Healthy Longevity As A Lifestyle Choice

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Healthy longevity doesn’t come in a pill or a hi-tech gadget—it comes as a lifestyle, or not at all

  • Today’s featured expert, Dr. Luigi Fontana, wants to talk CRON, HIIT, IF, and a stack of other things that don’t come with acronyms!

• Do you like being informed, healthy, and getting free stuff?

  • Today’s sponsor The Bircher Bar is a free health, science, wellness, & lifestyle newsletter with a special focus on giveaways and discounts.

• Your face is incredibly complex, sensitive, and responsive—not to mention, very close to your brain, and everything that feeds it or branches off from there. Today’s featured book focuses on looking after it!

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Tongue Circles For Head And Neck Tension (8:56)

Your tongue is a larger, more powerful muscle than you probably think. Here’s a great exercise for relieving tension:

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Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖

💪 MAIN FEATURE

7 Keys To Healthy Longevity

This is Dr. Luigi Fontana. If you look carefully, you can see he’s taking the stairs, which is great for his longevity. More importantly, he’s a research professor of Geriatrics & Nutritional Science, and co-director of the Longevity Research Program at Washington University in St. Louis.

What does he want us to know?

He has a many-fold approach to healthy longevity, most of which may not be news to you, but you might want to prioritize some things:

Consider caloric restriction with optimal nutrition (CRON)

This is about reducing the metabolic load on your body, which frees up bodily resources for keeping yourself young.

Keeping your body young and healthy is your body’s favorite thing to do, but it can’t do that if it never gets a chance because of all the urgent metabolic tasks you’re giving it.

If CRON isn’t your thing (isn’t practicable for you, causes undue suffering, etc) then intermittent fasting is a great CR mimetic, and he recommends that too. See also:

• Is Cutting Calories The Key To Healthy Long Life?

• Fasting Without Crashing? We Sort The Science From The Hype

Keep your waistline small

Whichever approach you prefer to use to look after your metabolic health, keeping your waistline down is much more important for health than BMI.

Specifically, he recommends keeping it:

• under 31.5” for women

• under 37” for men

The disparity here is because of hormonal differences that influence both metabolism and fat distribution.

Exercise as part of your lifestyle

For Dr. Fontana, he loves mountain-biking (this writer could never!) and weight-lifting (also not my thing). But what’s key is not the specifics, but what’s going on:

• Some kind of frequent movement

• Some kind of high-intensity interval training

• Some kind of resistance training

Frequent movement because our bodies are evolved to be moving more often than not:

The Doctor Who Wants Us To Exercise Less, & Move More

High-Intensity Interval Training because unlike most forms of exercise (which slow metabolism afterwards to compensate), it boosts metabolism for up to 2 hours after training:

How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)

Resistance training because strength (of muscles and bones) matters too:

Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)

Moderation is not key

Dr. Fontana advises that we do not smoke, and that we do not drink alcohol, for example. He also notes that just as the only healthy amount of alcohol is zero, less ultra-processed food is always better than more.

Maybe you don’t want to abstain completely, but mindful wilful consumption of something unhealthy is preferable to believing “moderate consumption is good for the health” and an unhealthy habit develops!

Greens and beans

Shocking absolutely nobody, Dr. Fontana advocates for (what has been the most evidence-based gold standard of healthy-aging diets for quite some years now) the Mediterranean diet.

See also: Four Ways To Upgrade The Mediterranean Diet ← this is about tweaking the Mediterranean diet per personal area of focus, e.g. anti-inflammatory bonus, best for gut, heart healthiest, and most neuroprotective.

Take it easy

Dr. Fontana advises us (again, with a wealth of evidence) Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and to get good sleep.

Not shocked?

To quote the good doctor,

Always a good reminder!

Want to know more?

You might enjoy his book “The Path to Longevity: How to Reach 100 with the Health and Stamina of a 40-Year-Old”, which we reviewed previously 🤓

You might also like this video of his, about changing the conversation from “chronic disease” to “chronic health”:

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Take care!

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

The Bircher Bar

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🤫 A WORD TO THE WISE

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

The Natural Facelift: Sculpt your face at home in just 5 minutes a day – by Sophie Perry

First, what this book isn't: it's mostly not about beauty, and it's certainly not about ageist ideals of "hiding" aging.

The author herself discusses the privilege that is aging (not everyone gets to do it) and the importance of taking thankful pride in our lived-in bodies.

The title and blurb belie the contents of the book rather. Doubtlessly the publisher felt that extrinsic beauty would sell better than intrinsic wellbeing. As for what it's actually more about...

Ever splashed your face in cold water to feel better? This book's about revitalising the complex array of facial muscles (there are anatomical diagrams) and the often-tired and very diverse tissues that cover them, complete with the array of nerve endings very close to your CNS (not to mention the vagus nerve running just behind your jaw), and some of the most important blood vessels of your body, serving your brain.

With all that in mind, this book, full of useful therapeutic techniques, is a very, very far cry from "massage like this and you'll look like you got photoshopped".

The style varies, as some parts of explanation of principles, or anatomy, and others are hands-on (literally) guides to the exercises, but it is all very clear and easy to understand/follow.

Bottom line: aspects of conventional beauty may be a side-effect of applying the invigorating exercises described in this book. The real beauty is—literally—more than skin-deep.

Click here to check out The Natural Facelift, and order yours!

May today see you in excellent health inside and out,

The 10almonds Team