Three Healthy lifestyle-based Approaches for Graceful Aging (One of which may surprise you!)
What changes are you making to your life to age gracefully?
Have you altered your diet, adapted your daily schedule to include more exercise, or taking steps to combat stress?
The truth is that there are so many things that can help to slow biological aging, trigger autophagy, and improve your body starting at a cellular level.
Below, we take a closer look at three of our most highly recommended lifestyle-based approaches for graceful aging. Incorporate them into your life, and you could very well turn back the biological aging clock!
1) Exercise (of a Very Specific Type)
Let’s be clear: ALL exercise is good for your body. Not only does it built muscles and improve your cardiovascular conditioning, but it enhances your body’s ability to adapt to stress, balances your hormones, eliminates cellular junk, and so much more. We could literally dedicate hundreds of pages to listing the many, many benefits of exercise.
But when it comes to graceful aging, there’s one specific type of exercise that will benefit you above all: time-efficient exercise training.
Time-efficient exercise training refers to specific forms of exercise that enable you to get a maximally effective workout in the shortest possible amount of time. Our busy lives limit the amount of time we can spend at the gym or exercising, which means we need to maximize workout effectiveness in smaller windows of time.
There are two particularly effective time-efficient exercise training regimens:
- High intensity interval training (HIIT). This combines short intervals of very high intensity with longer intervals of moderate or low intensity exercise. Studies have discovered that HIIT offers benefits ranging from reduced body fat to improved cardiovascular health to enhanced mental function to a faster metabolism.
- Inspiratory muscle strength training (IMST). This is a form of resistance training that specifically targets the muscles involved in breathing. It involves a specific tool that makes it harder to breathe, which in turn strengthens those muscles and increases cardiopulmonary capacity and cardiovascular function within a few weeks. The result of IMST is better exercise performance and enhanced cardiovascular endurance.
As the above-mentioned study stated, “these modes of training may improve cardiovascular function with time commitments of less than 60 min/wk.” It’s much easier to fit that amount of training into your week—just 20 minutes a day, three days a week is something almost anyone can manage!
2) Exposure to Mild Environmental Stress
It may sound counterproductive to expose your body to environmental stress, but the truth is that it’s the best way to trigger hormesis.
Hormesis is “an adaptive response of cells and organisms to a moderate (usually intermittent) stress. Exposure to a low dose of a chemical agent or environmental factor that is damaging at higher doses induces an adaptive beneficial effect on the cell or organism”
Basically, your body responds to low or moderate levels of a stressor or toxin by adapting to that stressor or toxin. The cellular signaling pathways and molecular mechanisms in your body actually become more effective at fulfilling their functions because they adapt to the stress, and your body is better able to repair itself because it has identified and learned how to counteract the toxins.
The result: a more adaptable, faster-repairing body!
Studies conducted on animals have found that environmental exposure to stressors—including low oxygen levels, temperature extremes, heavy metals, pesticides, ionizing radiation, and even dehydration—led to “performance benefits” that increased longevity and/or reproduction.
What does this mean for you? Simple: it may be worth allowing yourself to be exposed to mild environmental stress in order to trigger this adaptation to the stress so your body will be able to handle higher levels safely.
3) Fasting Mimicking Diet
Both caloric restriction and intermittent fasting can trigger autophagy, which accelerates the removal of cellular “junk” and leads to better cellular repair. Not only that, but it can improve antioxidant activity in your body and protect you against free radical damage and oxidative stress.
Intermittent fasting means either:
- Fasting for a 24-48 hour period, followed by 3-5 days of “normal” eating
- Fasting for a 12-18 hour period, followed by 6-8 hours of “normal” eating
Caloric restriction (a fasting “mimicking” diet) can also have a similar effect. By restricting your calorie intake (by 400-600 calories) once or twice a week, you simulate stress that triggers hormesis in your body. Your body becomes more efficient at utilizing energy, activates stored fats, and improves digestive function. But because you’re only restricting calories once or twice a week, your body doesn’t suffer malnutrition or nutrient deficiencies. It’s all the benefits with none of the downsides!
Combining these three approaches can lead to huge improvements in your health. Not only will your body be more adaptable to stress, but you’ll be more resistant to disease, your cardiovascular function will improve, and your metabolism will increase significantly.
Put it all together and you’ve got a recipe for a healthier life and slower biological aging!