When it comes to getting older, you think you know –

But guess what? You don’t know. The point of this book is that you do not know. And you have the wrong picture in your head. You know what it meant for your old man and his father.., for your mentor and a few billion other guys. But the rules are changing. Right now. And your prospects are different. Quite different. 

Harry–that’s Henry S. Lodge, M.D., my doctor, my co­author, my close friend–is going to give you enough of the new evolutionary biology in his chapters so that you can understand for the first time how your body actually works. It is going to be a revolutionary insight for virtually every­body, believe me. Once you understand it, and once you do some of the things that will seem obvious to you after that–why, you can choose to live like fifty until you’re in your eighties. In your eighties, my man! We mean it. You may ski into a tree; that’s a different story. Or you may grow a tangerine in your brainpan and be dead in the morning. Fine. But most of us really do not have to age significantly. For decades. 

Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You’re 80 and Beyond by Harry Lodge and Chris Crowley will make you hoot.  I had to stop reading because my loud guffaws and appreciative chuckling disturbed Suzanne’s needed rest as she recovered from her surgery.

This book is for men who are over 50 or think they may be over fifty some day.  And for the women who love them.  Presumably, the biology of women will benefit from the same suggestions.  This book motivates men and doesn’t try to motivate women, who require different conversations to motivate them. 

Younger Next Year for Women I haven’t read this one yet, but heck the biology of decay and growth are the same.  The motivations of feeling good are the same.  Women are often smarter about health and taking care of themselves than men are.  This book should as delightful as the one for men.  I ordered it.  JUST IN, one of my brilliant research staff has now read the book and approves heartily. 

Younger Next Year will change your perception on the biology of aging.  We have it wrong, us male folks over 50.  That’s why he or you must read it and why it’s so humorous.  If you’re a guy, you’ll need the humor because the authors don’t pull any punches.  The reality of Harry’s Rules (see below) leaves no weasel room.

Here’s what you think you know: You turn sixty and your feet are on the slippery slope–the long slide into old age and death. Every year a little fatter, slower, weaker, more pain-racked. You can’t hear — you can’t see. Your hips go. Your knees. And that great friend and amusing companion of your youth curls up and goes to sleep in your lap. Except when you have to take a leak, which is every half hour. You get petulant. Your conversation goes stupid. Your teeth are a bad yellow, and your breath isn’t so great, either. You don’t have any money. Or hair. And your muscles look like drap­ery. You give up. You sit there and wait. Go to the Nursing Home, get tied to a chair.

There’s a graph. 

The Mind Blower – We Have It Wrong Part II 

When I was using Bill Phillip’s excellent book, Body for Life, he suggested eating a bit more one day a week, your Free Day.  Phillips and others believed that you needed to eat more so your body didn’t go into a famine response, which would drop your metabolism and save fat stores.  

This logical sounding thinking turns out to be dead wrong.

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Harry goes into lovely, understandable detail explaining to you why this is so.  It turns out your body takes its cues from exercise.  It only reads one newspaper, and it only looks at the sports page.  Did you exercise hard today or not?  That is all it wants to know.  It doesn’t care how much you ate.

If you exercised hard, then it will repair tissue, cure disease, and build fitness, muscle, and strength.  It turns on the immune system.  You get healthier. 

If you didn’t exercise hard, it will just breakdown tissue WITHOUT REPAIRING IT.  It will conclude from your inactivity that you are starving, and it will lower your metabolism and conserve your fat stores and other stores to help you survive the winter or drought that you must certainly be experiencing.  Obviously, you would not stop exercising hard for any other reason.

Your body has no programming for an overabundance of food, high carbohydrate fatty food in particular, combined with sedentary behavior.  500 million years of perfection are nothing to mess with.  Humans just need to get with this perfected program of the body’s ancient wisdom. 

See?  Can you tell what a huge shift in thinking this is?

I knew I was in trouble with this review when I wanted to quote page after page for you.  Just buy the book – read it.  Laugh.  Don’t look for short cuts, they don’t exist.  Follow Harry’s rules.

HARRY’S RULES 

1.     Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life. 

2.     Do serious aerobic exercise four days a week for the rest of your life. 

3.     Do serious strength training, with weights, two days a week for the rest of your life. 

4.     Spend less than you make.  5.     Quit eating crap! 6.     Care. 7.     Connect and commit.