Looking at the empty posts, I couldn’t help but wonder if the other side would now follow suit, retaliating by ripping up the signs of the opposing view. As I jogged past the remaining signs and imagined them gone too, I realized that if this were to happen, it wouldn’t matter which side had started it. The notion of citizens on either side of the debate demonstrating their respect for freedom and democracy (to say nothing of peace and/or patriotism) by trampling on the rights and property of their neighbors was disturbing.

While I ran, I tried to imagine the mindset of the late-night sign stealers. Did they really believe the best way to represent and serve their cause was to deprive others of their right to free speech? How did this act of petty theft sync with their personal values and the values of the movement they were representing? Had they paused to consider any of this before acting? Or after?

It suddenly struck me that for a country whose political history is associated with an overarching emphasis on the individual – individual rights, individual liberties, individual initiatives – the United States is also a land in which individual self-knowledge is often surprisingly limited and compartmentalized.

That’s no surprise. From school age, we are mostly educated to see areas of our lives as separate and distinct. Reading is distinct from science is distinct from history. Art, music and gym are distinct from academic classes; classes are distinct from recess and lunch; and school often seems totally distinct from the rest of reality. People rarely ask us about our “inner life” or encourage us to think big, connecting thoughts about our relationships with others.

If we’re lucky, as we get older, we develop deeper insights about how people and things and systems relate. However, much of our culture still encourages us to see our professional goals as distinct from our personal values, our health and fitness challenges as distinct from our emotional and spiritual concerns, our public acts as distinct from our private convictions.

The “I” of one context doesn’t always have a lot of interaction with the “I” of another. As a result, we begin resorting to situational ethics. We justify choices and behaviors in one area of our life that we would never dream of entertaining in another. Over time, as the separation between our categories grows more rigid, our sense of self becomes more fragmented. We rely increasingly on a narrow sense of “us” and “them” to help us define ourselves more confidently, and the more inclusive, more humane sense of “we” suffers.

I thought about all this stuff as I ran. By mile two, my sense of judgment and disappointment was displaced by a welling up of compassion – for all of us trying to understand and peacefully tolerate each other’s sometimes maddening differences. By the time I got home, my head was in a different place, calmer now, and beset by new questions – including some about the nature of my own categories and motivations.

I started thinking about the run itself. Was it a purely superficial, self-serving act, or was there a larger benefit from the 30 minutes I’d spent moving and thinking and feeling? Was it an exercise in simple cardiovascular fitness or an act of meditation and contemplation? Had it made me a better athlete, or had it, in some small way, made me a better neighbor, too? Perhaps it was about all those things.

The only hope of truly understanding anything about ourselves, it seems to me, lies in reaching in and looking out, cultivating both deep knowledge and broad integration whenever we can. Developing our best selves not only lets us more fully experience the potential of our own bodies and minds – ideally, it also helps us perceive the world around us in new, more hopeful and more generous ways.

In this and every issue of Experience Life, we present information and ideas designed to inspire you in both regards.

Of course, there’s a certain amount of risk involved. You have to give up a turn to do the switch, and there’s no guarantee that your new letters will be better than the old ones. But very often, they are: You end up with a vowel, or something that lands you on a triple-word score, or some magic letter that changes everything. Almost always, the exchange creates several new possibilities and gets your game moving again.

I think of this Scrabble rule as a great example of what “fresh starts” are all about: You get to take what is not working for you and exchange it for something that might work better – or that will at least open up some new choices.

Unfortunately, in life, as in Scrabble, we often end up “making do” with one particular set of options or assumptions for way too long. It’s not until we are utterly stymied that we consider exchanging some of our old approaches for new ones. It’s not until we are in a position of suffering and frustration that we finally give ourselves permission to give something else a try.

In this issue of EL, we’ve collected several articles that invite you to re-examine ingrained habits and patterns of thought – assumptions about what is safe and good for you, about how things are, and how they could be.

From the foods you eat and the way you exercise, to the products you put on your body and the things you throw away, to the ways you conduct relationships and the ways you communicate with yourself, we present the work of several writers who invite you to entertain unfamiliar ideas and to try some new habits on for size.

Because last spring’s “detox” issue was so popular, we’ve included several articles that address the topic of toxicity and the pervasiveness of toxins in our daily life and environment. Our intent is not to shock or depress our readers with any of this information. Rather, we’re hoping to inspire you to proactively evaluate whether certain habits are serving or disserving you, and the impact that various alternative choices might carry.

As always, we encourage you to read further on your own, to take up what works for you and let the rest slide back into the Scrabble box. Give yourself permission to rethink whatever needs rethinking. You don’t even have to give up a turn.

P.S. Should Life Time Fitness CEO Bahram Akradi’s letter inspire you to do some good old-fashioned spring cleaning this year, get expert de-cluttering tips from the “Clutter Busters” article that appeared in our Sept./Oct. 2002 issue, now available in the past-issue archives within the Experience Life Web site.

The fact is, the whole thing was a bit of an experiment. Not to say that we didn’t know what we wanted to achieve – we did! Right from the beginning, we were determined to create a magazine that would help its readers design a better body and a better life. Just exactly what that magazine would look like and read like, however, was harder to say.

We knew the magazine should support the Life Time Fitness triad of education, exercise, and nutrition, and that it would have to serve a broad audience without losing its integrity or focus. Four key content areas emerged:

1) Health, nutrition, wellness: Achieving and maintaining a healthy weight; eating well; supporting and optimizing the body’s natural processes; natural beauty and body care.

2) Athletics, fitness, exercise: Building strength, muscle, flexibility, endurance; developing athletic ability, body confidence and physiological know-how.

3) Quality of life: Expanding and deepening life-wisdom; sparking insight and broadening perspectives; inspiring personal development and achievement; supporting healthy life choices.

4) Adventure destinations, travel, outdoor experiences: Celebrating our health and hard-earned bodies by getting out in exciting locations; seeing and doing extraordinary, exhilarating things.

“Huh, cool,” we thought. “But how?” There wasn’t any one magazine we wanted to model ourselves after. Nor were there any guarantees that what we felt compelled to do with the publication would actually work. A bi-monthly magazine full of meaty articles on all those topics, with departments on everything from stress-management to natural cooking? It seemed a little quirky. But we had faith that if we built it, people would come: People who saw health and fitness as important parts of a larger puzzle, people who were interested in moving themselves and their lives in a positive direction.

So we gave it our best shot, and you know what? It worked. It worked so well, it even surprised us. Oh, there have been glitches to be sure, but more often than not, the accidents have been happy ones, and the net outcomes have been encouraging. To hear weekly from readers who say we “get it,” and that we’re giving them something they can really use, is rewarding beyond words.

So yeah, we’d love to take credit for our ingenious planning and our take-charge attitude. But sometimes “taking charge” is really about letting something happen that wants to happen. And evidently, Experience Life wanted to happen. In the past year, we’ve received so much from so many: gifted writers and editors; innovative thinkers; inspiring authors and experts – and of course, our wise and enthusiastic readers, whose numbers have nearly doubled. We’ve also had the talents of our fabulous art director – Lydia Anderson – and our dedicated production team. Thanks to them, the fresh look of the magazine continues to get rave reviews. Just a few months ago, as a first-time entrant in the Minnesota Magazine and Publishing Association Awards, we took home a Gold Award for Overall Design Excellence. Woo hoo!

Of course, there are still plenty of things we’re working to improve. Lydia’s made some great design tweaks for 2003. And for future issues, we’re working on a graphic coding system that will help readers determine at a glance whether a given article is likely to be interesting to them and relevant to their personal goals.

We’re also making an important change in our Voices [Opinions/Expertise] department. In the past, we’ve featured a diverse array of experts and opinions, and a different topic with every issue. This year, we’re getting more focused on helping you overcome personal health challenges, and we’re running a series of articles by one of the country’s leading experts in integrative health: Dr. Elson Haas (you can read his article and find out more about him on page 47.) Next year, we’re planning to feature a series by a leading fitness expert. In this way, we’ll be able to delve into some important subjects we’d otherwise have to gloss over, and we can offer you full benefit of the expertise at our disposal.

There will be other changes, too – many of which sync up with the initiative that Life Time Fitness CEO Bahram Akradi describes in his letter on page 8 – but rest assured, we’ll see that the best parts of Experience Life just keep getting better.

Planned or unplanned, we hope your new year is full of adventures, insights and successes aplenty. Stay in touch and let us know how it turns out!

I sunk a lot of energy into worry, and I was good at it. In particular, I exhibited an advanced ability to worry about things prematurely. I was so terrified of kindergarten that I spent the entire preceding summer “studying.” For years, I was so afraid of riding a bike that by the time I finally tried it (at about age 8) I completely froze up, creating a spectacular head-over-heels crash that left me unwilling to get back on my bike for the better part of the season.

I can’t say exactly when or how this knack for making myself miserable abated, but over a period of several years, sometime in my mid-20s I think, I began quietly experimenting with a hair-brained theory my mom had been trying to sell me since grade school. Her theory was that if I put the same kind of energy into imagining ideal outcomes that I stubbornly invested in my fears, I could probably have a whole lot more fun, and be a lot happier to boot.

How is it that moms always know these things? How is it that we never believe them? Skeptical as I was, when I did finally give my mom’s theory a shot, it proved useful – and for me at least, very true. Soon, other truths started falling into place. For one thing, I realized that if I was going to be happy, I needed to shift my whole perspective – from getting everything right, to figuring out what mattered and what felt right to me. This, in turn, required me to begin focusing on the life I dreamed of living. Instead of endlessly obsessing about the things that I wanted to fix, escape or avoid, I started visualizing, in great and wild detail, what I believed I would most like to experience.

Big shift. Very big results. Of course, sticking with this new-and-improved approach hasn’t always been easy, but it has been enormously rewarding. In fact, I can safely say that it has transformed every area of my life: work, family, love, friendships, hobbies, creative projects, and especially my hopes for the future.

I still go on the odd worry-fest now and then, and I still have plenty of perfectionistic tendencies, but realizing that I also have the power to make or break my own happiness has been a huge catalyst for positive change in my life. It has let me try new things, including some things I am not naturally “good at.” It has allowed me to realize that criticism is inevitable and often useful. It has helped me be more compassionate with myself, and as a result, with others. Most importantly, it has helped me recognize that each of us has more tools for constructing our life experiences than we’d ever believe.

This issue of Experience Life celebrates some of those tools (watch for more in our January issue!). It also celebrates the energy and enthusiasm we can reclaim when we stop giving all our energy to the things that drain us, and instead begin fostering those things that bring us the most joy.

From tips for making workouts more enjoyable, to suggestions for rediscovering the healthy pleasures of real food, to guidance on getting over destructive ruts and patterns, we’ve pulled together a whole slew of ideas to help you find even more things to celebrate than usual this season. May it be a beautiful and peaceful one.

It’s one of those ads with the disembodied Barry White voice speaking as your appetite – part of a campaign that urges you to “satisfy your grown-up tastes.” I’m pretty sure these ads are supposed to be seductive, but to me they always come off as vaguely repulsive. Maybe it’s the adult actors quaking in the grip of uncontrollable fast-food urges. Maybe it’s something about the nature of the supposed cravings themselves: Since when, I wonder, did chicken strips become a “grown-up taste”?

By the time the X-Files are over and this same spot has run half a dozen times, I’m wondering, “How can these ads possibly be effective?” And yet, I fear, they must be. Somewhere out there, right this minute, somebody is heading out for a batch of chicken strips that they hope will satisfy (or at least blunt) a deeper craving. Someone else is picking up those accursed “Lunchables” – either because the ad has convinced their kids to beg for them, or worse, convinced the adult that this gift of hermetically sealed cold cuts will make them a terrific parent in their kids’ eyes.

For some reason I don’t fully understand, this disturbing train of thought dominates the rest of my evening. I get so hung up on all the bad ads and implicit promises that I lose track of the X-Files plot altogether. That night, I dream of Barry White in a giant Lunchables costume. Next morning, I wander down to the breakfast table only to discover that even my very basic, all-natural cereal has fallen victim to the hype machine: According to the package, it has now become a “cereal slimming system.” I fantasize about returning the unused portion to the store and saying, “So sorry – I thought I was buying breakfast cereal.”

It occurs to me that every day, most of us unwittingly buy something, or buy into something, because of imagined benefits that will supposedly accrue to us, or simply because the thing is there: novel, new and improved, something we don’t have yet, something we might as well try. Maybe an attractive spokesperson tells us it will make us happy. Maybe a label suggests that it will solve some pressing problem. Maybe a trusted, pedigreed source insists it is good for us. But maybe it only ends up complicating our lives further.

Back in July, the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a cover story by Gary Taubes called “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” The article blew the lid off a couple decades’ worth of nutritional misinformation by the FDA, USDA and American medical establishment – propaganda that convinced us that all fats were deadly and fattening, and that a steady diet of low-fat, high-carb, high-sugar processed foods would be our salvation.

So much for government and industry-funded research – this stuff makes the X-Files’ diabolical alien-baby-cover-up plots look straightforward. But in the face of so much misinformation, how do we learn the truth? Ultimately, like the intrepid Scully and Mulder, we have to discern it and intuit it and experience it for ourselves.

Believing and buying what we are told is simple, and discovering our own truth is sometimes not. Yet in the end, this is the only way we will ever achieve the deeper “simplicity” that most of us crave. Somehow, it seems, we have to loosen our grasp on dreams and promises we’re sold in order to free our hands for cultivating the dreams seeded inside us.

At some point, as psychologist James Hillman says, “You have to give up the life you have to get the life that’s waiting for you.” That, in essence, is the angle we took for this issue of Experience Life. I know that for the “Simplicity” issue, it may not seem like a very simple message. It means asking tough questions, and digging for answers, unloading old piles of accumulated stuff and nonsense, and sometimes living with a certain amount of fear and doubt. But it sure beats the alternative of getting stuck in someone else’s version of the good life – a version that never sits quite right with your own purpose or ideals.

Whatever your dreams, whatever you choose to believe, here’s to finding your own truth. Maybe it’s out there. More likely, it’s been with you all along.

“Life’s a bitch. And then you die.” Glimpsed on a bumper sticker, it’s just a flicker of unpleasantness – a bit of bravado from some tough-guy teen. You dismiss it without a second thought. Or do you?

Should you ever find yourself pondering this assertion, and especially if its plausibility weighs heavy on you, it could be a sign you are getting old. Old enough, at least, to have started inspecting the lines around your eyes. Old enough, perhaps, to have noticed some creaks and quirks in your body, and (big sigh) to have begun swapping descriptions of these ailments with your friends. Old enough, in other words, to know better.

This is not the road to youthfulness, friend, and unless you want to be a living testament to that wretched bumper sticker, it’s not the road you want to be on.

No doubt, getting old can be a bitch. Reminders of your mortality can certainly make you feel old. But you aren’t really getting old, are you? Nah. Not if you can help it, anyway. And, for the most part, you can.

That’s what the expert authors of books like Real Age: Are You As Young As You Can Be? (Cliff Street, 1999) and Biomarkers: The 10 Keys to Prolonging Vitality (Fireside, 1992) will tell you. Your chronological age (age in years), these doctors insist, can differ vastly from your biological age (the age you feel, look and function), and as it turns out, the size and nature of that discrepancy is pretty much up to you.

Your chronological age, of course, is determined by your year of birth, and there’s not much you can do about that one (except lie). Your biological age, however, is a rather complex amalgam of physical- and mental-health factors – a series of so-called “biomarkers” that are, at least in part, within your control. These experts assert that some of the most significant markers of aging can be arrested – even reversed – at virtually any time, even well into your old age.

Again, this is not to say that you are getting old. Or even worried about getting old. But with legions of baby boomers marching bravely into their, um, middle years, it’s safe to assume that there is now a larger population thinking and worrying about aging than at any previous time in history.

Wise Beyond Our Years

When Dylan Thomas wrote, “do not go gentle into that good night,” he couldn’t have known how passionately this generation would receive his advice, or what an arsenal of anti-aging knowledge and technology we would have with which to implement it.

Now, refusing to go along quietly with the aging process is one thing; fighting it like a desperate lunatic is another. And yet there is something about the prospect of aging that turns otherwise intelligent people into complete wackos. Miracle wrinkle cures, space-age ab-busters, powdered reptile organs – if it promises to keep us young, by gosh, we’ll buy it. Particularly if it promises to keep us young without demanding too much effort on our part.

If you’re already up to your youthful-looking earlobes in quick fixes like these, you may be disheartened to hear that according to the best research – the stuff coming out of places like the Harvard School of Public Health, the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center at Tufts, and the American Federation for Aging Research – you do actually have to do a little something in order to trigger the air brake on your aging machine. You do not need another quick-fix miracle product. You do not need surgical intervention of the plastic variety. What you need is a customized, comprehensive anti-aging plan.

On the following pages we’ve collected some of the most important and best documented anti-aging essentials for you. Integrate these fundamentals into your life, and you’ll not only slow the major mechanisms of aging, you may well throw them into full-throttle reverse.

Biomarker Breakdown

Before you start doing battle with the so-called biomarkers of aging, it helps to know what they are. And there’s a bit of debate about that. In fact there’s a fair bit of debate about the whole process of aging – how much of it is genetics (your DNA causing your system to crap out on you at some predetermined time), how much is wear and tear (e.g., free radicals demolishing the molecular structure of your body’s proteins, fats  and your DNA), and how much interdependence there is between the two factors.

For example, one much-ballyhooed marker of aging is a drop in key hormone levels. This shift appears to occur as a preprogrammed biological event, and yet hormone levels can also be significantly affected (for better or worse) by lifestyle factors like stress, exercise and diet. Similarly, skin proteins naturally break down over time, but their demise can also be considerably hastened by excessive sun exposure and inadequate nutrition.

Then, too, there’s the problem that many biomarkers are mere evidence of aging (like wrinkled skin and graying hair), while others are conditions that actually precipitate aging by catalyzing other aging factors.

Loss of lean muscle, for example, one important biomarker, results in decreased strength (another biomarker) and increases your fat-to-muscle ratio (another biomarker), thereby lowering your basal metabolic rate (yet another) and potentially compromising your arterial health – arguably the most important aging factor of all.

Because aging is a complex process, and the potential list of biomarkers is virtually endless, most anti-aging experts focus on those biomarkers that have the most significance on the degradation of the entire organism. After all, laugh lines don’t count for much if you’re keeling over from clogged arteries. Anti-aging experts also tend to focus on those biomarkers we can tackle most directly through maintenance and treatment. They pay less attention to subtle factors – like declining sense of smell – about which we can currently do comparatively little.

Note that we say “currently.” That’s because the field of anti-aging medicine, like all medicine, is undergoing seismic change at the moment. As a result of large-scale genomic and biomedical technology breakthroughs now in the works, our understanding about the nature of the aging process is evolving quickly. From the intersecting roles of hormones, antioxidants and T-cells to the encoded mysteries of DNA, science is unveiling new (and sometimes contradictory) chapters in this story daily. So while the theorists, geneticists, chemists and lab rats work out the details, by all means keep posted (we’ll be doing articles on this stuff in coming issues of EL). But meanwhile, don’t neglect the opportunity to learn what you can do – right here and now – to slap some anti-aging cuffs on the too-busy hands of time.

I Was So Much Older Then

In Biomarkers: The 10 Keys to Prolonging Vitality, authors William Evans, Ph.D., and Irwin Rosenberg, M.D., outline a comprehensive anti-aging plan designed around 10 key physiological factors that can impact aging for better or worse. Based on evidence from the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center of Aging at Tufts University, all have less to do with the passing of years, they say, than with the combined effects of inactivity, poor nutrition and avoidable illness.

These, the authors suggest, are the 10 most important biomarkers of vitality that you can alter (for the most part without medical intervention):

• Lean body mass
• Strength
• Basal metabolic rate
• Body-fat percentage
• Aerobic capacity
• Blood-sugar tolerance
• Cholesterol/HDL
• Blood pressure
• Bone density
• Body-temperature regulation

The researchers settled on these 10 (out of hundreds of possibilities), they explain, for two reasons: “(1) they’re critical biological functions that influence vitality; and (2) we know how to revive these functions, even in very old people.”

At first glance, you may think, “Hey, but those are mostly the same things responsible for keeping any person healthy.” And you’d be exactly right. Because as most anti-aging experts will tell you, much of what we’ve come to think of as aging (weakness, frailty, poor health, disrupted body chemistry) is often evidence of a system that’s been degraded less by years than it has been by chronic neglect, abuse, bad habits, stress and so forth.

This, in fact, is the central concept behind Dr. Michael F. Roizen’s No.1 New York Times bestseller, Real Age. Using a questionnaire and answer-charting system, this book proposes to help you calculate (to within about six months), the precise extent to which you’ve either aged your body prematurely or bucked the aging trend and won back a few years.

Based on a plethora of compiled research on aging, disability and death, Roizen’s formula adjusts your chronological age upwards or downwards by a given number of years in accordance with the impact of your various virtuous and/or dastardly lifestyle habits. Smoking a pack a day will cost you eight years, thank you very much. But quitting can rapidly win you back seven. By exercising and eating properly, taking the right supplements, maintaining a healthy weight, getting enough sleep, having a safe and satisfying sex life, managing stress, avoiding drugs, wearing your seatbelt and flossing your teeth, you can reclaim all sorts of time, rendering your “Real Age” a decade or more younger than your birth date would suggest.

You can check out the “Real Age” system for yourself at www.realage.com, where a free online test will calculate the aging effects of more than 125 behavior and history factors, report your “bio-status,” and even generate personalized age-reduction recommendations for you. But whether or not you buy into the whole Real Age concept, you can’t help but be struck by some of the data behind it, and by the incredible range of things you can do to offset – or accelerate – your own aging.

Initially, finding out about all the weird things that make you old can be kind of a jolt. For example, it’s surprising to discover that not flossing your teeth can, in “Real Age” terms, make you 3.2 years older! Apparently, this is because the same bacteria that’s present in dental plaque also causes inflammation and clogging of your arteries. Plus, periodontal disease and tooth loss can compromise your immune system. And, according to Roizen and other experts, arterial health and immune health are two of the most influential factors in how fast (and how well) you age overall.

Bio-Intervention

The next frame into focus concerns something called “bio-intervention.” You’re probably familiar with the classic intervention concept – where a group of concerned friends or colleagues interrupt an addict’s downward spiral into self-destruction by packing him or her off to a treatment-and-recovery program. It’s the same idea here, accept that you are intervening in your body’s own downward spiral. You are recovering some youthful vitality, and with luck, you’re also reclaiming some healthy years from what the authors of Biomarkers refer to as the “Disability Zone” – those years preceding death that many people spend in infirmity, limited mobility and pain.

Regardless of your current age, the authors of Biomarkers strongly suggest that you initiate this intervention now. If you’re young, it will keep you looking and feeling younger longer. And if you are old – even, the authors promise, “if you are already 75 years old and feel overburdened with aches and pains and have long since accepted the idea that an energetic lifestyle is over for you” – it couldliterally give you a new lease on life.

Ready to begin the bio-intervention planning process? The 10 factors outlined in the Biomarkers book are a great place to start. We’ve briefly covered the first six below. The remaining four are included in the Web Extra! found at the top of this page.

1. Lean Body Mass

This refers to the amount of lean muscle tissue you’ve got on your frame. Studies show that following young adulthood, the average American loses about 6.6 pounds of muscle every decade. Left unchecked, especially after age 45, this loss accelerates. The amount of muscle we have depends on two factors: 1) how much we use our muscles; and 2) the amount of natural, tissue-maintaining anabolic hormones (like testosterone) we have swimming around in our blood. The right kinds of exercise, in adequate amounts, can impact both factors.

And this muscle business is not just a vanity thing. Actually, your lean body mass turns out to be a sort of linchpin for a bunch of other biomarkers that can make or break your grand plans for continued youth and vitality (read on, you’ll see).

2. Strength

This is your ability to lift, support, move and resist weight. Naturally, loss of muscle tends to cause a decline in strength: Strength of the sort you need to move something heavy, like a big box, and strength of the sort you need to move something heavy, like you and your skeleton.

Your skeletal muscles, along with your nerves, are what make your bones move – and when they start getting weak, your health starts a descent down a very slippery slope. There’s a bunch of stuff here about losing motor units and fast-twitch muscle fibers that’s worth knowing, but the main takeaway item is this: If you allow your muscles to weaken and atrophy through lack of use, you won’t be able to move your body (let alone that big box), anywhere near as quickly or efficiently as you used to.

Losing your muscular strength and ability to move well is bad enough on its own, but it also has a domino effect on your biomarkers, causing a slowdown in your metabolism, an increase in body fat, a plunge in your aerobic capacity, reduced blood-sugar tolerance and loss of bone density, among other things.

The problem is, we tend to lose a huge number of muscle cells as we age, and the cells remaining have an annoying tendency to shrink. The only way to counter this trend is to work your muscles vigorously enough to cause hypertrophy (making the individual muscle cells grow larger). That means vigorous resistance training – weight lifting, core and stability training, things that give all your muscles a real workout. And no wimping out, even if you are old: Studies show that even very old people can get huge benefits from doing high-intensity resistance exercise. In fact, when they work hard enough (80 percent of their one-rep max, as opposed to the 30-40 percent most older folks satisfy themselves with), they can experience gains every bit as dramatic as young people, quickly doubling or even tripling their strength. Those who’ve already experienced declines in mobility often improve their ability to get around, too, gaining confidence and independence in the bargain.

Even if you are too young to be thinking about mobility, you will probably find that building muscle strength and tone dramatically improves your physical poise, posture and appearance. It may also increase the likelihood that you will be motivated to remain fit and active as you age.

3. Basal Metabolic Rate

Your BMR is the baseline rate at which your body burns calories (i.e., metabolizes food and tissue into energy, releasing heat) while it is at rest. This biomarker, too, is related to muscle, because even at rest, muscle is active tissue. It burns at least some calories even when you’re just lying there doing nothing (unlike fat, which mostly just stores calories). We’ve known for a long time that BMR tends to fall with age, but now researchers are almost certain that this decline – about 2 percent per decade starting at age 20 – is due primarily not to aging per se, but to loss of lean body mass.

As we begin losing muscle and our basal metabolism starts to slow down, very few of us notice – at first. Even though our caloric requirements have diminished, we keep eating the way we always have, with predictable results: We get fat.

According to the authors of Biomarkers, every decade from about age 20 on, our daily caloric needs decline by about 100 calories. So, to maintain his or her weight, the average 70-year-old needs about 500 fewer calories per day than the average 25-year-old. Considering that it only takes 3,000 or so excess calories to make a person gain a single pound, it’s no wonder we pack on fat so fast as we age.

4. Body-Fat Percentage

You knew we were getting to this, didn’t you? Even if your actual body weight doesn’t increase, the changing composition of your muscle/fat ratio – your Body Mass Index or BMI – has some serious implications for your aging-vitality profile. In fact, many epidemiologists use BMI as a way of predicting a person’s risk for developing chronic disease.

Really, our bodies don’t like carrying around more than a little adipose tissue, and when forced to, they balk, putting us at increased risk of impaired blood-sugar tolerance, heart disease and stroke. Excess weight also stresses our internal organs, puts pressure on joints, and can interfere with our posture and gait, thereby messing with our spinal alignment.

Beyond making us look much less youthful (witness your 10- or 20-year high-school reunion), having too much fat can also make us feel lethargic and dissuade us from exercising, which is a Catch-22 because exercise is an essential tool for burning off that fat. Dieting alone just tends to reduce your basal metabolic rate further and causes you to lose muscle along with fat, setting you up for even bigger trouble. Including exercise in your fat-burning plan also improves your overall fitness, which brings us to …

5. Aerobic Capacity

The term “aerobic capacity” refers to your body’s ability to process oxygen – specifically, to breathe in air, get it into your bloodstream, and transport that oxygenated (aerated) blood throughout your system. This requires a strong cardiopulmonary system: a powerful heart and lungs and a healthy, efficient vascular network of arteries, veins and capillaries (see “Full Circuit” to find out how this system works).

Most people’s aerobic capacity declines markedly with age because the whole system gets less efficient – for a host of reasons: Our maximum heart rate declines, our cardiac output lessens, our arteries and veins weaken, stiffen and get mucked up, our circulation gets less robust, and our muscles lose some of their capacity to process oxygen.

Although the impact of these trends can be largely reversed or overcome with cardiovascular exercise (which improves cardiac output, capillary density, and muscles’ oxidative capacity), aerobic exercise works a little differently in older people than it does in young folks. Specifically, scientific evidence suggests that in older people, the impact of aerobic exercise occurs more in the processing efficiency of the muscle cells than in the output of the heart. Although you can still increase cardiovascular efficiency and up the maximum volume of oxygen (VO2 max) your body is capable of processing, as you get older that improvement occurs more and more through muscular demand. Thus, having a weakened musculature has an even bigger impact on aerobic capacity than it did when you were young.

The good news is that with exercise, you can make marked improvements in a relatively short amount of time. Studies suggest that aerobic exercise has an even greater impact on the oxidative capacity of middle-aged and older people than it does on young adults.

6. Blood-Sugar Tolerance

You’ve probably heard a bit about “glucose tolerance” and “insulin sensitivity.” Both refer to our bodies’ ability to take up and process the sugar (glucose) that winds up in our bloodstream. Dietary sources of glucose include starches (like breads, pastas and potatoes), and pretty much anything that tastes sweet (milk, fruit and, of course, various kinds of sugar). The digestive process breaks down these carbohydrates and sugars into individual molecules that enter your bloodstream as glucose. Those glucose molecules are then escorted – by a hormone known as insulin, which is produced by our pancreas – to our muscle cells, where (ideally) they are used for energy or stored as a reserve fuel (glycogen). Barring that, they are circulated to the liver and converted to fat.

Our bodies like to maintain a constant glucose supply. When we don’t have enough blood sugar, our liver will step in to manufacture it. When we dump in too much sugar (say, in the form of soda, candy, sugar cereal or other refined carbs), our pancreas tries to keep up, producing more and more insulin in an effort to signal our muscles to take up more of the excess glucose.

The trouble is, as we age, that process gets thrown off. First, accumulating body fat and losing muscle reduces our body’s demand for glucose. Processing the excess glucose also puts a strain on our system, rendering our fat-burning and detoxifying mechanisms less efficient, resulting in more fat. What muscle tissue we have left also becomes less sensitive to insulin, meaning it takes more and more insulin to have an effect. Over time, the insulin-production cells in our pancreas can wear out from overproduction. This heralds the arrival of a condition known as “adult onset” or “Type II” diabetes, which contributes to hypertension, heart disease and all sorts of other things that can rapidly age and kill you.

Improving glucose metabolism and preserving your insulin sensitivity is an essential part of maintaining youthful health and staving off disease. Fortunately, if addressed early enough, this requires mostly stuff you should be doing for your other biomarkers anyway. Strength-building exercise can markedly increase muscles’ insulin sensitivity and glycogen storage capacity. A diet low in unhealthy fats (but ample in good fats), and high in fibrous, complex carbs (like raw vegetables) helps maintain good blood chemistry and keeps muscle/fat ratios in check. Good nutrition also helps support the organ and endocrine systems that regulate hormones and blood-sugar. Aerobic exercise burns off excess fat and helps regulate metabolism. It’s all part of the big, beautiful bio-intervention picture!

The Quest and the Questions

We’ve just covered the 10 factors addressed in the Biomarkers book. And of course there are plenty more biomarkers we haven’t even gotten to – from the heft of your hormones to the tidiness of your tolomeres (cellular endcaps that protect your DNA).

Both the fusion and profusion of these factors create a pretty daunting picture, particularly when you start getting into all the science behind them. And yet the basic message behind virtually all this remains relatively simple: Taking good care of yourself (getting appropriate, adequate nutrition, exercising amply and staying psychologically and emotionally well) all increase your body’s ability to cope with the rigors of life, reducing your chances of getting sick with age-related, degenerative conditions like heart disease, Type II diabetes, arthritis and osteoporosis. Not getting these diseases, meanwhile, can significantly reduce the rate at which you age.

You may be wondering, though, are diet, exercise and lifestyle factors the only ways you can affect aging? Of course not. We already know about plenty of proactive interventions, from nutritional-supplement therapies to hormone- and enzyme-replacement therapies, that can counter certain markers of aging, and that are appropriate for some people. And of course there are lots of health and beauty products designed to slow the visible effects of aging. But even there, it’s important to recognize that things like wrinkles and skin tone, hormonal balances, the integrity of your DNA – perhaps even gray hair – can all be impacted by the overall health and resiliency of your entire system.

There is also an enormous amount of promising research and breakthrough activity occurring in anti-aging medicine right now – from biomedical tests that promise to help people customize their own diet and exercise programs for optimal impact, to genetic tests that suggest ways for their doctors to identify and intervene early in potentially damaging conditions. Right at this very moment, some of the best minds in the world are intently focused on finding out more about all the things that cause aging, and experimenting with ways to get those things to slow down or cease. You can expect to read more about all of these things in upcoming issues of EL.

Meanwhile, what’s the goal – to live forever? For some youth-seekers, probably. But most experts agree that the real objective is maximizing not so much the number of years we live, or even the number of years we live wrinkle-free (there’s always Botox injections for that); rather, the really big prize is maximizing the number of years we can live in good health, happiness and vitality.

Whether you choose to plan and implement your own anti-aging bio-interventions, or seek professional help with that process, it’s important to remember that some aspects of getting older really don’t require intervention. Some things that come with age – like wisdom, complexity and perspective – are marvelous assets, of course. And other things
– like silver hair, laugh lines and a less than perfect physique – are characteristics we can get comfortable with, and even grow to appreciate.

Above all, the many markers of aging offer us a reminder – that time and life are both fleeting, that change is inevitable, and that we are, in all our mystery and imperfection, very much human. At core, our unique physiology has its own mysterious rhythm and purpose. And that is something that no amount of Botox, and no dumb bumper sticker, can ever change.

Time Off for Good Behavior

There is an increasing amount of scientific evidence that our psychological, emotional and spiritual state can have very real biochemical and physiological implications for our health. Psychological and emotional stress impact the endocrine system, which regulates hormones, and can otherwise disrupt things like blood chemistry, heart rate, blood pressure and brain waves. If you are hoping to keep yourself young – in body and at heart – here are some areas worth examining.

How You Think: Are you optimistic and open-minded, or negative and judgmental?

How You Feel: Do you feel mostly empowered, hopeful and grateful, or victimized, hopeless, envious and in want?

Whom You Love: Do you have good friends, a loving partner, a close family, or mostly superficial contacts and strained, distant or conflict-ridden relationships?

What You Believe: Do you have a sense of the sacred, of beauty and mystery in everyday life, or a sense of nothingness, void and disconnection?

What You Enjoy: Do you take time to develop talents, enjoy pleasures and grow dreams, or are you forever denying yourself, putting enjoyment off until tomorrow?

How You Inhabit Your Body: Is it a temple you’re proud of, that you love caring for and being in, or is it a prison that constrains you, frustrates you and makes endless demands?

Whether You Care: Do you have a sense of purpose and an inspiration for being alive, or are you just dragging yourself through and wondering if it is all really worth the bother?

By probing your attitudes and beliefs in these areas and others, you can get a pretty good sense for whether your current perspectives are likely to enhance or detract from your ideal-age picture. You can also get some ideas for how you might go about reframing and expanding those attitudes that have been with you the longest or that pose the biggest challenges for you.

Initially, it’s sort of confusing and surreal, this realization that you aren’t always going to be young. Like the first day you realized you might actually be a grownup. But more disturbing. On the other hand, it’s also kind of galvanizing. Once you are over that “no longer young” hump, you come to grips with some very clear choices. You can be one of those people who truly gets better – more beautiful, more vital, more evolved – with age. Or you can be one of those people who doesn’t.

When I look at my parents, I see models for the kind of older person I want to be. My mom is 60. She has always been a beautiful woman, but I think she is getting more gorgeous all the time. She still wears her wavy hair shoulder-length, and the broad, silver streaks running through it now make her look kind of witchy and mysterious. She’s an active gardener and farmer with a booming reflexology practice, and she and my stepfather are planning a long biking and walking trip through Europe this fall. They both read voraciously and have about a dozen interesting projects going on at any given time.

My dad, a professor, is just retiring at 72. People say he looks like a shorter, more Greek version of Sean Connery. He has a recumbent exercise bike in his living room, spars regularly with a karate group, and splits wood whenever he has the chance. When he isn’t planning trips to a primitive cabin on the edge of the Boundary Waters, he’s working on quirky academic projects, planning “film nights” at friends’ houses, or trying to pare down his dangerously large (and enviable) collection of books.

My parents are aging well, and I’m taking a lesson from them. Both spend a lot of time outdoors, have rich networks of friends and family, and keen interests. They take good care of themselves physically (they’ve both been taking vitamins for decades, eating well, getting proactive, natural health care and lots of exercise). But more importantly, they both have a lot of life force and purpose. They are interested, open – accessible to possibilities. They don’t care too much about money. They don’t hold a lot of judgments. They consistently challenge themselves, and pursue whatever intrigues or energizes them. As far as I can tell, their lives keep getting bigger and richer with each passing year.

I have another model, too: Ruth Gordon’s feisty character in the film Harold and Maude. There’s a great scene where you see Maude walking alongside a group of funeral mourners in the rain. Everyone else has a black umbrella and a slow, somber gait. Maude, who’s just turning 80 in the film, has a bright red umbrella and the bobbing, energetic step of a young girl. The visual contrast is striking. So is the underlying message: You’re as alive and as vital as you feel.

Throughout the film, Maude counsels Harold – a depressed, semi-suicidal 18-year-old who falls in love with her – on how to embrace life with passion, purpose and pleasure. Some of the film’s major themes concern life choices: deciding who you want to be, how you want to live, how you choose to respond to life events.

In my mind, the prescription for vitality – at any age – comes down to a combination of will and grace: the will to make decisions, choose goals, discern courses of right action, and then have the discipline and integrity to carry them out (something I keep in mind whenever I am doing one of Chris Clark’s nightmarish hill runs – see page 98); and the grace to accept that not absolutely everything is within our direct control (as all those little fine lines attest).

Anyway, we’ve developed this issue of Experience Life with all these things (plus the best anti-aging advice we could dig up) in mind. Hope you enjoy it!

7. Cholesterol/HDL Ratio

By now you probably know that the balance of certain classes of lipoproteins in your bloodstream has a lot to do with your risk of heart and arterial diseases. “Lipoprotein” just means a fatty substance (like cholesterol) combined with some kind of protein substance. Cholesterol in itself is not a bad thing (your body requires it to function and produces its own supply), but under some circumstances, an excess or imbalance of certain lipoproteins can be a very bad thing indeed.

Specifically, an excess of low-density lipoproteins (LDL, or “bad cholesetrol”), particularly when out of balance with the presence of high-density lipoproteins (HDL, or “good cholesterol”), appears to have a dreadful effect on your cardiovascular health. Doctors used to think that excess LDL caused fat-laden deposits to build up on arterial walls, clogging them, causing blockages and thus blood-starving the surrounding tissues (an effect that, if those tissues happen to be in your brain or your heart, can cause you to drop dead). Now though, they’ve realized that LDL actually causes arterial inflammation. The fatty plaque stuff builds up not so much on the surface, but within the tissues of the artery itself, where it sets off an immune response, causing those tissues to swell, stiffen and in some cases rupture. The blood clotting that occurs as the result of these ruptures is, in many cases, what ends up blocking the artery (read “Atherosclerosis: The New View” in the May 2002 issue of Scientific American at www.sciam.com).

In any case, an excess of LDL is still a bad thing. And an ample amount of HDL (which docs now believe not only helps to remove cholesterol from arteries, but also intervenes in the LDL inflammation process) is still a good thing. To keep your LDL/HDL ratios in order, you need – you guessed it – plenty of cardiovascular exercise (which helps raise HDL) and a diet low in saturated fat, high in live foods, healthy fatty acids and whole grains (all of which are believed to help lower LDL). Both these diet and exercise strategies help lower body fat and maintain a healthy body composition, which in turn further improves your LDL/HDL situation. This keeps your circulatory system healthy – which keeps you looking, feeling and functioning younger, for longer.

8. Blood Pressure

Enough has been written about the dangers of high blood pressure that we won’t go into great detail about it here (for more on the importance of maintaining a healthy cardiovascular system, see “Full Circuit” in this issue of EL), but suffice it to say that if your arteries and heart are put under too much pressure too often (as they are with hypertension), it predisposes you to heart attack, aneurysm stroke, kidney failure and all sorts of other undesirable experiences that, if they don’t kill you immediately, will most certainly reduce your vitality and cause you to age at an accelerated rate.

Your best bet for managing and reducing blood pressure? No big surprise here – once again, it’s mostly healthy diet and adequate exercise, plus quitting smoking, reducing body fat, reducing stress, and for some, going off birth control pills. There’s also evidence that, for some people, other strategies (moderate intake of red wine, an aspirin a day, anger management – even forgiveness) can have a significant lowering effect. But you can save yourself a whole lot of worrying about how to lower your blood pressure if you never let it get high in the first place. Translation: Cut the crap out of your diet and get your body moving!

9. Bone Density

Doctors know that the mineral content in our bones tends to decline with age, causing our bones to become porous and more brittle (a condition known as osteoporosis). They don’t all agree on why, and probably there is no single reason, but rather many reasons. What they do know is that our bones, like the rest of our tissues, are dynamic; they are constantly reforming and regenerating themselves. But as we age, that regeneration process often becomes a degeneration process. The two chief causes of degeneration appear to be: 1) diet-related (when we aren’t getting enough bio-available minerals from our diets to support vital functions, our bodies make up the difference by robbing the mineral stores in our bones); and 2) activity-related (when we don’t do enough weight-bearing exercise – like running, walking, manual labor – our skeletons adapt and get weaker.)

According to the Tufts studies cited by the Biomarkers authors, popping mineral supplements alone is not the answer. Your body requires the presence of many other substances (vitamin D, certain hormones, etc.) to make use of those minerals, and interestingly, exercise appears to be one critical factor in whether or not those substances are present. In other words, your activity levels can affect whether or not available minerals are absorbed in adequate quantity.

The authors recommend a brisk, daily walk as the best osteoporosis preventative. They also point out a couple of other interesting bone-loss/exercise connections. For example, if we reduce our weight-bearing activity as we get older, we are not only more likely to lose bone, we’re also more likely to lose strength, balance and agility, and thus are more likely to fall. If we fall and break a hip or other bone, we are less likely to be able to move or exercise, thus setting up an even more accelerated cycle of infirmity and ill health (for all the reasons described in the previous sections). Even more good reason to invite your older friends and relatives along on your daily walk!

10. Body-Temperature Regulation

Every time there’s a heat wave or cold snap, you hear about how dangerous these temperature fluctuations can be for older folks. That’s because as we age, our internal temperature regulators tend to fritz out on us – but again, this is not purely an inevitable result of old age.

To be sure, several factors in older peoples’ reduced ability to regulate body temperature do occur with age. For example, many older people experience reduced thirst and reduced kidney efficiency, both of which can contribute to chronic dehydration and an impaired ability to self-cool by sweating. But both this affliction and its counterpart – impaired ability to self-warm by shivering – are also byproducts of reduced fitness. So once again, by maintaining a high level of cardiovascular fitness, you have a good shot at staving off or minimizing such problems.

Gains in fitness can actually help repair your body’s temperature-control mechanism. Keeping your metabolism high helps ensure that you’ll hang onto your thermogenesis (heat-generating) abilities longer. Maintaining healthy circulation will help you keep cozier in cold weather, too. Regular exercise also increases the amount of water in your blood, helping you maintain higher body-water and electrolyte levels, and thus retain more of your sweating abilities. Still it’s a good idea to drink more as you age, and to get into the habit of drinking even when you aren’t thirsty. That goes double when you are exercising or facing warm temperatures.

To learn more about aging and biomarkers, visit www.realage.com, or the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University at www.hnrc.tufts.edu.

At Kronos Optimal Health Centre in Arizona (www.kronoscentre.com), for example, the entire practice has taken an integrated, preventative approach designed to identify and strengthen their individual patients’ “weakest links.” First their experts use a battery of lab tests and other evaluations to pinpoint factors that might predispose an individual patient to premature aging and health challenges; then they suggest a customized course of integrated treatment (nutritional and pharmaceutical as well as fitness- and lifestyle-oriented) aimed at reversing or ameliorating those trends.

As Dr. Chris Heward, vice president of research and development at Kronos, describes it, “We’re essentially using a diagnose-and-treat model in a preventative paradigm.” The idea he says, is to prevent any one system in the body from faltering and aging prematurely. “We go in and take a hard look at all the physiological and biochemical factors that could be creating a weak link for that person. Then, using the best scientific and medical technologies, we determine the best, most effective ways of intervening with them.”

This “weakest link” approach aims to head off major problems at the pass – saying a clipped “buh-bye!” to potential damage that could otherwise contribute to the illness and premature aging of the person overall.

Watch for more on individualized nutrition and genetic testing in future issues of EL.

The precise and simultaneous adjustments, balance, speed and direction involved in proprioceptive exercise require constant and complex input from the brain. As a result, proprioceptive exercise helps build and maintain neuromuscular pathways, which in turn support good reflexes, coordination, balance and muscle tone – all of which tend to decline as we age.

Various forms of proprioceptive training are widely employed in stability and balance-oriented exercise regimens, including most core and integrated-training protocols, as well as yoga, Tai Chi and Qi Gong. Proprioceptive exercise is appropriate, in one form or another, for people of virtually every age and ability, and may be particularly useful for those who wish to improve their motor skills and cognitive function.