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

According to Morris, she takes about 200 pills per day as part of this routine, washing them down with a whey protein drink. That’s a big investment of time and money, but does it work? Well, she’s seventy-six, still working, and looks great, so she’s not complaining.

“Am I taking too much? Probably, or in some cases, maybe not enough,” she writes in explanation of her regimen. “I go by results. I have no typical old age diseases such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, memory decline, etc. At work, which requires mental alertness and physical stamina, I am on my feet for ten hours, filling prescriptions, counseling patients, taking phone calls, and constantly making decisions that require focus and precision. I must be doing something right!”

The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one’s self:

The work is done. But just as one says that, the answer comes: “The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains.” The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be while you still live. For to live is to function.

Morris also emphasizes that by no means should anyone simply copy her supplement plan. “I don’t advocate that anyone take the supplements and/or quantities that I take,” she says. “What I take is based on my experience as a pharmacist and researcher. Everyone must educate himself or herself, in conjunction with a qualified physician or nutritionist, as to what is best for them.”

Nutriceuticals are combinations of vitamins, minerals, phytonutri-ents, and other compounds specifically formulated to address a specific health issue such as memory, weight loss, or prostate health. You hear about them all the time—such herbals as saw palmetto, advertised as helping to support prostate health, or gingko biloba for memory and mental function. Since so many grandiose claims are made and so much money is involved and because nutriceuticals are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, this is an area where you should exercise extreme caution.

• Research centers such as the University of Arkansas Department of Horticulture are finding numerous benefits in compounds from such plants as spinach and cowpea.

• Turmeric shows promise both as a super antioxidant and in preventing neurological diseases.

• While claims as a brain booster are unproven, ginkgo biloba does improve blood circulation and may provide relief for conditions ranging from Alzheimer’s disease to macular degeneration to erectile dysfunction.

• Saw palmetto does reduce the discomfort from a benign enlarged prostate and can prevent the gland from becoming larger.

• Resveratrol is the “secret ingredient” in the skin of red grapes, a phytochemical that is both a potent antioxidant and a powerful anti-inflammatory that can reduce cholesterol levels and heart disease risk.

There are thousands of substances and combinations of substances that could fall into the category of nutriceuticals (you can learn about the individual substances at a great Web site, www.wholehealthmd.com, in the Reference Library), and many do have wonderful benefits. Others are scams. In dealing with nutriceuticals, it’s best to follow a few simple rules:

Stress is to our modern culture what demons were to the people of the Dark Ages: the malevolent cause behind everything that goes wrong. Overweight? Blame stress. Have high blood pressure? It couldn’t be that you eat fast food six times a week, don’t work out, and pour salt on everything in sight, could it? Nah.Must be stress.

Stress is the most misleading health problem around. So let’s get something out of the way right here and now: there’s nothing wrong with stress. Stress is just your body’s physical response to a situation where more physical capacity is needed—the “fight or flight” instinct. When a stressful situation appears, hormones such as cortisol, norepinephrine, and adrenaline get dumped into your system, increasing your heart rate, increasing the flow of blood to your brain, making you feel wired and hyperaware (that’s why time appears to slow when you’re under stress).

It’s your body’s way of clearing out the unnecessary functions so you can deal with a threat. There are actually three kinds of stress:

The stress response is necessary and even beneficial. When you’re working on a deadline or dealing with a dangerous situation, your stress response gives you the quickness of mind, agility, and strength to do what you must. In the short term, the stress response can make us perform better and achieve more. It’s chronic distress that’s a problem. The body’s fight-or-flight mechanism evolved to deal with threats to life and limb like rival tribes or wild animals; it was never meant to be switched on ten hours a day dealing with the rigors of bumper-to-bumper traffic. When you’re under stress constantly, the stress hormones do damage to your body and may actually shrink certain areas of the brain. Sustained distress can also elevate blood pressure and has a deeply negative effect on mood.

Now comes new evidence that chronic distress actually advances the aging process. A 2004 study directed by researchers at the University of California–San Francisco looked at the effects of chronic stress on the genes of mothers caring for chronically ill children. The study revealed that the physiological effects of stress actually damage the telomeres, the structures on the end of chromosomes that determine how often cells can divide before they begin to die. Shortened telomeres equal shorter healthy cell life, which leads to tissue breakdowns, muscle failures, hearing loss, reduced brain function, and the other classic maladies of age. This new information would explain why people who suffer from prolonged emotional strain seem to age and become ill before their time.¹⁵

Obviously, you have a vested interest in reducing the impact of chronic stress on your health. And if you’re nearing the age when you’ll refire and turn your back on working for someone else, there are numerous ways to do that: Exercise. Find purpose and meaning in your later life. Do what you love with people you love. When you’re busy and productive and not worrying about money, you’ll find that your stress level barely registers.

According to the 2003 Sleep in America Poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation, 26 percent of adults 55 to 64 rated their sleep as fair to poor, as did 21 percent of those 65 to 84. The poll found that while older Americans generally do not get less sleep than their younger counterparts, 37 million do experience frequent sleep problems that can complicate treatment for such conditions as arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, and depression.¹⁶ Stage 4 sleep, the deep sleep during which the body and mind repair themselves, may be altogether absent in some older people. But sleeping poorly and waking up tired are not normal parts of aging. Of course, you may be one of the millions of Americans who has chosen not to get enough sleep. In his interview, Bortz called our obsession with minimizing sleep “a national epidemic.”

The average adult needs from seven to nine hours of sleep a day in order to recover from exercise, purge the body of lactic acids and other toxins, and make complete use of nutrients. Whether sleep problems are due to anxiety or inactivity, or just years of habitually not getting enough sleep, if you’re to have a healthy, active Second Prime, you’ve got to build sleep into your lifestyle.

“The importance of sleep to healthy aging is often overlooked in the medical community, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that good sleep could be a new vital sign,” said Robert N. Butler,MD, president and CEO of the International Longevity Center USA (ILC), in a November 2005 news release. “Poor sleep is a condition that needs to be addressed, diagnosed and treated—it could be as important as nutrition, exercise, and social engagement to the health of older adults.”¹⁷ But how do you address it safely? A 2005 Gallup survey released by the ILC showed that 77 percent of older adults expressed concerns about the long-term effects of prescription sleep aids, with addiction being the obvious greatest concern. But drugs are quick fixes for problems that can be solved safely and naturally with some changes in lifestyle.¹⁸

In Dare to Be 100, Bortz suggests changing the typical time you fall asleep by doing things like taking a warm bath two hours before the time you want to go to sleep. Eating later will have the same effect, lowering body temperature to bring on sleepiness faster. He adds that many things can help improve sleep habits:

• Dealing with worrisome things early in the day, rather than late. (The ILC survey showed that worry over caring for aging parents was one of the most common factors in Baby Boomers’ ability to sleep.)

Another excellent way to get more sleep is to create a routine around going to bed: go to bed at the same time every night, engage in the same preparatory activities, light candles, put on relaxing music, meditate. Engaging in the same activities as a precursor to sleep helps signal your body that it’s time to stand down and begin relaxing. Reading in bed also seems to help many people fall asleep, but if you fall asleep in the sack while reading this book, please don’t tell us. It would hurt our feelings.

A reporter was interviewing a 104-year-old woman: “And what do you think is the best thing about being 104?” the reporter asked.

She replied: “No peer pressure.”

To us, there are two kinds of vanity. First, there’s the bad vanity, the kind that keeps you from using hearing aids and eyeglasses and other technologies that can enhance your life, that drives you back to the cosmetic surgeon for one expensive surgery after another, that leads to self-loathing and depression when you finally realize that the youthful, clear-skinned person you once were is gone forever. That’s the type of vanity that hardens older people, turns them bitter and angry.

Then there’s the positive vanity, also called “healthy body image.” It’s the vanity in which you accept that yes, you’re changing as you age, but you’re going to do whatever you must to look the best you can in your 70s, 80s, and 90s. What’s more, you refuse to be a frumpy old codger—you’re going to dress well; keep your hair, beard, and nails neat; keep your teeth healthy; and always look your best when you go out or entertain at home. The first kind of vanity denies that with the passage of time come changes that can’t be avoided; the second accepts that those changes will come, but resolves to make the most of them. The first is born of fear, the second of pride. We’d rather live proud than afraid.

Pride in how you look makes you exercise more, eat better, and dress more attractively. Knowing you look good gives you confidence and enhances your sex drive. It also gives you the élan to flaunt your age, not hide it. If you look good and feel good, you’ll take pride in your wrinkles. You’ll enjoy the stares you get from men or women twenty years your junior as they watch you pass. You’ll get a kick out of confounding the expectation of what an “old person” is supposed to dress like, walk like, or look like.

To lengthen your healthspan, you have to quit thinking about being disease-reactive and starting thinking about becoming disease-deflective so that disease and physical breakdown pass you by, looking for easier targets. Fitness, great diet, supplements, and rest are your Kevlar body armor against illness. You’re a hard target, so disease goes elsewhere for easier prey. You make yourself disease-deflective by doing all the things we’ve talked about in this chapter. You also work with a team of health-care practitioners who work with you to keep you well—whatever you need to help you live the long, healthy life you covet.

There is, of course, a place for conventional medicine. We’re strong believers in screenings such as colonoscopies, mammograms for women, and prostate screenings for men. Certainly it makes abundant sense to have an annual physical so you can catch any problems at their earliest stages. But beyond that, running to your primary care physician and being handed another pill bottle at the slightest sign of an ache or pain? That’s crazy. But how do you create a health-care support system that’s disease-deflective when health insurance companies are so focused on conventional medicine? Answer: you swim out of the mainstream.

“The new movement is called consumer-directed health care or CDH,” says Paul Zane Pilzer, economist, entrepreneur, and author of The New Health Insurance Solution, in an interview for this book. “The average large company health-care plan today in America costs $14,000 per family each year. Companies are now allowed to say to employees, ‘We’ve been spending $14,000 for your family. Here’s $14,000 a year, tax-free. You must buy health insurance with the money, and whatever you don’t spend, let it roll forward to next year.’ Now, every time you pick up a prescription at the doctor, you’re going to ask, “Is there a generic available? Is there something in the same category that will do the same thing for half the money? Because every dollar I don’t spend on health care, I get to keep.”

Pilzer says consumer-directed oversight of the cost of health care will alter the landscape completely. “It changes everything overnight,” he says. “All of a sudden, the health-care industry, which is currently $2 trillion, or one-sixth of our economy, joins the rest of our economy. When someone delivers good health care at a good price, you’ll run over there, and when someone delivers bad health care at a bad price, you won’t go back. People can direct that money into wellness and prevention programs instead of just treatment of symptoms programs, and of course they’ll accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars in health savings accounts for their future health care and retirement, when they’re no longer working.”

If you’re in the Baby Boom generation, chances are you’re still working and may have access to this kind of HSA or health savings account. According to Pilzer, four million Americans are covered by such an arrangement, and he expects hundreds of millions more to be covered in the next twenty years. “We will look back on the era from 1945 to 2005 as the dark ages for American health care, when the only way to get decent health care is through your employer,” he says.

But what if you’re already retired from a full-time job and moved on to your refirement, something that doesn’t give you the option of an HSA? There are other options for you:

• Convenient storefront clinics, located in consumer shopping meccas like Wal-Mart and Target stores. Going by brand names like Redi-Clinic and Mini-Clinic, these clinics offer services at a much lower price than hospitals and deliver more respect for your time. Show up at a busy time, for example, and they might hand you a pager and invite you to go and shop, and they’ll page you when the doctor or nurse can see you.

• You can get your own family health insurance policy and open a Health Savings Account, which will allow you to save up to $5,450 per year tax-free toward covering your medical expenses. But get such coverage early, before you or someone in your family develops preexisting conditions.

• Concierge health plans. These plans, which you arrange with private personal physicians, are in addition to the premium and deductible of major medical, prescription, or catastrophic coverage you might have. Here’s how it works: to see an internist or general practitioner who offers concierge service, you must first join his or her practice by paying an annual premium, ranging from $2,000 a year at the low end to as much as $20,000 at the high end. In return, you get a personal physical each year where you’ll discuss sleep habits, nutrition, medical history, and so on; same-day appointments, and sometimes even private Web pages with your complete updated medical history. For those patients who can afford it, concierge care is like a return to old-fashioned small town doctoring. Find out more at www.conciergephysicians.org.

“People need to change their health insurance to a program that rewards them for being healthy,” says Pilzer in his interview,“that lets them save each year tax-free what they don’t spend on current health care, that automatically gives them and their family members the incentive to make the proper health choices, because the proper health choices are also going to save you money. You don’t need health insurance to pay for things you’re never going to use.”

When you look at how your body ages as a product of the choices you make, age-related decline ceases to be an inevitability. “A lot of people unconsciously assume that they will get-old-and-die: one phrase, almost one word, and certainly one seamless concept,” write Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge, MD in their book Younger Next Year:

[They assume] that when they get old and infirm, they will die soon after, so a deteriorating quality of life does not matter. That is a deeply mistaken idea and a dangerous premise for planning your life. In fact, you will probably get-old-and-live.You can get decrepit if you like, but you are not likely to die; you are likely to live like that for a long, long time.Most Americans today will live into their mid-eighties, whether they’re in great shape or shuffling around on walkers . . . good reason to make the Last Third of your life terrific— and not a dreary panoply of obesity, sore joints, and apathy. “Normal aging” is intolerable and avoidable. You can skip most of it and grow old, not just gracefully but with real joy.²¹

Senior fitness instructor Bartholomew gets the final word. In response to our questions, she writes: “Physical deterioration and its resulting psychological consequences may be typical, but they are not normal! It occurs when personal health loses status as a priority . . . until it is lost. The good news is that many conditions brought on by a sedentary lifestyle can be eliminated, delayed, or improved. The future of this country and its elderly is not in ‘sickness care.’ Rather, it depends upon healthy lifestyle choices.”

Second Prime Strategy—Body

1. Things to Do

• Map out the exercise you get each week and find ways to add more.

• Talk to a personal trainer or sign up at a gym.

• Track your diet and find ways to add more fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and raw nuts.

• Adjust your schedule to get more sleep.

• Talk to your physician about a personalized supplement program.

• Drink at least eight glasses of water daily.

• Look into ways to lower stress such as quiet time, walks in nature, prayer, deep breathing.

• If you don’t already, start scheduling annual checkups and regular dental visits.

• Catalog the ways in which you would like to improve your appearance.

• Start doing online research into alternative health insurance.

2. Changes You Need to Make to Improve Your Health

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3. Your Body Goals for Your Second Prime

Example: “Get down to my college weight in 12 months.”

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4. Body Resources
General Health

• Eternal Health (www.eternalhealth.org)

• National Institute on Aging (www.nia.nih.gov)

• Alliance for Aging Research (www.agingresearch.org)

• Infoaging.org (www.infoaging.org)

• The Okinawa Centenarian Study (www.okinawaprogram.com)

• American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (www.worldhealth.net)

• Mayo Clinic (www.mayoclinic.com)

• Medline Plus (www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus)

Movement

• National Senior Games Association (www.nsga.com)

• Geezerjock magazine (www.geezerjock.com)

• International Council on Active Aging Fitness Facility Locator (www.icaa.cc/facilitylocator.htm)

• Fifty Plus (www.50plus.org)

• Senior Fitness.com (www.senior-fitness.com)

• About.com (http://exercise.about.com/od/exerciseforseniors)

• Helpguide.org (www.helpguide.org)

Diet

• The World’s Healthiest Foods (www.whfoods.com)

• Diabetes Danger (www.diabetesdanger.com)

• Nutrition Action Healthletter (www.cspinet.org/nah)

• WholeHealth MD (www.wholehealthmd.com)

Supplements

• Office of Dietary Supplements (http://ods.od.nih.gov)

• US Food and Drug Administration (www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/supplmnt.html)

• NatureMade (www.naturemade.com)

Sleep

• National Sleep Foundation (www.sleepfoundation.org)

• Sleepnet (www.sleepnet.com)

• The Better Sleep Council (www.bettersleep.org)

Health Insurance

• The New Health Insurance Solution (www.tnhis.com)

• Extend Benefits (www.extendbenefits.com)

• eHealthInsurance (www.ehealthinsurance.com)

• Alternative Health Insurance Services (www.alternativeinsurance.com)

• Society for Innovative Medical Practice Design (www.conciergephysicians.org)

• Fitness and Wellness Insurance Agency (www.fitnessandwellness.com)

Books

• 121 Ways to Live 121 Years and More! by Dr. Ronald Klatz, president, American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, and Dr. Robert Goldman, chairman, American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine

• The New Health Insurance Solution by Paul Zane Pilzer

• Dare to Be 100 by Walter M. Bortz II, MD

• Younger Next Year by Chris Crowley & Henry S. Lodge, MD

• Merchants of Immortality by Stephen S. Hall

• Aging Well by Andrew Weil, MD