Stop the Clock

Stop the Clock

And Make the Years
Treat You Right

Pepper Herman plays killer golf, drives a sports car and zips back and forth between her home in Charlottesville, Virginia, and voice-over jobs for ad agencies in Wilmington, Delaware, and Philadelphia.

Her hair is long and dark. Her skin is smooth. People tell her that she looks a lot like Cher.

Oh, and one other thing: Pepper Herman is 60.

Back in her thirties and forties, Pepper started to create the vibrant, energetic woman she is today. You can do that, too.

The Real Age Makers

Aging today is not like it was for our mothers.

Lots of us had mothers who put on an extra ten pounds at age 30. They got wrinkles at 35, dry skin at 40, joint stiffness at 45, high cholesterol at 50, heart disease at 55, memory loss at 57 and osteoporosis at 60.

We don't.

We don't because today we know that a low-fat diet prevents the weight gains and increases in cholesterol associated with aging.

We know that staying out of the sun and using sunscreens prevent the proliferation of wrinkles.

We know that alpha-hydroxy acids--acids found in fruit and milk--prevent the dry, patchy skin that comes with age spots and baggy skin.

We know that exercise--particularly water aerobics and swimming--delays the onset of arthritis.

We know that aerobic exercise, a low-fat diet, aspirin and relaxation exercises prevent the progression of clogged arteries to heart disease.

We know that working crossword puzzles and reading the op-ed section of a newspaper can counteract the memory loss that results from an aging brain.

And we know that weight-bearing exercise and getting enough calcium can prevent the thinning of a woman's bones that leads to osteoporosis.

In other words, we know that although overweight, wrinkles, dry skin, arthritis, high cholesterol, heart disease, memory loss, osteoporosis and a whole host of other things could rob us of our youth, the real age maker is not physical: It's the mind-set that allows us to veg out in front of the television, eat high-fat foods, smoke, skip vegetables, bake in the sun and forget to play and challenge ourselves.

Aging, for the most part, is what we do to ourselves.

The Biology of Aging

"The human body is designed to last 110 years," says Ben Douglas, Ph.D., professor of anatomy at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson and author of AgeLess: Living Younger Longer. "Just like other members of the animal kingdom, our bodies are designed to last roughly five times the age of when we reach our sexual maturity. And with proper care, we should."

So what is it about aging that stops us? Let's take a part-by-part look, keeping in mind that much of what we call aging can be overcome.

Skin. In your twenties, accumulated sun damage may cause skin across your forehead to wrinkle. In your thirties it may wrinkle between your eyes. By age 40, crow's-feet appear and by age 50, wrinkles will have started at the corners of your mouth. Your skin will grow thinner, drier and less elastic with time--mostly due to a dwindling supply of connective tissue and estrogen that begins in the forties.

Cardiovascular System. After age 25, there's a small but steady decline in your cardiovascular system's ability to deliver oxygenated blood throughout your body during exercise. Typically, a woman's aerobic capacity drops 5 to 10 percent a decade between the ages of 25 and 75, which, as a practical matter, means that you get winded easier as you get older. The heart itself shrinks and beats at a slower rate. Blood vessels narrow and become less flexible. Systolic blood pressure--the top number on a blood pressure reading--increases about 20 to 30 percent between the ages of 30 and 70.

Muscles. After the age of 45 or so, your muscles begin to shrink as fat deposits expand. Muscle strength declines approximately 30 percent between the twenties and seventies, while muscle mass declines up to 40 percent.

Bones. Minerals--particularly calcium--are constantly being added and withdrawn from your bones throughout life. Deposits exceed withdrawals until around age 35. After that, there's a steady decline in bone strength and density. Partly because women's skeletons are smaller than men's to begin with, and partly because hormonal changes after menopause accelerate bone loss, osteoporosis tends to be more of a problem for women than it is for men. The risk of hip fractures starts to increase in the forties, then doubles every six years thereafter. In fact, researchers estimate that a woman is likely to have lost 30 percent of her peak bone mass by the time she's 70--making her increasingly prone to breaks.

Joints. A little stiffness in the knees, hips and neck begins somewhere in the forties. It gradually gets worse until your doctor diagnoses it as arthritis somewhere in your sixties. The disks between your vertebrae begin to degenerate and your spine stiffens somewhere in your seventies.

Metabolism. Starting around age 20, the number of calories your body needs gradually declines. By the time you're 70, you need 500 fewer calories a day.

Brain. We start life with a fixed number of neurons designed to provide a lifetime of service. Although we lose some nerve cells throughout life, in the absence of any disease, nerve cells function, repair, regenerate and make new connections during our entire lives. So what causes senility? Most of what we think of as senile behavior in older folks is caused by disease--not the loss of neurons.

Immune System. After age 60, the gradual decline in your immune system makes you more vulnerable to infection. If there's a bug around, you're more likely to get it.

Cholesterol. The amount of cholesterol in your blood--which is generated by the liver from saturated fats and cholesterol in your diet--tends to increase with age. It generally reaches a peak between the ages of 60 and 70, about a decade later than a man's peak.

Hair. Graying can start at any time. By age 50, half of us will have gray hair. By age 80, 40 percent of us will have more facial hair than we want.

Bladder. As estrogen begins to decline in the late forties, you may lose urine when you exercise. After menopause, you may be more prone to bladder infections.

Reproduction. The ovaries may produce less estrogen and progesterone after age 35. Fertility gradually ends and menopause begins.

Eyes. When you start holding the newspaper at arm's length somewhere in your early forties, the lens in your eye is losing its elasticity, making it less able to focus on close objects or shift from near to far. By age 65, you may begin to develop cataracts and by age 80, you may need three times as much light to see as clearly as you do now.

Ears. Your ability to hear begins to decline in your sixties. It declines in men as well, but at a faster pace.

Nose. Your ability to smell declines gradually after age 45.

Mouth. Your ability to sense subtle distinctions between flavors is reduced as the number of taste buds on your tongue declines.

Before the Looking Glass Most of us keep track of the aging process with our mirrors. Here's what a woman can and can't see as she watches her face and body throughout the adult years. Twenties. She looks good and feels great. But by her early twenties, the first faint signs of aging begin to show. Her muscles begin losing fullness and firmness due to the loss of muscle fibers. The rate at which her body burns calories begins to slow, dropping off by 2 percent a decade from now on. Her high-pitched hearing also begins to fade. Thirties. Laugh lines and fine furrows appear around her eyes and mouth, and if she's overly fond of a California tan, she may have other wrinkles, too, along with age spots. That's because her skin is gradually slowing production of pigment-producing melanocytes, tiny cells that help protect against ultraviolet radiation. In her early thirties, crow's-feet may appear. She also has to stay active to slow the decline in cardiovascular fitness, which begins now and may drop 30 to 40 percent by age 65. The gradual loss of bone strength begins around age 35. Forties. As the sebaceous glands in her skin cut back production and supportive fibers grow less elastic, primarily as a result of sun damage, she notices that her skin is becoming drier, thinner and more inclined to wrinkle. She may notice bags under her eyes. To her surprise, she finds that she needs reading glasses--the lenses in her eyes began to stiffen at around age 40 and now she has difficulty focusing on close objects. She may also begin to see a slight weight gain. Twenties Thirties Forties Fifties Sixties Seventies Fifties. Most women's ovaries stop producing estrogen and progesterone at approximately age 50. The change accelerates bone loss, reduces vaginal lubrication and raises cholesterol levels--increasing the risk of osteoporosis, heart attack and stroke. Her skin will loosen and sag in the middle of her cheeks, jowls and neck. Skin tone becomes more irregular. Sixties. She begins asking people to repeat what they said because her hearing has begun to fade. She may also discover she's actually begun to lose weight--mostly because she's lost muscle mass and gained fat. Since fat weighs less than muscle, she's now a size or so smaller. She also begins to grow ever-so-slightly shorter, losing half an inch over the next twenty years. Her skin is rougher and loses its uniform color, resulting in more splotches. She may also notice that she's more likely to pick up any bug that might come around, since a gradual decline in her immune system makes her more vulnerable to infections. Seventies. She takes life just a bit easier now. Her muscle strength has declined from its peak in her thirties, and reduced muscle tone means that she may have difficulty holding her urine or having food move through her digestive tract. She also needs twice as much light to see as clearly as she once did, but the odds are ten to one that she's still as sharp mentally as she ever was.

The Age Erasers

Despite what you've just read, very little of what we call aging has to happen. Somewhere around the age of 40, for instance, Pepper Herman realized that if she wanted to maintain her youthful body and energetic personality into her sixties and seventies, she'd better develop a battle plan to fight off the encroachment of age.

Pepper approached it in her usual way: She talked to her friends, visited doctors and read everything she could get her hands on about maintaining a healthy body. Then she experimented to find what was right for her.

She started on an eating regimen that included beans, brown rice, broccoli, miso soup and rice cakes along with tomatoes, green peppers and chicken.

The diet was so successful that it made her look and feel about ten years younger. "My cholesterol dropped from 300 to 167 and I lost weight," she admits. "But I didn't exercise, so my build still wasn't good."

Finally a friend dragged her to an aerobics class that was simultaneously trying to build "buns of steel," "super abs" and "power pecs." "It was awful," says Pepper. "They all looked like movie stars, and I couldn't keep up. I could only do a quarter of what they did."

Exhausted, Pepper decided that she might need exercise, but not to that degree of intensity. "I found a local exercise class in which I felt more comfortable and went twice a week," she says. "I also started walking with my sister-in-law and playing golf.

"I started losing more weight, and toned and tightened myself up," she adds. "My body became better than it had been in my twenties and thirties."

Eventually, Pepper says, she added a relaxation technique, popped some
vitamins--especially vitamins C and E plus beta-carotene--chewed a calcium-enriched gum, earned her master's degree, hung out with creative people who stimulated her mind, got involved with political action groups and seduced her husband on energizing trips to Sante Fe, Anguilla, Vermont and anywhere else that took her fancy.

The result? The Pepper we have today: the prototype of an exciting, seemingly ageless woman--a woman who smashes every previous generation's concept of "old."

Not everyone can become a Pepper, of course. But everyone can hold aging at bay by changing the way they think about getting old.

To stay young, says Mary M. Gergin, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University's Delaware County campus, "We need to liberate ourselves from outdated notions of aging. We need to be unafraid and daring and willing to take risks. And we need to be willing to break the mold of aging."

Once we do, says Dr. Gergin, we need to use the age erasers that most suit our own individual needs just as Pepper Herman did.

Which ones? Here's a sample of strategies you might want to consider.

Get Out and Sweat

If there's anything close to a genuine youth drug, it's sweat.

"There's nothing science can do for you that could be of more benefit than exercise," says William Evans, Ph.D, director of the Noell Laboratory for Human Performance Research at Pennsylvania State University in University Park and co-author of Biomarkers: The Ten Determinants of Aging You Can Control.

A single classic experiment vividly illustrates his point. In the late 1960s, a Swedish physiologist named Bengt Saltin asked five young men, two of them athletes, to lie in bed for three weeks while he monitored their bodies' physiological response to prolonged disuse.

The result? In the space of 21 days, doing nothing reduced the men's aerobic capacity so dramatically that Saltin concluded it was equivalent to almost 20 years of aging.

Fortunately, subsequent research found that exercise could not only reverse Saltin's results, it could actually reverse the results of age. In one study, for example, 11 healthy men and women from 62 to 68 years old were put on a moderately strenuous walking program for six months, and it boosted their aerobic capacity an average of 12 percent. When they continued the program for another six months, at double the intensity, their aerobic capacity climbed an additional 18 percent.

Many other physiological changes that were normally associated with aging can also be prevented or delayed with moderate exercise. What does "moderate" mean? About 20 minutes of aerobic activity, three times a week, should do the trick.

Researchers at Tufts University put a group of elderly volunteers on an eight-week strength training program and found that women as old as age 96 were able to increase their muscle size and strength by more than 200 percent.

Other researchers have found that weight-bearing exercises such as walking, jogging and dancing can keep bones strong and help prevent osteoporosis.

And still other researchers have found that exercise can prevent the age-related increases in weight, triglycerides, cholesterol and diastolic blood pressure--the bottom number in a blood pressure reading.

In a study at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, researchers recorded weight, triglycerides, cholesterol and blood pressure for 500 women between the ages of 42 and 50 both at the beginning of the study and then again three years later. In the years between measurements, diastolic blood pressure, weight, triglycerides and total cholesterol levels went up for everyone. But the women who exercised the most gained the least weight and had healthier blood cholesterol levels.

How much exercise is necessary to keep your body youthful into your sixties and seventies?

"For years, exercise zealots kept saying that you had to work out for 30 to 40 minutes, three times a week, in order to get any benefit," says Dr. Evans. "But there's now good evidence that fairly low-level activity is also beneficial."

Low level means taking the stairs when you could take the escalator, he adds. It means parking the car far from the entrances of malls, supermarkets, workplaces--in short, anywhere you go. It also means walking ten minutes in the morning or at lunch and another ten minutes around dinnertime or before bed.

"It all adds up," says Dr. Evans. And the bottom line is that it will erase many of the problems that make you old before your time.

Eat Veggies for Longevity

Florets of broccoli, a heap of steamed carrots or a few ruffled leaves of kale may not seem important in the larger scheme of life. But these unassuming vegetables are actually "longevity foods"--clean-burning, high-octane fuels that can prevent many causes of premature aging.

Broccoli, brussels sprouts, carrots and most leafy green vegetables are packed with beta-carotene, the vitamin A - producing substance that has been shown to block cancer and prevent heart attacks.

Kale and other green vegetables are loaded with calcium, the mineral your body needs most to maintain its youthful bone strength.

And all vegetables have almost no fat or cholesterol, which will help keep age-related weight gains, high blood pressure readings and clogged arteries at bay.

Feast on Fruit

Nutrients called antioxidants--vitamins C and E and beta-carotene--turn out to be key players in what could be described as an "anti-aging diet." Contained in fruits, nuts and some vegetables, antioxidants are the body's defense against what scientists call free radicals--highly reactive molecules zinging around the body doing all sorts of cellular damage. They are implicated in the initiation of cancer, heart disease and even aging itself--so much so that some scientists feel that the aging process is produced largely by a lifetime of tiny cellular nicks, dents and bumps caused by free radicals as they oxidize various cells.

Antioxidants--as their name suggests--provide the body with a natural defense against these free radicals. That's why nutritionists frequently recommend that you eat foods that are rich in vitamins C and E and beta-carotene.

Sources of vitamin C include citrus fruits, red bell peppers and cabbage. Other good sources are strawberries and tomatoes.

The best sources of beta-carotene are carrots, spinach, broccoli and lettuce.

Vitamin E is found mostly in nut oils such as hazelnut, sunflower and almond--all of which weigh in at more than 100 calories per tablespoon. You could eat the nuts themselves, of course, but you'd have to eat so many to get much vitamin E that you'd be munching all the time--not to mention getting all that fat, too. As a result, many women prefer to get their vitamin E from a supplement.

How Long Will You Live? The choices you make every day about what you eat, whether you exercise and how stressed you let yourself get combine with any genetic glitches to determine your longevity. Take the following test to see whether you stand a good chance at longevity. Keep a running tally of your score as you answer the following questions. Family History (Choose all that apply) 1. - 1 One or both parents lived beyond age 75 and did not have cancer or heart disease 2. +2 Cancer in a parent or sibling 3. Coronary heart disease before age 40 in: +2 One parent +4 Both parents 4. High blood pressure before age 50 in: +2 One parent +4 Both parents 5. Diabetes mellitus before age 60 in: +2 One parent +4 Both parents 6. A stroke before age 60 in: +2 One parent +4 Both parents Lifestyle and Health (Choose all that apply) 7. +2 Live and/or work in a heavily air-polluted area 8. Smoking: - 1 Never smoked or quit over 5 years ago 0 Quit 1 to 5 years ago +1 Quit within past year +5 Have smoked more than 20 years 9. You smoke cigarettes: +2 Less than one pack a day +3 One pack a day +5 Over two packs a day 10. Your alcohol use: - 1 None or seldom 0 Drink no more than 1 1/2 ounces of hard liquor, 5 ounces of wine or 12 ounces of beer a day +2 Three or more drinks a day 11. Your blood pressure: - 2 Below 121/71 0 121/71 to 140/85 +2 141/86 to 170/100 +4 171/101 to 190/110 +6 Above 190/110 12. Your blood cholesterol level: 0 190 or below +1 191 to 230 +2 231 to 289 +4 290 to 320 +6 Over 320 13. Your HDL cholesterol level: - 1 over 60 0 60 to 45 +2 44 to 36 +4 35 to 28 +6 27 to 22 14. Your weight: 0 Normal or within 10% of normal +1 Overweight by 20 to 29 percent +2 Overweight by 30 to 39 percent 15. You exercise: