Archive for the Anti-Aging
You’ve probably never thought about whether or not your blood is healthy. One might ask, “If I’m healthy, isn’t my blood healthy?” Maybe we should back up and ask, “What makes for healthy blood?”
Blood is the essence of life. It moves cells, oxygen, proteins, nutrients, and waste materials through the body every second. It is a life support transport vehicle. In order to flow freely our blood must be just the right consistency, or viscosity. Poor lifestyle choices, stress, drugs, and more can thicken the blood by various means. Thick blood cannot flow freely through the capillaries. The system becomes sluggish. While cholesterol gets all the attention in terms of heart disease and diabetes it’s inflammation that leads to toxic blood which leads those problems.
According to Dr. Steven Sinatra, “Toxic Blood Syndrome is an early warning sign for heart trouble to come.”
When blood is toxic and inflamed it is inefficient and is prone to clotting. Elevated viscosity, or thickness, is a starting point for coronary and peripheral artery disease. Inflammation and increased blood thickness have been linked to age related cognitive decline, increased long term risk of CVD in men, depression, heart disease, diabetes, and more.
How to keep your blood healthy?
Test don’t guess. This is one of my midlife health mantras and blood work is at the top of the list of tests I recommend. If you haven’t already ask your doc for a CRP test. CRP is manufactured in the liver in response to inflammation and is a reliable marker. Ideally your level will be below 1 mg/L. If your level is very high that could indicate an auto-immune problem or cancer so you must work with a knowledgeable doc on this. Add in a test for your Fibrinogen levels. Fib is a clot-regulating protein and a marker for your blood’s stickiness and viscosity. If yours is over 350 mg/dL-you will want to dive right into the prevention strategies below.
QUIT SMOKING! Smoke increases fibrinogen levels among other things you already know.
Eat an Anti-Inflammatory diet–This would be very low in sugar which is terribly inflammatory, high in vegetables, low glycemic carbs, with plenty of healthy fats like olive oil, coconut oil, avocados and avo oil, nuts, grass fed proteins and wild fish.
Take Your Supplements–You can deny they make a difference or you can just get on the program recommended by Harvard, Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, and many more bastions of conservative medicine who are on the leading edge. A basic multi, fish oil, 2 grams per day, Vitamin D, 2 grams per day, Magnesium and potassium from foods and an extra 400- 500 mgs as a supplement.
Reduce your stress Everything about the stress response is designed to thicken blood so in the case of a Saber tooth tiger claw to the gut you don’t bleed out. Of course that seems ridiculous to us today but the physiological process remains the same.
Take care of your teeth and gums–one source of heart disease and inflammation is periodontal disease. Brush, floss, gargle with something natural not full of sugar and alcohol.
Drink plenty of hydrating fluids. You know that you should be drinking half of your body weight in ounces of water per day right? Well go grab a glass!
Exercise No need to beat this one to death. Add in healthy blood vessels and reduced inflammation to the benefits.
Ground yourself This is a topic I’ll cover extensively in another post because I’m really excited about the potential but let’s just say that with all the EMFs flying around, we need to rid them from our systems. The best way to do this is to put your hands or feet in contact with the ground, the sand, or the grass. “The known effect of grounding is that it discharges and prevents the buildup of electrical stress. Walking barefoot on the Earth, as humans have done throughout history, naturally grounds and discharges the body. The most reported benefit from people who place their bare feet directly on the Earth and ground themselves is that they “feel better.” You know I live to find ways to help us midlife women feel better and this is revolutionary.
If you want more information right now head over to this site and spend some time reading. If you can’t get barefoot on the ground there are all sorts of mats, and sheets etc one can buy to get the same results.
What will you do right now to help your blood stay healthy and free flowing? In this case prevention is much easier and less painful than the alternative.
You do have one don’t you? At the very least you have good intentions right? Well, not to be a drag, a pill, or a party-pooper, but if you want to enjoy the privilege of good health, you got to plan on it.
In Daniel Pink’s book called A Whole New Mind–excellent read by the way on how the world has changed from left brain thinking to a right brain driven, whole brained approach–there is a chapter on design. What I read got me thinking about how we design our lives–or leave the design to habit, chance, others. Pink quotes the renown architect Frank Nuovo as saying “Design in its simplest form is the activity of creating solutions, Design is something that everyone does every day.”
True enough. We design schedules to get in all of the most important “to dos” like work, shopping for food, personal hygiene, time with family etc. If we are following some sort of plan for our lives the design should support us getting where we want to go.
In the case of living young into an old age–I’m hoping we share that goal–without designing or including some specific lifestyle habits known to increase the chances of doing that, we leave ourselves open to a mess. Think lime green walls, orange shag carpet, deco lamps and marble top tables. I’m feeling a little sick right now, you?
Even the most outrageous interior design contrarians among you would be rearranging in no time. Liken this room to aging with no plans, no design in mind for the rooms you want to inhabit.
Sure you know the food and exercise regs, you’ve heard me and others drone on about knowing your numbers, getting your annual physical done–by a doctor you can talk to please–getting a good night’s sleep etc. So, are you? When was the last time you had your fasting blood sugar levels checked? When you get your blood work done and the doc says, “Everything is fine” but you wake up tired each day, toss and turn at night, can’t lose weight, and don’t have a bm every day, are you fine?
My answer is, “No.” You might reply that “it’s normal for me.” Guess what, none of those symptoms are things you should live with. They are not normal, they mean something is out of whack and more than likely within your control.
The sooner a problem is discovered the better off you are in terms of getting over it.
You’ll need a physician you can talk to who specializes in working with the whole body. You must educate yourself about how good it’s possible to feel, not what’s “normal.”
In order to confidently design a plan that will keep you upright, intact, able to put words together to form sentences, you’ve got to know where you are right now and that requires getting the facts that only testing can give you. “Test don’t guess” says famed nutritionist to the stars, JJ Virgin and I agree.
Then you can create a bold design of a healthy life. You can add outrageous activities, splashes of decadent delicious culinary treats, and enjoy the living rooms of your creation. Until you’re sure your foundation is firm, confidence feels risky and live is random movement towards a blurry end point.
Get help for direction, accountability, and support. Another of the designers that Daniel Pink mentioned is Paola Antonelli. To paraphrase her, “Design is giving the world something it didn’t know it was missing.” Can you design a healthy life and give yourself a few things–wonderful things–you didn’t know you were missing?
A while back the associate producer sent me an invite to watch this all-things-boomer show. I’ve never had the change as it plays locally way past my bedtime. But I continue to get the emails and the topics were fascinating enough that I had to click through to their blog site for a preview now and again.
Good news, I don’t have to stay up late–and miss my literal beauty and health sleep–you can watch all the episodes that have played, right on their site!
Last week’s was about how it feels to age–literally. A professor up in Nova Scotia created something called The Empathy Suit to give his students an experience of how it feels to move about your day in an elderly person’s body. Made me want to go to the gym. Check it out.
The half hour also covered whether or not replacement surgery should be the default for pain and quality of life and, you won’t believe this, Martha Stewart. What’s she got to do with aging? Come on, she’s as adept at extending her brand as anyone out there and she’s opened The Martha Stewart Center for Living at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC. As the host, Robert Lipsyte says,”From the cradle to the grave with Martha.” She smiled that “It’s good to be Martha” smile of hers.
I had to laugh when she said about her book in progress, “I’ve written the book on how to take care of your home I should be the person to write a book on caring for yourself and your loved ones.” Really.
The show has covered topics like, plastic surgery, dating at midlife, spirituality and aging, Alzheimer’s, and lots more. It’s never the same old stuff and the guests are a mix of experts, medical people, authors, actors and so on.
I’ll leave you with a clip from the show when Robert Interviews Faye Wattleton, former president of Planned Parenthood turned actress, speaker, news commentator, on their plastic surgery episode.
Click this link to watch the video
What the heck does that mean you may be asking and what has it got to do with midlife?
Science has discovered that the genes we are born with are not a static bunch of cells that doom or bless us with our height, health, disease, and jean size. Far from it. And that includes the idea that at the very least genes determine height, frame, eye color. Science cannot explain from a genetic point of view why tall kids are born to short parents. The assumption that it’s better diet has been ruled only one possibility as the younger generation of Phillipinos is growing shorter despite better economic conditions.
In truth there are at least 20 genes that determine height. And science now can’t even decide whether height is 90% gene directed or only 20%!
These facts and so many interesting others come from Deepak Chopra’s newest book, Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul.How to Invent a New You. I’ve long been excited by the science of epi-genetic control–the science of genes and how they turn on and off–and Dr. Chopra’s book is full of wonderful examples of how this works in real people’s lives and the science behind it all.
So what’s this got to do with you and midlife? Right around the middle, for many women, our bodies really start to change. Hormone production is erratic, systems that allowed us to beat them up with no consequences are speaking up, and the diseases associated with our lifestyle choices start to show their symptoms. Add to this that many of us have stories that include reasons for our weight, our illnesses, and our levels of happiness or discontent as being “genetic.” Here’s where it gets really good. You don’t have to tell that story–or have results you don’t want–anymore.
When you were born your genes began adapting to how you thought, felt, and acted. The genes of 70 year old twins looked wildly different than they did when they were born–no longer even close to identical. Life–how we think and feel as well as the environment we choose for ourselves–turns genes on and off.
Translation, you don’t have to have diabetes because it “runs in your family.” You don’t have to gain weight at midlife because it happens to all the women in your family.
“Genes are the most complicated thing about the body. Yes there is simple truth behind them, which is this: you can change your genes, and therefore you can improve them. You are talking to your genes when you do simple things like eating and moving” so says Dr. Chopra in chapter 4. Could there be more of an incentive to eat foods that heal and support healthy aging and get some exercise? Not to mention that you feel better when you do but come on people. We have the power to create our second half with a vengeance. We are not victims to the familial gene pool.
If you want an easy to follow version of this science–with some exercises to help– I recommend Deepak’s book. If you want to hear Dr. Bruce Lipton on the subject, he’s sort of the designated voice of epi-genetic control, use this link to see a 6 minute video. It’s just fascinating.
