How 50 can be the new 40 (or 40 the new 30)
I saw a really funny Instagram post from a man joking about how something was definitely “in the water” of the current 40 year olds to make them look so good. More like 20 year olds than 40 year olds. Ya know, think the Golden Girls as 50 year olds versus Penelope Cruz or David Beckham.While certainly advances in cosmetic procedures play a part in what you see in Hollywood, advances in the Longevity Sciences have been pretty key. Can we feel better at 50 (or 40) than a decade earlier? Isn’t it just gloom and doom from there?
You can choose to buy into the idea that life after 50 is a steady decline (or 40 or insert your feared age), hook, line and sinker, or you can create the habits, identity and mindset that chooses something different. Thanks to advances in longevity science, we now understand that aging is more malleable than we once thought. It’s not about luck, or even genetics (although that plays a part), it is about strategy.
What you do. How you eat. How you move. What thoughts or beliefs you hold and how all that feels and accumulates in your body. If you are doing it right, 50 can feel like 40, or even 35.
Here are a few habits I have had dialed in for the last decade or so which has me feeling better at 47 than 27, sleeping better, with better energy, a smooth hormonal transition AND fitting into the same clothes I wore in high school:
1. Balanced Blood Sugar.
This was a big one and what I am teaching/coaching on this month at Jivamukti Glockenback next Sunday! If there is one thing you can do to slow down aging, it’s regulating your blood sugar. Spikes and crashes don’t just impact energy levels, they accelerate aging by fueling inflammation, oxidative stress, and insulin resistance. Keeping blood sugar stable means more sustained energy, better cognitive function, and a longer health span.
How to do it:
Eat breakfast, ideally within an hour of awakening to have a good healthy Cortisol Awakening Response. Breakfast should have 30g ish of protein to blunt blood sugar spikes which were relatively stable all night.
Prioritize protein and healthy fats at every meal. More or less, carbs should be no more than 30% of your daily caloric intake.
Eat veggies first, then proteins and fats, then starches and then sugars or breads. Just like your grannie and grandpa ate. The order of food has a MASSIVE impact on blood sugar spikes and knowing how to space out food makes it easy to enjoy what you like while experiencing all the great stuff from balanced blood sugars.
Walk after eating to blunt glucose spikes.
Experiment with CGMs (continuous glucose monitors) to see how your body responds to different foods, as well as how exercise, stress, sleep and undereating impact your blood glucose levels.
2. Do your Liver a solid. Support it.
Your liver is a workhorse, responsible for filtering toxins, metabolizing fats, regulating blood sugar and clearing/detoxing your hormones. But in a world of environmental toxins, processed foods, and excessive stress, it’s under constant attack. A sluggish liver means poor detoxification, hormone imbalances, and accelerated aging.
How to support it:
Drink lemon water in the morning and digestive bitters before meals to stimulate bile flow.
Eat cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower) to enhance detox pathways.
Eat a diet with a lot proteins (animal proteins best), B vitamins, magnesium, zinc, and selenium, to name a few. This supports Phase 1 and 2 Detoxification (toxins and hormones) that happens primarily in the liver.
Reduce alcohol and processed foods to lighten the livers burden. Don’t kill the messenger!
3. Support your stress system (aka your Adrenals & the HPA Axis). Can’t stress this one enough, so I saved it for last.
The adrenal glands and HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis regulate our stress response. Chronic stress leads to cortisol dysregulation, which accelerates aging, disrupts sleep, and contributes to insulin resistance. If you are always in “go “ mode and never in rest mode, you likely have an overactivated sympathetic nervous system. And it’s aging the crap out of you.
It bears repeating but here are a few ways to support your stress response:
Have at least 10 minutes every day where you bring yourself down into a relaxation response. How you do that is up to you - walk in nature, singing, chanting or humming, breathing practices, yoga.. ya know, the things one does on a yoga retreat. Do it for a few minutes on the daily
Turn of your phone at least an hour before bed and sleep 7-8.5 hours a night. Cortisol balance starts at night.:)
Swap intense workouts for restorative movement (like yoga or walking) when feeling burned out. Cardio or high intensity training should be kept to 20 minutes or less if you are in or close to an adrenal fatigue picture. It makes it worse. Trust me. Especially if you are a perimenopausal woman.
I turned 47 in August and am starting to creep up to eek 50. … whether you are woman and are inundated with stories of menopause being a total s%^tsh9w or you are a man and preparing for the decline of your sex drive, your hair, and ecking towards that mid life crisis.. the picture is usually presented as pretty damn grim. Stories which are part of the collective conscious we often don’t question and believe as true. Just because they are repeated often. But repeated stories are not true stories…
Aging doesn’t have to be gloom and doom. For real. It is probably my #1 reason why I do what do for work and for me. It’s not about having a long life span. It’s about having a long health span.