You can’t go back in time, but changing the way you eat, sleep and deal with stress could make you feel like you’re getting younger, at least according to a new book. It all started when a doctor became a mother at the age of 50 and set out to find a way to keep her daughter healthy. now she younger The program can reverse biological age in just eight weeks.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald is the author of Younger: lower your biological age and live longer, better (Buy on Amazon, $21.49), and her younger The program uses genes to detect biological age. Curious which one is yours? You can take a fun quiz on their website right now to approximate your own biological age by answering just a few lifestyle questions. Fitzgerald tells us that it is important to understand the difference between the two types of ages: biological and chronological.
“Chronological age is the number of birthdays we’ve had, which obviously, we can’t do anything about, no matter how hard we try. Biological age is how quickly our bodies physically age, and we can reliably measure biological age by looking at gene expression,” he says. FIRST.
And for Fitzgerald, the fight against biological age is deeply personal. “I became a mom at 50, so I started my parenting journey late. I think about preserving my biological age with every fiber of my being. I don’t want to spend the last 16 years sick and have my daughter’s inheritance go to hospital or pharmacy bills to keep me alive.”
How can biological age be reversed?
Fitzgerald’s program traced the DNA to see if make changes to your diet and lifestyle would impact aging. According to his results, she did. The participants were “younger” at the end of the eight-week program. Their biological ages had decreased by three years, and their DNA reflected it. Everything depends on balancing DNA methylation, a biological process that basically makes changes to DNA segments without changing the sequence. The process does not alter our DNA, it only changes the activity.
“Aging and the diseases of aging take over our genetic expression and push it toward disease,” explains Fitzgerald, adding that, on average, Americans spend the last 16 years of their lives dealing with chronic illness. “We need to be in the driver’s seat of our genetic expression. And we can do that with simple adjustments that take control.”
Which is the younger Program?
The eight-week treatment, called the younger Program, includes guidance on diet, sleep, exercise, and relaxation. It also includes supplemental probiotics and phytonutrients, which are the natural compounds we get from plant foods. The program specifically targets methylation patterns that predict biological age, and according to Fitzgerald, that is the key to its success.
Fitzgerald highlighted some parts of the program, like a minimum of 30 minutes of exercise at least five days a week. And you don’t even have to work that hard: The program only requires 60 percent effort (“Exercise is a genetic whisper,” says Fitzgerald). Other parts of the program include eat five to ten eggs a weektwo cups of dark green leafy vegetables and two cups of cruciferous vegetables (such as broccoli and Brussels sprouts) every day.
Staying healthy is important and reversing your biological age could be one of the best ways to fight aging!
This article originally appeared on our sister site, first for women.
