Younger Next Year
9, Apr, 2012
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Tags: lifestyle, live better, live longer, philosophy, self-improvement, younger by next year
Younger Next Year describes that lifestyle, summarized by “Harry’s Rules.” Follow them, the authors say, and you’ll turn back your biological clock — “become functionally younger every year for the next decade.” From the book:
Harry’s Rules
- Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life. Don’t think of it as exercise. Think of it as sending a constant ‘grow’ message…as telling your body to get stronger, more limber, functionally younger, in the only language your body understands. Do it because it’s the only thing that works.
- Do serious aerobic exercise four days a week for the rest of your life. Hard aerobics, working up a good sweat, is our favorite exercise rhythm because [it] brings out our youngest and best biology: strong, fast, energetic, and optimistic all day long. Tell your body it’s springtime.
- Do serious strength training, with weights, two days a week for the rest of your life.Generally, we aren’t aware of nerve decay as we get older, but it’s the main reason our joints wear out, our muscles get sloppy, and our ability to be physically alert and powerful begins to fade. And it is reversible with strength training.
- Spend less than you make. Time to quit playing and come inside. Come inside your income. Try to do it early. As with smoking, you can recover. It takes time and earlier is better, but do it.
- Quit eating crap! Never go on a diet again. The only way to lose weight is to embark on a program of steady, vigorous exercise, avoiding the worst foods (french fries, almost all fast food, processed snacks with names that end with the letter “O”), and eating less of everything.
- Care. There have to be people and causes you care about. Doesn’t seem to matter much what the causes are. They don’t have to be important to society or make money, as long as they’re important to you.
- Connect and commit. There is a terrible temptation, in our 60s and 70s, to close up shop and narrow our lives. In most cases, retirement already does that, and it’s tempting to just go along with the program, get narrower and narrower. Well, don’t. It’s killing us. We have toexercise our social, pack-animal gifts as vigorously as we exercise our bodies. That means adding friends, doing more stuff, getting out there, and being involved.