How to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life

The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball—the further I am rolled the more I gain.¹

A man’s age is something impressive, it sums up his life: maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves. A man’s age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories.²

Blueberries versus bioengineering. In essence, that’s what the current landscape of antiaging science breaks down to: lifestyle versus genetics. On one hand are those whose primary focus is on extending human life span though the diligent, preemptive application of the science we know works today: testing and screening for disease, healthy diet (the antioxidant-filled blueberries), exercise, mental challenge, social contact, and the like. These advocates, led by such figures as best-selling author Dr. Andrew Weil, tend to hold the position that while cutting-edge, anti-aging research has exciting potential, it has not yet yielded any proven advances that can slow down or reverse aging, so let’s work with what we know gets results. There’s logic to this: why sit around and let your body decay waiting for some genetic miracle when you can act now, make lifestyle changes, and add decades?

On the other side are the antiaging scientists, led by such individuals as Steven Austad, PhD, professor of Cellular and Structural Biology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and a leading advocate for the aggressive pursuit of new antiaging research, usually occurring in the human genome. This work suggests the possibility of fulfilling the greatest of human desires—the substantial extension of human life span—in the coming decades while laboring under the burden of enormous expectations. How can it not, when some members of this movement utter the highly charged word immortality at the drop of a hat?

We’ve said that aging is inevitable and that the wise person accepts that fact and does the most he or she can to make the best of the rest of life.And that’s true—today.Many researchers in the field of experimental gerontology believe that medical science will make inroads against age-related degeneration and may even eventually halt the cellular death that leads to the aging of our bodies. Right now, that’s not possible. Ten years ago, we couldn’t look into the human genetic sequence to find the causes of disease. Today,we can. It would be foolish to assume that because we don’t yet know how to manipulate genes to give humans 300-year life spans that we won’t in the future.

The only bullets we can fire at the Grim Reaper today, though, are the ones we’ve known about for years: eating fruits and veggies, working out, and so on. Wisdom dictates that we focus on what we can do now while supporting legitimate research that might yield breakthroughs in treating the underlying causes of aging.

But that raises a question:Which factor has more to do with how we age, lifestyle or genetics? Let’s take a look at that, though as you may have guessed by the title of this chapter, you’re not as much of a slave to what mom, dad, and your grandparents bequeathed you as you might think.

An Unequal Ratio

A woman at a retirement home where 80 percent of the residents are women sees a new arrival lying poolside— a man in his early 60s, quite good-looking. Hoping to snare him before any of the other women, she goes down to introduce herself. After some pleasant small talk, she asks him, “So, how did you end up here?”

The man says, “I killed my wife, dismembered her body, and dumped it into the ocean,” he says. “I was tried for murder, but they didn’t have enough evidence and had to let me go. So I moved here, because I heard there were a lot of rich widows.”

The woman takes this all in for a moment then says, “So, you’re single then?”

In 1984, the John D. and Katherine T. MacArthur Foundation convened a group of sixteen elite researchers from a variety of disciplines to embark on a decade-long series of studies of aging. The goal was to create a “new gerontology” that would counter the hoary, debilitating cliché that old age doomed one to a later life of senility, immobility, and obsolescence.

The findings of what has become known as the MacArthur Foundation Study of Aging in America were galvanic.According to its results, seniors in America do not view their lives as hopeless and view their health as generally good. Furthermore, it appears that illness, declining mental performance, and detachment from life are not inevitable for the elderly. But the most important outcome of the study was that genes are only responsible for 25 to 30 percent of our longevity. The other 75 to 70 percent is a little bit of luck but mostly lifestyle choices. This finding is accepted as fact by gerontologists and antiaging scientists around the world.³

You really do have control over your life span and your “healthspan,” the period of time in your life that you are well, active, vital, and mentally sharp. Where some researchers are primarily concerned with the length of life, others believe that science should zero in with equal intensity on the quality of life—helping people stay healthy and active years or decades longer, even if their life spans don’t increase appreciably.

We think it should be a balance between the two. No one wants to live 150 years but spend the last fifty of those years blind, crippled, and bedridden. At the same time, if you told us we’d live to eighty-five but be dancing the tango until age eighty-three, we’d take it.

“The focus is so much on the length of life, not the quality of life,” says Dr. Austad in an interview for this book. “I think that’s why the public is dubious about this whole enterprise to lengthen life. I think if you said, ‘How about making people healthier for 50 percent longer,’ people would say, ‘Yeah.’ But the easiest way to measure research is to talk about longevity.”Let’s face it, for most of us quantity of life isn’t enough. We want all the best parts of our lives to be longer:

• Soulspan—The period of volunteering, giving back, making a difference, and being spiritually alive and awake

You should accept nothing less.And it’s becoming clear that more than ever, that means making smart, healthy lifestyle choices.

Every so often we’ll see the sentiment on a bumper sticker: “Eat right. Exercise. Die anyway.” Funny, but telling. There’s no question that certain lifestyle choices have been shown to extend healthspan and life span, but then every so often a George Burns will come along and live to a hundred despite years of smoking and throw all the theories to the wind.Mark Twain said it perfectly at his seventieth birthday celebration in 1905:

I have made it a rule to go to bed when there wasn’t anybody left to sit up with; and I have made it a rule to get up when I had to. In the matter of diet, I have been persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn’t agree with me, until one or the other of us got the best of it. I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. As for drinking, when the others drink I like to help. I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome.⁴

Twain would live to seventy-five, some twenty-seven years beyond the average life expectancy of his contemporaries. As the author of Roughing It, his denunciation of exercise was probably a bit of curmudgeonly role-playing. But the fact remains that some individuals who defy the accepted “no smoking, no drinking, hard exercise, and smart diet” wisdom do outlive those who adhere to it. Why? Is there some other aspect of lifestyle that affects longevity as much as what we put into our bodies and how we move them? As it turns out, yes. All aspects of lifestyle merit some examination.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years.

Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion. ⁵

You can see the effects of lifestyle on life span simply by looking at the root causes of the major diseases that kill us: cancer, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, and diabetes. Time and again, we see the incidence of these diseases rise in countries that become wealthier and adopt more Western lifestyles: heavy meat consumption, less exercise, higher levels of obesity. A 2003 report released by the World Health Organization showed that due to tobacco use, unhealthy diets, and aging populations, global cancer rates were on the rise, with fifteen million new cases expected by 2020. Cancer was once thought of as a Western disease; it now kills more people in the developing world than in industrialized nations. Diabetes may be the biggest scourge; statistics suggest it will be our number-one killer in a decade.⁶

When Doris Haddock was “only” eighty-nine, she decided she was fed up with the corrupt US campaign finance system, which led to corporations having all the influence over which legislation was passed in Congress. Did she write a letter? No. She walked across the United States.

“I could see that the House was not going to do anything about the McCain/Feingold bill,” she says. “The Senate began sending us notes basically saying, ‘Dear little old ladies, we’re going to pass that bill,’ and the same thing happened: nothing. I knew the only way to get it passed was to wake up the public. The only thing I could see was to do the walk.”

Her son was dubious that she could walk 3,200 miles at her age, so he made her do a training regimen to prove she could handle it. “I went out and laid on the ground in a sleeping bag in November,” she says. “I begged for food and shelter, like a pilgrim. I had to learn to thumb a ride. I lived on trail mix for a week and walked ten miles a day with twenty-nine pounds on my back. At the end of the year, I came to him and said, ‘I’m ready.’”

In 2004, having already become a celebrity in New Hampshire, she decided to run for the Senate as a Democrat against a well-funded Republican opponent. Despite entering the race only three months before the election and being out-fund-raised, $2.8 million to $166,000, she garnered 34 percent of the vote and is widely credited for giving New Hampshire to John Kerry in the presidential election.

Today, despite throat surgery, she remains active as a speaker. “I’m just an ordinary old woman,” she says. “People write to me all the time and tell me I’m an inspiration, but anyone could have done what I did. Having a purpose gives you a reason to keep on living after sixty-five.”

Logically, if we can bring on many of the diseases of aging by engaging in foolish habits, we can stave them off by engaging in healthy ones. That’s borne out by an increasing body of research:

• Clinical studies are underway throughout the world to confirm what many scientists already know anecdotally: turmeric, the Asian spice that gives curry its yellow color, wards off such diseases as Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, and colorectal and other cancers.⁷

• A ten-year study in Japan, in which researchers from Gifu University in Japan looked at the consumption of soy and oil-rich fish by nearly 30,000 residents of a single town, showed that the men and women who consumed the highest levels of soy were the least likely to die during the study. Fish oil also appears to play some role in women’s longevity.⁸

• A study by Gary Fraser of the diet and lifestyle of Seventh-day Adventists found that their lifestyle—largely vegetarian diet, regular exercise, no tobacco or alcohol use, strong spiritual beliefs— substantially reduced their risks of coronary artery disease and cancer.⁹

• A 2001 study published in the Official Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine looked at 347 elderly Dutch men and assessed the effects of their exercise habits on their cognitive abilities. The authors concluded that engaging in more than one hour per day of physical activity at an older age may reduce the risk of cognitive decline.¹⁰

• A Norwegian study of 15,000 men and women linked higher dietary calcium intake to lower blood pressure. Other research also points to calcium as a preventive factor for colon cancer.¹¹

• A long-term study by Dr. William Strawbridge and other researchers published in the American Journal of Public Health in 1997 showed that individuals with a strong religious faith who regularly attend religious services have lower blood pressure, are less likely to suffer from depression, cope better with illness and injury, have a greater sense of well-being, have stronger immune systems, and live 23 percent longer than those with no religious faith.¹²

• A 2005 study by American and Japanese gerontologists revealed that while obesity had little effect on the longevity of adults over age seventy, being obese after seventy gave them a far greater probability of spending their remaining years disabled.¹³

• A six-year study of Chicago residents has shown that eating fish once a week provides omega-3 fatty acids that boost brain function, reduce the risk of stroke, and delay age-related dementia. The research of Joe Mercola, M.D., suggests that omega-3 also prevents skin cancer when taken daily.¹⁴

• A study led by a Yale University researcher of 660 men and women in Ohio showed that adults with positive attitudes about aging lived an average of seven years longer than those with negative attitudes.¹⁵

• Researchers at the University of California–San Francisco found that women under chronic stress may suffer damage to the DNA of their immune system cells, causing cells to reach the end of their reproductive lives faster, die sooner, and accelerate the aging process.¹⁶

• And of course, there’s the so-called French Paradox, in which the French and Italians, who eat rich foods and fats and cheeses in abundance, have much lower rates of heart disease. Scientists now think the paradox has to do in part with the Mediterranean diet, rich in olive oil and other beneficial fats, and also with the drinking of red wine, which contains resveratrol, a powerful antioxidant thought to lower the risk of cancer, atherosclerosis, heart disease, and brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

In an article in Time magazine, Dr.Bradley Willcox of the Pacific Health Research Institute in Honolulu said it best: “You could have Mercedes-Benz genes, but if you never change the oil, you are not going to last as long as a Ford Escort that you take good care of.”¹⁷ Surprisingly, gerontologists and other scientists who study the progress of aging say that many who reach one hundred and beyond are in surprisingly good condition, presumably because they have passed the age, thought to be around ninety, where if they were going to develop the destructive maladies of age, they would have done so already. The thinking now is that if you can make it to your 90s, you stand an excellent chance of making it to triple digits in good shape.

There are false starts and contradictory findings, but with studies and hundreds of clinical trials planned or underway around the world to study lifestyle factors from diet and smoking to stress and remaining employed in old age, a clear picture is emerging: genetics may be the foundation on which you build your health, but the lifestyle choices you make determine the quality of the house that rises and how long that house will endure.

One of the most common assumptions about lifestyle is that taking loads of antioxidant supplements helps fend off a strike force of diseases from cancer to macular degeneration. When our bodies metabolize food, our cells throw off extra electrons called free radicals, which can also form from immune system activity and as a result of environmental factors such as pollution and pesticides. These solo electrons need to pair with other electrons, so they steal them from healthy cells. The result, over time, is cellular damage, cell death, and even genetic damage. So life really is a fatal disease with no cure.

Antioxidants such as vitamin E and vitamin C “donate” electrons to the free radicals, preventing them from damaging cells.Millions of people down billions of dollars in antioxidant tablets and vitamins every year to achieve this effect. Unfortunately, research suggests that supplements may not be the answer.Multiple studies have shown that while eating plenty of antioxidant-rich foods does reduce the risk of some cancers, heart disease, and other afflictions, taking supplements may not. For example, a Danish study of more than 170,000 people considered at high risk of gastrointestinal cancer determined that antioxidant pills—with the exception of selenium— were “useless” in preventing GI cancers. Some speculate that there may be other compounds such as phytonutrients in fruits and vegetables that make the antioxidants more effective.¹⁹

So if you want to get the full benefits of antioxidants, you can’t be lazy, eat garbage, and pop a handful of pills each morning. You’ve got to hit the farmer’s market and chow down on your daily dose of green leafy vegetables, red peppers, carrots, and the like.

Another lifestyle choice open to question appears to be Caloric Restriction (CR), which has become a cause celebre in many antiaging circles. The idea is that if you restrict your calorie intake to 1,200–1,500 calories per day (the average adult man needs 2,500–3,000 calories daily), you reduce the metabolic activity that produces free radicals and in so doing reduce cell damage. However, cutting calories by one-third appears to increase life span in worms, insects, and mice, but there is no evidence yet that it does the same for humans. The few people who have put themselves on a restricted-calorie diet have shown, however, some health improvements such as dramatically lowered cholesterol and healthy weight levels thanks to less food intake. Chances are, we’ll know more in a few decades.

Our big gripe with CR is about quality of life. Is it worth an extra ten or twenty years of life if you can never eat the foods you love or sit down to a meal with friends because you’re watching every single calorie? No doubt some people will say, “You bet it is.” That’s fine, but we think there are just as many who would refuse to give up the pure pleasures of food. So the jury remains out.

But the biggest myth is that people who live to one hundred while retaining their ability to work, play, and engage in life are the beneficiaries of some genetic secret. They’re not. According to a 1988–1998 study conducted by researchers at the University of Georgia, healthy centenarians show a wide variety of traits that seem to affect their ability to remain vital and active. There does not seem to be a magic bullet, but factors of function, ability, and personality appear to have a great deal to do with a person’s ability to stay vibrant past one hundred. In other words, a long life span and a long healthspan appear to be equal-opportunity events. “We interpret these results from the optimistic perspective that any person may have a chance of living a long and productive life,” said Leonard Poon, director of the UGA Gerontology Center. The university is currently engaged in Phase 3 of its centenarian study, set to conclude in 2006.²⁰

What about our genes? Are they just the foundation for the edifice of our longevity or something more? Could the secret to slowing or even reversing aging lie within the human genome? It’s a controversial topic among scientists, but most agree that if humans have the capacity to live well beyond the current accepted ceiling of 120 years with any sort of health and function, our genes hold the key.

Lifestyle, you see, can only do so much. Leonard Hayflick, professor of anatomy at the University of California–San Francisco, the father of modern gerontology, and the discoverer of the point where cells reach the end of their ability to divide and replenish themselves (now called the Hayflick Limit), makes that point in candid terms. He says that if you cured all the diseases that ravage us in our dotage—cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes— you would only add thirteen years to life expectancy.²¹ Still desirable, of course, and we would doubtless live healthier and happier, but because our cells still wear out and break down, our bodies will still inevitably deteriorate.

Clearly, if we’re going to extend healthy, useful life by many decades or even centuries, as some antiaging evangelists claim is possible, we need to focus on our genes. And that is a field that is complex, controversial, and not without promise.

But what role do genes play in life span? Turns out they’re not the all-powerful force we thought they were. Ever since James Watson and Francis Crick published their findings about the structure of DNA in 1953, most people have assumed that you were the slave of your genetic code; with it set, the balance in your life’s bank account was deposited, and when it was used up, so were you. The belief in the power of the gene led to a dangerous fatalism, in which some individuals who became morbidly obese or developed cancer simply blamed their genes instead of making lifestyle changes to prevent disease. Why bother when longevity is determined by the genetic blueprint, which can’t be influenced?

Today we know better. We understand that genes determine inherited characteristics from our eye color to our propensity to develop plaque buildup in the arteries. In effect, your genes decide the likelihood of your developing a disease, being overweight, losing your hearing, and a million other aspects of living. But except in the case of incurable genetic diseases like Huntington’s, your DNA does not hand down an ironclad sentence that states, “You will live sixty-three years and five months and not a day longer.” Genes determine what could potentially occur in your body; lifestyle decides whether that potential becomes reality or not.

We also know that genes do change. The damage caused by free radicals can damage the DNA in your cells, and it’s this damage that some researchers believe may be behind many types of cancer. Conversely, if you eat a diet rich in antioxidants, you will protect your cells and your DNA from damage from rogue molecules. So your genes are neither all-powerful nor beyond your influence. Far from it: every lifestyle decision you make influences how much of your genetic inheritance you manifest.

Where genes take center stage in antiaging research is when the talk turns to the root causes of aging. Why do our bodies break down? Why do cells live a certain amount of time and then inevitably decay? Researchers are just beginning a deep investigation of the genetic and molecular causes behind aging. It’s a field regarded with some skepticism by the rest of the scientific community, but antiaging researchers are united in their passion for what they say is not only real, hard science, but of potentially world-changing benefit to the human race. Research is looking into a staggering variety of areas of human cellular biology seeking the mechanisms that cause our cells to age, lose their ability to function and reproduce, and ultimately die. The goal is not just to find the causes of and prevent the diseases of aging, but in the end to slow or even reverse aging itself.

In his book Merchants of Immortality, Stephen S. Hall presents one such example of the thousands going on worldwide: a company called Sierra Sciences in Reno, Nevada, which claims to have discovered molecules that might allow cells to replenish the control devices at the ends of our chromosomes, called telomeres, that determine how often a cell can divide before it starts to die. If such a molecule could be turned into a drug, then in theory people could take a pill that would lengthen their telomeres, allowing cells to go on dividing and resetting the aging clock. It’s an extraordinarily complex, speculative possibility, but it suggests the incredible potential for life extension that cellular biologists and geneticists are only beginning to tap.²²

Antioxidants are organic compounds, including vitamins C and E, vitamin A (which is converted from beta-carotene), selenium (a mineral), and a group known as the carotenoids, which are the pigments that make carrots orange. Found mostly in brightly colored vegetables and fruits and leafy greens, they are thought by most health professionals and aging experts to be crucial to maintaining your health as you age.

Antioxidants are powerful because of the basic chemistry our bodies use to turn food into fuel. When our cells use oxygen as a catalyst to metabolize food molecules into energy, an extra oxygen electron called a free radical is often left over. Oxygen molecules hate to be alone, so they try to steal an electron from a healthy cell, damaging that cell in the process. That damage, occurring billions of times in our lives, can cause serious damage to cell walls and cell structure and can even damage DNA, which can lead to uncontrolled cell growth, also called cancer. Your body can also produce free radicals when exposed to cigarette smoke or pollution.

Antioxidants “lend” an oxygen molecule to pair off with the rogue free radical molecule, preventing it from damaging cells. That’s why conventional wisdom now suggests that consuming plentiful amounts of antioxidant-rich foods (supplements don’t appear to have the same beneficial effects, though they may have some) can keep you healthy longer.²³

In response to questions for this book, Dr. Michael Elstein, the Australian antiaging physician and author, writes about some of the most promising aging research going on now:

• The development of so-called genome remedies, drugs which could be engineered to target and repair damage in DNA and would be individualized based on each patient’s genome.

• Extensive research taking place at the University of Colorado, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and other locations to discover the genes of aging. These studies include isolating longevity-causing mutations in worm genes, finding genetic pathways that imitate the effects of insulin in a manner similar to restricting calories, and the discovery of an amino acid that declines in aging muscle, heart, and brain tissue but has been found to extend the life spans of mice.

• Work with telomeres in controlling and killing the growth of cancerous cells, the only cells in the body that can reproduce indefinitely. Elstein writes that using telomeres to slow down aging is difficult. However, he adds that “Geron Laboratories in the United States has already employed telomerase (the enzyme that regulates telomere growth) to increase the life span of human cells from the skin, blood vessels, eyes, muscles, and immune system.”

• Animal models of aging. “A big aspect of the research today is about gene variants associated with longer life,” says Dr. Steven Austad in his interview. “There have been dozens of genes discovered in worms, mice, and flies that if you disable them, they live longer. Some of these are the same genes in all cells. This is hot news because I don’t think anybody’s ever thought you’d find the same genes in animals as different as a fly and mouse that would have the same effect. Nobody is proposing that we genetically alter people to make them live longer, but these genes suggest there are molecules in our genes that can be targeted to make us live longer.”

When I was forty, my doctor advised me that a man in his 40s shouldn’t play tennis. I heeded his advice carefully and could hardly wait until I reached fifty to start again. ²⁴

Where antiaging science gets contentious and dicey is where people start talking about what can be achieved and when.Mainstream scientists like Austad insist that “hard” science is making progress but in slow, measured stages. Then there are the immortality prophets like the epically bearded Aubrey de Grey, a researcher at Cambridge University in England, who has become the poster boy for the aggressive science side of aging exploration.This movement takes a much more gung-ho view of longevity research, promoting claims of sometimes dubious scientific standing through organizations with names like the Immortality Institute.

Writing in response to our questions, de Grey insists that with proper funding, “we have a fifty/fifty chance of seeing advances in twenty-five years” that will extend human life spans to potentially millennia. “Should our culture see aging as inevitable? Absolutely not! It is obviously something we can defeat, just as rust on a car is.”

Austad takes a different view: “There’s a huge divide appearing in the literature between real science and pop science,” he says. “There’s a difference between being an amusing eccentric and being a salesman. I think longevity evangelists are actually doing a great deal of harm making these outrageous statements about making people live longer.”

Whether you believe antiaging science must proceed slowly and cautiously or that dramatic breakthroughs are on the horizon with the right attention and funding, one fact remains: right now what we can do is make lifestyle changes to make the most of our 120-year potential. Says Hayflick, “I do not expect that intervention in the fundamental aging process will occur in our lifetime—or in the lifetimes of our children.”²⁵

• Eat a varied diet rich in a wide range of fruits and vegetables and with a balance of protein, carbohydrates, and healthy fats (mono-and poly-unsaturated fats). See the World’s Healthiest Foods Web site (www.whfoods.com) for great lists of healthy foods.

• Get enough fiber, 40 grams or more a day. The average American is lucky if he or she takes in 15 grams per day.

• Shop the perimeter of the supermarket, where the least processed foods are. Stay away from the middle aisles unless you need toilet paper.

• Include soy in your diet. The Chinese have extremely low rates of breast cancer, and they claim that soy is the reason.

• Take supplements including vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, folic acid, calcium, ginger, turmeric, and fish oil. Or try taking nutriceuticals, formulations of vitamins, minerals, and other compounds designed for specific effects on the body.

• Lift weights. Studies show that even people in their 90s who have never lifted weights before can see huge benefits.

• Work puzzles, take classes, keep working—anything to keep your mind stimulated and challenged.

But perhaps the most important thing you can do is to think like a vital, energetic person who is determined to defy the idea of getting old. Life is full of people like George Burns or Bob Hope, who lived very long, productive lives while ignoring the conventional wisdom about staving off age and disease. Are such people just winners of the genetic lottery? We don’t think so. There is something most centenarians appear to have in common: a love of life and a stubborn refusal to think of themselves as old.

“I believe the key to avoiding the debilitation of old age is staying productive, doing something that’s going to help not only yourself, but somebody else,” says Barbara Morris, R.Ph., who at a fabulous-looking seventy-six is a practicing pharmacist and author of Put Old on Hold. Interviewed by us for this book, she maintains there are five keys to keeping old age at bay:

1. Have a clear vision of you and your life twenty-five years from now. “When I was ten years old, I knew I didn’t ever want to get old, she says. “I saw a picture of a pretty young woman in Ladies Home Journal, and I told myself, ‘That is how I always want to look.’ That picture is just as sharp and clear in my mind today as it was then. That vision has motivated me to achieve what I have.”

2. List the youthful attributes you want to have in twenty-five years. “I think we need to stay aware of what it means to be old. We need to observe old people to see what it is about their oldness that we want to avoid and appreciate the youthful attributes we have right now. You’re going to have to work to maintain those attributes. Youth is a gift; it’s free. Old age takes effort.”Make a physical list.

3. Develop daily antiaging habits.Morris, who works a ten-hour day as a pharmacist, says she doesn’t sit down during that long day.After work, she first jumps onto the treadmill and walks for thirty minutes, lifts weights, and does other exercises.“Staying young is going to take a cultural shift,” she says.

4. Engage in positive mental management. Morris suggests practicing positive self-talk and affirmation—you are energetic and full of life, and you are never too old to do something.

5. Believe it’s possible to put old on hold. Morris writes, “You can control the aging process—believe it. Here’s a great goal: as each day goes by, experience freedom, good health, and independence, fully able to enjoy the best years of your life.”

In other words, people who live to ripe, active, old ages all seem to refuse to let anyone else define their idea of old age.“Students in California can define their own gender, meaning they can define their own identity, appearance, or behavior,”Morris said during her interview. “And I say if that’s legal, it certainly ought to be legal for people to determine their perceived age on an employment application or something like that. Everybody knows what’s in them. We shouldn’t allow chronological age to limit our potential.”

What How to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life is really about is changing your definition of age. We have three different categories of age:

1. Chronological, which measures how old you are by the clock and the calendar. Unless you’re after senior citizen discounts at the movie theater, this is irrelevant.

2. Biological, which measures how old your body is according to cellular damage, toxins, and many other metrics.

3. Experiential, which is how old you feel based on your experience and your attitude toward life. Mark has tested over 10,000 audience members at his live seminars, and no one feels their chronological age. Most seniors feel twenty to forty years younger. Experientially, those who have really lived feel older.

We’re proponents of living by your experiential age because judging from the purposeful, self-possessed folks in their 80s, 90s, and 100s who are still out there working, creating, and enjoying life, your mind-set may be the most important longevity technology of all.

In his interview for this book, Dr. Dychtwald, psychologist, gerontologist, and author of eleven books on aging, including the recent The Power Years, says, “There are plenty of people who are just not acting their age. They’re not doing the ‘roll over and play dead’ thing. When John Glenn went up into space at seventy-seven, everybody said, ‘What’s an old guy doing that for?’ I think people who have lived this longer life and are still reinventing themselves, still growing, and still contributing, in many ways, are the real social pioneers of the twenty-first century.”