Category: Anti-Aging

Sleep is the ultimate anti-aging strategy.

Anyone remember from the old movies how people who were stressed out and experiencing what was then quaintly called a “nervous breakdown” were sent away to a sanitarium for the “rest cure”? Makes sense when you think about it—after all, when your dog gets sick, what does he do? He usually curls up in a corner, won’t eat, and sleeps a lot. He’s basically taking a rest cure. This is the animal’s natural way of healing. No extra energy is spent on external things such a sdigestion, and all the body’s resources are mobilized for the task at hand. Sleep and rest minimize the “output” and allow the body to replenish, renourish, and repair. We were programmed to get about eight hours at the end of every day to accomplish much the same thing your dog accomplishes when he curls up and naps till he feels better.

Except that we’re not doing it. Not even close.

Scientists don’e even fully understand exactly why our bodies need sleep, but they know that we do. Sleep generates hormones, such as human growth hormone, the ultimate anti-aging hormone (released only in the dep stages of sleep), and melatonin, which appears to have powerful antioxidant and anticancer properties. Biochemicals get replaced during sleep.

And let’s not forget that lack of sleep is a huge stressor, causing our bodies to secrete cortisol, whose aging effects can be considerable. (Cortisol shrinks a portion of the brain called the hippocampus; it also puts on belly fat.) In short, not getting enough sleep can shorten our life and diminish its quality in multiple ways.

But it’s not just the quantity of sleep we get, it’s also the quality.

Sleep is essential to memory, mood, and cognitive performance, all markers for a healthylifestyle. All diminish as you get older unless you take good care of your sleep. Inadequate sleep is linked to increase anger, anxiety, and sadness, all diminishers of the quality (and potentially length) of your life. One study at the University of Pennsylvania showed that when subjects were only allowed to sleep 4.5 hours a night they exhibited significantly more stress, anger, and mental exhaustion.

Then there’s obesity and diabetes and all the life-shortening syndromes and conditions that come with being overweight and having an impaired metabolism. A study at the University of Chicago showed that under-sleeping for even a few days impairs sugar metabolism and disrupts hormone levels– in some cases to a prediabetic level!

Sleep also affects immunity. One study showed that after being restricted to only four hours a night for four nights straight, people who got the flu shot actually produced less than half as many flu-fighting antibodies as the folks who weren’t sleep deprived!

What to do, what to do?

1) Go to bed ½ hour earlier.

It’s way easier to add sleep on at the beginning of your sleep than at the end of it. Keep going to bed ½ hour earlier each week till you get to the ideal number of hours for your body (for me it’s six, for many it’s eight, for a very few it might be nine).

2) Change the temperature.

The bedroom should be cool and comfortable. Dr. Sara Gottfried recommends 68 degrees.

3) Accept that you’re not Hugh Hefner.

The bedroom is not an office. It should be a place to retreat to. Ideally, the bedroom should be a sanctuary, and should be for two things only: sleeping and getting lucky. Don’t try to make your bed an office. It’s not, and trying to make it one will only screw up your sleep.

4.) Prepare properly.

Watching the news is not a calming preparation for sleep. Turn off the TV for ½ hour before bed, make some tea, and for goodness sake, relax. You deserve it! And more importantly, you need it.

Years ago, I participated in a panel at a health and wellness fair sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. On this panel were a number of practitioners, many of them forward-thinking specialists in integrative and functional medicine.

I don’t remember who I shared that panel with that day—I’ve been on more than 100 such panels—but I do remember one pearl of wisdom offered by one of the docs sitting next to me.

“When I have a patient with lots of complaints and symptoms I often tell them to do one thing”, he said. “Take your weight, divide by two, and drink that number of ounces of water every day. When they come back to see me in two weeks, 90% of the time their symptoms have significantly improved.”

Though there is no real science behind the “8 glasses of water a day” rule, that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. About sixty percent of our bodies are water. And if we don’t stay hydrated, the first thing to go is physical and mental performance.

Even as little as a 2% loss of your body’s water content can make a significant difference. (Athletes can lose up to 10% of their water just by sweating.) And let’s not forget that muscle is a whopping 80% water!

Water can also affect mood. One study of young women showed that fluid loss of as little as 1.36% following exercise impaired both their concentration and their mood. It also increased their number of headaches. And in case you think that’s just a “woman” thing, the same thing happens in men. A study in young men found that a fluid loss of only 1.59% increased feelings of fatigue and anxiety. That small amount of dehydration also had an effect (not a good one) on their working memory.

Drinking more water can also help with headaches, kidney stones, and constipation (especially constipation!).

And then there’s weight loss.

In two separate studies, drinking about 17 ounces of water was shown to increase metabolic rate by up to 30% for up to 1.5 hours. A third study showed that dieters drinking half a liter of water before meals lost 44% more weight.

In the weight loss community, it’s long been an article of faith that drinking more water can help you lose fat. The prescription has always been the one my unnamed colleague at that LA Times health fare repeated so many years ago: Take your body weight, divide by 2, and drink that number of ounces of water.

It’s an easy way to make a quick upgrade to your overall health—and it might even help you shed some body fat at the same time!

Most of you probably never heard of Adele Davis, but back in the 60’s and 70’s she was the most recognized nutritionist in the country. And she had one piece of brilliant advice that I still remember to this day. Here’s what she said:

“Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince,and dinner like a pauper”.

And that, my friends, is the essence of step two.

You don’t have to change a thing you’re eating (and that goes double if you did step one). This is not about what you eat, it’s about when you eat it and how much.

Now you probably know that front-loading our calories early in the day is the exact opposite of the way we normally eat. Most of us skimp on breakfast and lunch and then have a huge dinner, especially when we eat out.

That’s precisely the wrong way to do it.

Years ago, Health magazine did a really interesting feature on how to gain weight. (Yes, you read that right.) They figured if we knew what people did to successfully gain weight, we’d know what not to do. Clever, right?

But who in the world wants to gain weight, you might ask?

Sumo wrestlers.

Health magazine followed around a few competitive sumo wrestlers whose living depends upon them being enormous. Know what they’d do? They’d train for hours, then eat a huge meal and go to sleep.

Conventional dietitians and other mainstream health know-it-alls have been telling us for years that “a calorie is a calorie” and it doesn’t matter when you eat it.

Excuse my French, but they’re full of shit.

Try front-loading your calories earlier in the day. Eat lightly at night, and early.

And watch what happens.

Whenever someone tells me how confused they are about diet—which is pretty much every day of my life—this is what I tell them to do. It’s the simplest, easiest “intervention” you can do. It doesn’t require counting grams, calories, ounces. It doesn’t require that you evaluate the pros and cons of high fat, low fat, paleo, vegetarian, raw food, high protein or any of that stuff.

In fact, it’s so simple it’s hard to believe it works as well as it does.

But it does work. Probably more powerfully than any diet program and certainly easier to sustain for the rest of your life.

So here’s the deal. Every morsel that goes into your mouth has to pass one test, and one test only.
It has to be real food.

OK, I can almost hear some of you saying, “I wonder what he means by “real food”?”

Good question. We all know that broccoli and almonds are real food, and we all know that Twinkies and Corn Flakes aren’t. But most other foods fall in between.

So here’s the rule: If you’re not sure if it’s “real food” or not, it’s probably not. Don’t eat it. Don’t give it the “benefit of the doubt”. If it comes in a box, if it has ingredients you don’t recognize except from chemistry 101, if it looks like it could live on the shelf for a couple of years, don’t eat it. Period.

I realize there are exceptions and some decent “real” foods might be tossed aside, but I’d rather you err on the side of safety and clean eating. I want you to eat from what I call the Jonny Bowden Four Food Groups: Food you could hunt, fish, gather or pluck.

I don’t care what or how much you eat, as long as it passes this single test: Is it real? Is it food your great grandmother would recognize as food? (Hint: Great grandma would have no idea what to make of “Lunchables”. Or a box of juice. Or a frozen dinner, even the supposedly “healthy” kind like Amy’s. Sorry.)

I don’t even care if you eat dessert. Raw food desserts are beyond luscious, especially if you like the taste of coconut, and even though they’re sweet and delicious, they’re still made with real food, so they get a green light.

You get where I’m going here? This is not a diet. It’s a “pre-diet”. You can always figure out the proportions of protein, fat, and carbs later on. You can always figure out the timing of meals later on. All those things are details. Will fine tuning make a difference? Sure. But right now, let’s save the fine tuning for the “advanced course”. We’re working here with basics—basics that will make an enormous difference in how you feel and how you look.

Real food is the first step. And allow me to let you in on a secret—sometimes a first step is all you need.

In 12 step programs like AA, there are a whole lotta people who got sober without going beyond the 1st step (“Admitted I was powerless over alcohol”.) They may never get to the amends part or the inventory part, but they still get sober because that first step is so powerful.

Real food is your first step. It might even wind up being your only step, which would still be OK because by eating nothing but real food, you wind up eliminating half the junk in the American diet.