Read an Excerpt
Introduction
You might be asking yourself, what can this book do for me? Will it provide new and useful information? Can it help me make a change for the better? Will I age any slower? The answer is this book can teach you a unique, science-based model of health, disease, and aging that will provide you with the keys to controlling the aging process.
I will explain why we age, and the difference between healthy, normal aging and the disease-filled, accelerated aging most people experience today. I will show you how health and disease really work, and how you can enter your later years confident and in control with the power to enjoy abundant health and vitality until the very end. In short, this book has the potential to transform and enhance your life in ways you may have never dreamed possible.
Why do we fear old age? For most of us, it is not death itself, but 'getting old' that stirs a feeling of dread in us. We imagine a life of declining health, a weak and fragile body, diminished mental capacity, and the ultimate indignity of having to depend on others to function on a daily basis. This is an image of a life not worth living—something we would all like to avoid or at least put off as long as possible.
Why then are most of us doing everything in our power to hasten its arrival?
That's right. As a culture, we are accelerating the aging process at an alarming rate, and it is costing us immeasurable losses in quality and enjoyment in the later decades of our lives. We develop chronic illnesses like diabetes, heart disease, and arthritis when we should be in good health. We become disabled when we could be capable and strong. Most of us die prematurely of preventable and curable diseases.
Aging this way is a mistake. It is a mistake made moment by moment and day by day throughout our lives. It is a mistake caused by choices made for us as children and choices we make for ourselves as adults. As a result, we now have thirty-year-olds who exhibit biological markers that are typical of eighty-year-olds. Overweight ten-year-olds are showing biological aging that is typical of forty-five-year-olds.
Talk about accelerated aging! If children are biologically forty-five at age ten, what will they be when they are fifty? American children today are so far from optimal health, they are projected to be the first generation in more than two hundred years that will have shorter lives than those of their parents.
Unfortunately, many of us take better care of our cars than we do of our bodies. We wouldn't think of putting salt in the radiator, soybean oil in the engine, or corn syrup in the gas tank. Nor would we drive with the brakes on, switch into reverse while barreling down the highway, or bang into everything that happens to be in our way. Everybody knows that these reckless actions would cause severe damage to a car. Yet, day after day, year after year, many of us are similarly careless in how we treat our bodies.
We load the grocery cart with processed foods, wash down fast food with supersized sodas, suffer increasing levels of stress without an outlet, reach for something—anything—to feel better, stare for hours at one screen or another, and then hit the sack for too few hours of fitful sleep. Few of us realize that living like this for years may be sentencing us to a life of high medical bills, invasive surgeries, and chronic and degenerative diseases, leading to an untimely death. Unlike a car, we can't trash our body and then just get a new one.
If you choose a typical modern diet and lifestyle and do not intend to make any changes, you are choosing the path of accelerated aging and untimely death. However, if you are willing to take a serious look at the way you eat, the way you move, and the way you live, and then make some adjustments, you can in fact achieve total health and never feel old again.
You Can Be Younger than Your Years
You see, it is entirely possible to be biologically younger than your chronological age, and that is exactly what this book is about. Being biologically younger than your years is easier to achieve than you might think, because the human body is a self-repairing system. It is designed to keep you fully functional and in good health for a long lifetime. All you have to do is supply the body with what it needs to keep up its own maintenance. The dreaded symptoms of aging that many of us have come to see as normal are nothing but a disease of repair deficits. A poorly maintained car ends up in a junkyard, and a poorly maintained body ends up in a nursing home.
This does not have to happen to you!
There are entire societies, such as the Himalayan Hunzas and the Japanese Okinawans, who have been able to enjoy excellent health and vitality into an advanced old age. There are also many individuals who achieve this, regardless of the culture around them.
One outstanding example is Jack LaLanne, an icon of modern physical fitness. LaLanne set out to prove that age was no obstacle to great physical performance. He ate a healthy diet and exercised every day of his life, until he died in 2011 at age ninety-six. He drew worldwide attention for swimming from Alcatraz Island to Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco at age sixty while handcuffed, shackled, and pulling a thousand-pound boat. At age seventy, he towed seventy boats carrying seventy people through Long Beach Harbor while handcuffed and shackled once again.
I myself am in my mid-seventies, but I am in excellent shape both physically and mentally. My arteries, and the medical odds of my having a heart attack or stroke, match those of a man in his mid-twenties. I never get sick. I have had only two colds in the last twenty-seven years. I have no arthritis, no hip or knee replacements, and no artificial implements anywhere in my body. I have no cataracts or macular degeneration in my eyes. I take no drugs. I am mentally sharp and full of energy. Do you remember being a kid and having so much energy you didn't know what to do with it all? That's how I feel at seventy-six.
How This Book Can Help You
In this book, I will show you how to take control of your health and reduce your biological age. Virtually all aging our society experiences today is premature. Yet premature aging is not natural or inevitable; it is a disease of deferred maintenance. In fact, I will explain that, regardless of symptoms, there really is only one disease, and that this one disease only has two causes. I will teach you how to control these two causes of aging and disease through the Six Pathways to health or disease.
Approaching aging as a disease caused by repair deficits empowers you to maintain and rejuvenate your body at the cellular level. Since the introduction of the Beyond Health Model (One Disease—Two Causes—Six Pathways) in my first book, Never Be Sick Again, many thousands have used it to cure themselves of chronic illnesses and enjoy excellent health. I use the same concept here to show you how to eliminate the causes of cellular aging and help your body do the maintenance it is designed to do to keep you biologically young.
Accelerated aging is a mistake. The rate at which we age can be controlled. It is entirely possible to live a longer life and to greatly reduce the risk of age-related diseases—if you know the factors that accelerate aging and avoid them. By taking control of the aging process, you can reduce your biological age, delay aging, and enjoy a very long disease-free life. I invite you to learn how to do this.
©2014. RAYMOND FRANCIS. All rights reserved. Reprinted from Never Feel Old Again. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher. Publisher: Health Communications, Inc., 3201 SW 15th Street, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442.
