In my practice, one of the main concerns people have relative to their health is that they want to “stay young”. I’ve often thought  -  what is it about getting older that people don’t like? In asking further, people will tell me that they want to have good energy and experience life as exciting as it was in their youth.  We have this idea in our culture that life peaks in our youth, and then as you age, you have to accept the gradual loss of energy and vitality that tends to characterize our advancing years.  Is it even possible to turn back the clock?  Can we actually feel younger and even be younger?

Well good news! We are beginning to realize and truly believe that being older doesn’t mean that your life has to be any less exciting or any less happy.  After all, it makes sense to think that by virtue of having gained quality life experience in our younger years, when we are older, we actually have the opportunity to live more balanced and well-rounded lives – there is the possibility that we can take the best of what each of the different phases of our lives has had to offer, and if we then had the energy of youth on top of that, well the sky’s the limit!

So, what do you need to do?  As with anything else, there are first the fundamentals and then there’s the icing on the cake. Please review http://www.spaongreenstreet.com/pdfs/anti-aging-living-longer.pdf on our website for our comprehensive approach in our Wellness Program.  You have to have the fundamentals in place for the ‘icing’ to enhance the overall experience.  We will explore the ‘icing’ in subsequent posts – the intelligent use of supplements for instance, enhancing hormones, etc., but let’s discuss these fundamentals first, for without them, we end up falling short.  In anti-aging, part of the fundamentals has to do with exercise, and here’s a bit of exciting research regarding the benefits of exercise relative to the aging process.

A new study has found that exercise actually reverses the aging process at the cellular level.  The study, published in an online journal called PLoS One, studied 25 people over the age of 65 for six months. A research team led by Dr. Simon Melov from McMaster University Medical Centre in Hamilton, Ontario, took biopsies of their thigh muscles.  Then they put the group on a strength-training regimen that included two hour-long sessions in the gym per week. At the end of the six months, they were biopsied again.

The muscle cells were compared to the cells of a control group of young people (average age 22). At the beginning of the study, the older people’s cells were genetically different from the younger people’s cells.   But at the end of six months, a third of the genes within the cells had undergone significant changes. The cells that changed were involved in the functioning of mitochondria, which transform nutrients into energy. And guess what, the study participants reported having greater energy!

“The genetic fingerprint [of the elderly participants] was reversed to that of younger people — not entirely, but enough to say that their genetic profile was more like that of young people than old people,” said Simon Melov, director of genomics at the Buck Institute in Novato, Calif.  He concludes by saying the famous words, “It’s never too late to start exercising.”

So, great news for all of you who are committing to an exercise program! You can actually change your genetic profile by engaging in consistent exercise. Like I said earlier, it takes some doing, but the efforts are well worth it, are they not? Do your level best to put the fundamentals to work and just see how they end up working for you. You can add this recent bit of news to all the things that we already know about exercise, from helping you to lose weight to enhancing your memory and thinking. 

 Fundamentally Yours! Ricardo

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