Turn Back The Clock

Feel Younger, More Energetic, Add Years to Your Life

What good is money unless you have the good health to enjoy it? The healthier you are, the better you will feel. The better you feel, the more you can enjoy life!

Good health starts with a positive mental attitude about life and yourself and is brought to fruition by proper diet and exercise.

Dr. William Evans, Professor of Applied Physiology and Nutrition at Pennsylvania State University, in the March 1995 issue of Men’s Confidential provides the following advice for feeling healthy and adding years to your life.

Build Muscle

It’s easy to write off pumping iron as a young person’s vain game, but maintaining muscle mass may be the key to warding off everything from diabetes to heart disease, according to Evans, who has been studying the processes of aging for over twelve years. Perhaps muscles’ most important contribution is maintaining a stable metabolic rate. As we get older, our metabolic rate decreases and, with it, our ability to burn calories effectively. The result: We store more fat from fewer calories. But it doesn’t have to be that way. “Although the metabolic rate does go down with age, it’s not age that’s the culprit, it’s declining muscle mass,” explains Evans.

And it’s never too late to turn up the metabolic volume. “Even people in their nineties can begin a resistance training program of high intensity that successfully builds and maintains metabolic-stabilizing muscle,” says Evans.

If you’ve been out of the lifting loop for a while, you’ll probably want to check with your doctor first and start slow. Evans recommends starting with a half-hour of high intensity lifting, either at home with free weights or using the machines at your local gym, two to three days a week.

Pump Up Your Heart

While building muscle is critical, it’s only one piece of the fitness puzzle: Keeping up your aerobic capacity is the other. “Regular exercise is emerging as one of the most important factors in staying young in mind and body,” says William Rakowski, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Medical Science at the Center for Gerontology and Health Care Research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “Not only can it help in weight and blood pressure control, basic biological vigor and stamina, but it can also improve your basic outlook on life.” If that’s not enough to convince you to get into those walking shoes, aerobic exercise has also been proven to help you sleep better, think more clearly, and keep osteoporosis at bay.

And there’s no need to take up marathoning. Walking for 20 minutes a day, three to four days a week, can go a long way to meeting your aerobic quota. Throw in taking the stairs instead of an elevator and parking deliberately far away from your destination to give yourself a short jaunt, and you’ve got your basic fitness bases covered.

Stay Sexually Alive ( One Of My Favorite Ways To Stay In Shape!!!!!!!!)

Although the millions of cells that make up our immune system start to become less aggressive as we age, leaving us more vulnerable to colds, infections, and other nagging ills, there is a way to power up your immunity: Reduce stress. And what better way to fight stress than to have sex.

“Sex is one of the greatest stress busters around,” says Reed Moskowitz, M.D., Founder and Medical Director of the Stress Disorders Medical Services at New York University Medical Center and author of Your Healing Mind (1993, Avon). Physical responses to stress–the flight-or-flight sensations of panic, tense muscles, sweaty palms, etc.–are caused by the buildup of adrenaline, which is alleviated by the act of sex in two ways. Physically, the rhythmic contractions and ejaculation men experience during sex release messenger molecules, know as endorphins, into the body. These endorphins turn off the panicky sensations brought on by the adrenaline and set off pleasurable responses that help to relax tense areas all over the body.

Emotionally, the good sensations brought on by sex will help you to feel better and allow you to refocus on positive things instead of the stressors themselves.