Turning Back the Hands of Time
Being young may be largely a lifestyle choice
Here's some news for baby boomers turning 60: Working out and eating right can make you younger. So say Henry Lodge and Chris Crowley, authors of the new book Younger Next Year for Women: Live Like You're 50--Strong, Fit, Sexy--Until You're 80 and Beyond and the men's version published a year ago. Based on the emerging understanding of the biology of aging, the duo say, 70 percent of the typical American's decline is preventable. Lodge, 47, is an internist who teaches at Columbia's medical school. Crowley, a retired New York attorney, showed up at age 65 for a consultation with Lodge, overweight and achy all over. Today, at 71, after several years of spinning classes, he's fitter than ever.
What inspired you to write these books?
Lodge: You take care of somebody, and you see him gaining 5 pounds a year and being sedentary. Then really awful things happen--strokes, heart attacks, and people becoming apathetic and withdrawn. It became clear to me that this was lifestyle choice. Very little of it was related to luck or genetics.
But isn't it hype to say you can be younger next year?
Crowley: Sore joints, arthritis, obesity, the apathy, the lack of sexual interest. When you think about aging, you think that all that stuff is coming. It doesn't have to. I can ski better than I could 15 years ago. A summer ago, I did a 100-mile bike ride with a pal in the Colorado Rockies.
Lodge: If someone who is sedentary really commits to exercising six days a week, he would be something like 10 or 15 years younger in the functional respect within a year.
How much exercise?
Crowley: Steady, remorseless exercise. You've got to do strength training; you've got to do aerobics. Six days a week, 45 minutes a day. If you have to start out at 20 or 30 minutes, fine and dandy, but you really should get to 45 minutes and stay there for the rest of your life.
Lodge: Your other choice is to grow old. A patient of mine came to see me before he retired--100 pounds overweight, blood pressure and cholesterol way up, apathetic, and depressed. He looked like hell. I'd talked to him for years about exercise, and he just said, no. Well, he finally heard the message.
Crowley: You told him he was going to die, Harry.
Lodge: I said something like that, and he went down to Florida, and he started walking on the beach. The first day he went for a quarter mile, and the next day he couldn't get out of bed. A year later, he was walking 5 miles a day on the beach and looked like a million bucks.
Why weight training?
Crowley: You get more bone mass, the grippers that attach your bones to your muscles get grippier, and the goop gets goopier between the joints. The message system that tells your body how to respond to unevenness in the road gets younger. You don't fall down as much.
advertisement
