We are so engrained in the instant gratification that our society puts forth. We want instant everything; instant rice, 500 channels with nothing on the TV, a refrigerator full of food, and if there is no food, a pizza will be at the door in 30 minutes. Optimal health is like your wealth. It is not an instant process, we have to be patient.
Achieving this level of health can take some time if you are grossly out of shape, your hormones are way off balance, or you lead a sedentary lifestyle. It is possible to add good, active, and productive years to your life.
If you are just learning of this concept, get ready. Get ready to change some things around. Get ready to learn about what’s going on inside your body. Get ready to live better, and live longer.
Just imagine if you can gain another 5 years of quality life. How about another 10 years? A lot happens in 10 years. You’ll have grandkids that will grow and mature into adults. Don’t you want to be around to see that? Do you want to be there to witness the start of the next generation? Could you help them buy that little starter house? You will be able to play with your great-grand kids. You will have energy and feel youthful for years to come.
People versus numbers
In traditional medicine, certain age markers are considered to be normal based on your age. Levels of certain biochemical markers will increase or decrease with age, which is normal for the aging process. Even though they are not optimal, they are still considered normal. Age management, on the other hand, will see these markers changing and can either supplement to raise them or provide certain therapies to lower them depending upon the situation.
Let’s take the example of the thyroid tests. If you were to go to your traditional doctor complaining of tiredness, cold hands and feet, and hair loss, the doctor should, and probably will, get a thyroid stimulating hormone level. Most likely, if you fall into the normal range, the doctor will say you are normal. He will tell you everything is fine and you don’t need medication. An age management specialist will optimize this hormone even if you are within the normal range by giving you the proper amount of a thyroid medication, based on you as an individual and not numbers on a piece of paper.
Another good example is cholesterol. It seems as though the preferred cholesterol level keeps getting lower and lower. What we have to remember is that all of our sex hormones; testosterone, progesterone, and the estrogens, all originate from cholesterol. If we continue to lower cholesterol, we are depleting our bodies of these hormones. I feel, as many other age management doctors do, that optimal total cholesterol level is from 150 to 200. What is more important here is the ratio between the LDL (the bad cholesterol) and the HDL (the good cholesterol). Ideally, we want about a 2:1 ratio of LDL to HDL; so you have twice the amount of LDL as HDL. If your LDL is 100, your HDL should be about 50. Even if your total cholesterol is 215, I don’t care as long as your ratio is good.
Also, your body repairs itself with cholesterol. Every day, all day, your body is getting injured in some way. When you need repair, cholesterol is the substance that comes to the rescue and does the patch-up job. It is when you have too much cholesterol from a poor diet and sedentary lifestyle that the trouble begins. If your cholesterol is too low, you probably will not produce your required hormones too feel well. Your body is going to use cholesterol to repair itself first, what is left is what is used to manufacture your hormones. If there is nothing left, you can’t produce hormones.
For men, testosterone begins to fall at about age 35. We lose 1%-2% every year and with that decline comes a decrease in lean body tissue, decreased libido, an increase in prostate size, decreased strength, decreased stamina, and just feeling old and “burned out.”
Going to a traditional doctor and getting a blood test most likely will not get you any testosterone supplementation. The normal blood levels for testosterone range from 200 to 1200. If you are normal for you at 900 and now you have a testosterone level of 400, the doctor is going to say, “Well, your testosterone level is normal.” Your testosterone level has dropped by more than half, yet you are still considered normal?
An age management physician would look at that number and say, “You are in the normal range but you’re not optimal. We can boost you up a bit and see how you feel after a couple weeks. If you still feel sluggish, tired, and weak, we can bump it up a little more until we find what is right for you.” Are you beginning to see the difference here?
Hormonal decline
Along this same train of thought, women also begin a hormone loss around age 30. With women, it starts with a gradual decrease in progesterone and continues on with estrogen and even testosterone. For both sexes, the decline of growth hormone, DHEA, and thyroid begins in the early to mid thirties. What we will do is return these hormone levels back to optimal levels. The age range of 30 to 35 years old for hormones levels is generally considered the gold standard. This seems to be the range at which most people feel their best when given hormone supplementation. We will attempt to keep these levels throughout life and adjust them as necessary.
When I say hormone supplementation, I mean supplementing the amount of hormone that your body is producing with a bio-identical hormone, bringing the level back to optimal. This means that the chemical is the exact same structure that is found in your body. By doing this, there are absolutely no side effects. There are, however, under dosing effects and over dosing effects. When men are feeling weak, low libido, and a loss of strength, this is an under dosing effect of testosterone, for example. By supplementing with the correct amount, the proper level returns and the under dosing effects subside.
On the other hand, a woman who feels bloated, irritable, has foggy thinking, and has trouble sleeping, is suffering from an over dosing of estrogen. Having too much estrogen is not necessarily caused by getting a high dose of bio-identical estrogens either. Many women suffer from excess estrogen caused by chemicals in our environment. Lowering the estrogen level through lifestyle changes and balancing with bio-identical progesterone will quickly relieve these symptoms.
You are what you eat
Nutrition is a critical part to the anti-aging, or slowing of aging, area of medicine. A poor diet leads to what you see every day walking around the mall, or riding on a scooter around the mall because they are too overweight to even walk. Eating the typical American diet leads to excess weight gain, heart disease, Type II diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. All of these are lifestyle related diseases.
The term de-generation is used to define the slow process that goes on inside the unhealthy person. Eating poorly causes the body to produce a low level of inflammation. This is similar to, but on a smaller scale, having something like a swollen ankle. You have twisted your ankle, injured it, and the body is sending its healing attributes to the injury. This causes swelling or inflammation. This same process, at a very low level, is going on in your blood vessels, your vital organs, and virtually every cell in your body. Over time, this causes increased aging as well as cellular damage.
A diet high in saturated fats, sugar, and trans fats will cause the highest amount of inflammation. Don’t get me wrong in thinking that you have to totally eliminate saturated fats from your diet. A small amount is good for you. The problem is the person who eats sugar laden and fatty foods five or six times a week.
Sugar should be kept at a minimum. Just about every processed food in the supermarket is going to have sugar in it. Even if the box says sugar free, look for fructose, maltose, dextrose, all those other substances that are not technically sugar but taste the same and act just about the same in your body. High fructose corn syrup is an extremely prevalent substance found in the vast majority of processed food; do you best to limit or avoid high fructose corn syrup.
Hydrogenated fats are man-made fats that are not found in nature. They are used in the food industry because they taste good and have a long shelf life; these are not good for you at all. Hydrogenated fats are created by converting the liquid fat into a solid by exposing it to hydrogen. These fats like margarine and shortening raise cholesterol, deposit fat in the blood vessels, and cause inflammation in the body.
Recent research shows the quickest way to getting rid of this low level inflammation is simply diet and exercise. If people realized the power of eating a little better, making better food choices, and exercising, it would make a world a difference in their health.
The best diet is one that has a roughly equal number of calories from carbohydrates, protein, and fat calories. Carbohydrates are in the form of mostly fruits, vegetables, and grains. Protein is lean meat like poultry, fish, egg whites, or a low fat cut of red meat. The fats should be butter, olive oil, sunflower oil, or coconut oil.
I have my own eating plan that I think is the best. I call it the 511 Diet because you eat very “clean” for 5 straight days, you fast on the sixth day until dinner, and eat whatever you want on the seventh. Following this plan gives your body a break on day 6 and satisfies all those cravings on day 7. On this plan, you can eat whatever you want, just not whenever you want. We get into more detail in the chapter titled The 511 Diet.
Other lifestyle conditions can lead to this type of inflammation. Studies show that people who go on yo-yo diets, repeatedly gaining and losing more that 20 pounds at a time, have a higher level of inflammation. People whose waist measures more than ½ their height have a higher level of inflammation. If you are 5’10” tall, that is 70 inches. Your waist must be less than 35 inches around to prevent excessive damage. Those who are sedentary, people who smoke, people who tan a lot in the sun, people with bronchitis, gum disease, high blood pressure and high cholesterol all are at risk for increased inflammation.
We are made to move
For exercise, there are a couple different kinds that you can do. There is endurance, interval training, and weight or resistance training. Endurance training is the long distance type, like riding the bicycle or running. Endurance training is good for cardiovascular health. This type of exercise has you putting forth a moderate effort for long periods of time.
Interval training is when you perform very intense exercises for a short period of time, then go slow for a short period of time, then fast again, then slow. And you repeat this pattern several times. In my personal experience and the research I have read, the magic number seems to be eight. You must do this interval training pattern at least eight times before there are chemical changes in the body. A few minutes after you end this type of training session, your growth hormone spikes, that is good. Also, your body can better use the sugar/glucose/insulin system of energy. Your body gets more efficient and better at burning fuel.
Weight training is my personal favorite. It is very important or several reasons. As we age, muscle is lost and in the space where muscle used to be, is fat. Muscle is also metabolic, meaning that it uses calories all the time. Fat uses almost zero calories to maintain itself. And, as we age, it gets more and more difficult to gain muscle because our hormone levels keep decreasing. So you have to start young to get a good foundation. Weight training also increases the strength of your bones. Along with your muscles and connective tissue, your bones have to become stronger to support that extra weight, this prevents osteoporosis.
STRESS, avoid it
Stress management is another important point in regards to achieving your optimal health. We all have stress regardless of whether or not we are a student, a single working person with no children, married, unmarried, divorced, whatever, we all have a certain level of stress in our lives. At certain times, stress is good for us and it helps us get things done and do what we have to do. Too much stress, and too much prolonged stress, can be detrimental to your health. Stress causes our body to release a chemical called cortisol and to release sugar into our blood stream to be used as a quick source of fuel.
Thousands of years ago, we needed this stress response from our body because we were being chased by predators, or in wars, or in a situation where our very lives depended on split second action and reaction. In modern times, we rarely need this type of reaction from our body. When you are under prolonged, low level stress, your body is constantly putting out a small amount of cortisol and sugar. Excess sugar causes your body to release insulin. When insulin is high, your growth hormone level decreases. Growth hormone is sort of our own “fountain of youth.” When a person has excess cortisol, they tend to store body fat around the midsection. This is not a good situation.
You can manage your stress level through lifestyle changes such as relaxation techniques, getting the proper amount of sleep, and eating a proper diet. There is more on the subject of stress in a later chapter.
The best way to move towards your own personal peak level of health is to optimize and balance your hormones, eat properly getting the appropriate amount of nutritional intake, keep stress to a minimum, and regular exercise. When all four of these conditions are being met, you will feel healthier, look younger, and just live better.
Other published chapters…
