For centuries, ever since the legendary Ponce de Leon went searching for the elusive Fountain of Youth, people have been looking for ways to slow down the aging process. Medical science has made great strides in keeping people alive longer by preventing and curing disease, and helping people to live healthier lives. Average life expectancy keeps increasing, and most of us can look forward to the chance to live much longer lives than our ancestors.
Many researchers think that the key to our own personal Fountain of Youth resides in our hormones and endocrine system. These are the various organs and glands that make hormones in our bodies.
We are all aging constantly. The unpleasant fact is that every single one of us begins aging the moment we are out of the womb (at least it beats the alternative). If you’re living, you’re aging; you can’t avoid it. But there are a number of things that you can do to keep yourself healthy and active, and to eliminate or at least slow down many of the factors that contribute to aging.
Is it possible to turn back the clock?
Your body was designed with the inbuilt ability to fix itself, as long as you take care of it properly. It is made up of something like 100 trillion (100,000,000,000,000) living cells, that will keep themselves strong and healthy with the proper food.
Each and every one of those trillions of cells dies off and is replaced with a new cell at regular intervals. As amazing as it may be to contemplate, your entire body is completely replaced every few years – so you really are not the same person you used to be!
One theory posits that the nucleic acids, or telomeres, in our cells shorten slightly every time one of our cells replicates itself.
Each time the cell is duplicated, it’s a less than perfect copy of the previous version, and this eventually leads to the body’s aging, breakdown, and death.
What happens with your cells is the key to slowing the aging process because, when a cell dies, one of three possible things must happen:
Somewhere in our thirties, many of us start noticing the first signs that we aren’t kids anymore – a few gray hairs begin to appear, we see lines in our face, our skin starts to sag here and there. As time goes by, other signs gradually appear – it’s a little harder getting up in the morning, our vision and hearing aren’t what they used to be, our sex life isn’t as lively as we remember. And we look around us and see the same things apparently happening to our friends and family. Most of us pretty much accept what we see as an inevitable process of our biological nature, over which we have no control.
But this is a huge mistake!
The human body can take an awful lot of abuse and neglect. We don’t always think about our bad habits, since it may take years or decades for the effects to become apparent. But neglect yourself long enough, and you may one day find yourself suffering through the late period of your life with a wide range of maladies and complaints, from difficulty seeing and hearing to cancer, heart disease, brittle bones, and many other problems.
Yet it only takes a little knowledge and a bit of application to prevent most, if not all, of these common old-age problems from manifesting. There’s no magic pill or instant cure, and it may take some effort on your part. But the results will be well worth it - how much would it be worth for you to enjoy your final years as a healthy, active adult, able to continue doing many of the things you most love?
People are living longer than ever these days, due to advanced medical breakthroughs, increased awareness of the importance of a healthy lifestyle, and other related factors. But you can go a lot further. You can most definitely affect your rate of aging by using the principles outlined in this book.
As you notice your body looking and feeling younger, your mindset will improve too, which will motivate you to continue your anti-aging practices, and that will set up a positive feedback loop, instead of a negative one, and so the process accelerates.