able to add seven to twelve years to your life expectancy, depending on your present condition. But what good is it to live longer if your mind doesn’t recognize your friends or family? What good is it to extend your life if you are barely able to get around? What good is it to live more years if you are going to sit in a wheelchair and stare or be bedridden for the last part of your life?
No good at all—unless you are physiologically healthy during those extra years. And that’s what this plan is all about. You can actually become younger physiologically than you are right now. With the Prescription for Life plan, when your chronological age is sixty-eight, your physiological age can be fifty.
You are about to begin a life-changing journey that will be worth far more than all the money you will ever have in your bank account. I like to use Charles Dickens’s 1843 story, A Christmas Carol, as an illustration. As you probably recall, Ebenezer Scrooge is the principal character. Three ghosts come to him on Christmas Eve, and the last of the three is the ghost of Christmas “yet to come.” This ghost takes Scrooge to a grave, where no one mourns the man who has died, where all he had in material goods is now for naught. The ghost reveals to Scrooge that this is his own future if his present course doesn’t change. As you know, Scrooge makes a decision to change because he realizes in that moment what his future will be. He changes his course and turns his life around for the good.
This book will show you where you will end up if you continue on a wrong course. More than half of Americans are on that path, eating the wrong foods, enjoying life as couch potatoes, and not maintaining their ideal weight. They will hasten their demise if they stay on that course, if they choose not to change their direction.
It is sad to live in a world that dark—especially if you don’t even know you need to change. You don’t want to look back five years or ten years from now and say, “What might have been . . . if only.”
Scrooge woke up the next morning realizing he could change. People do change. And no matter how good your lifestyle of eating, exercising, and weight control may be presently, even if it is great, it can get better.
If you’re ready to make a change for the better, it will be helpful to find an accountability partner or group. Studies show that such support increases your exercise time by 20 percent. It works similarly in losing weight. Get a partner and you can both watch your physiological age decrease. Get a partner or join a group and commit to developing the three most important lifestyle strategies you can ever follow to remain as young as you possibly can.
Your journey begins here to get you on the right course, “yet to come.”