Improve Your Healthspan
I recently finished this audiobook and found the majority of it to be super useful in reminding me why we work hard now to make our lives better as we age.
I wasn’t sure whether to post it in fitness, nutrition or mindfulness and ultimately decided that our mental outlook trumps everything else we do, so here it goes.
In summary, the book is written by a cancer surgeon who got tired of trying to treat people reactively, meaning when most of them were too sick for him to be able to save their lives versus simply prolonging them in the best case scenarios.
He teamed up with a longevity expert and had a slew of research help to give us a book that is a little dense at times but provides scientifically-based evidence (with many great metaphors) to show us how we can live longer and better by challenging the current medical system.
Not surprisingly, he addresses our nutritional needs, exercise, sleep, our emotional and cognitive health and the specific ways each of these is essential to preventing the various diseases that most aging adults currently die from, including heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and type 2 diabetes.
He argues that it’s possible (in most cases) to avoid these diseases with preventative medical and genetic testing and proactive, personalized health care planning.
Some of the information is not significantly different than much of the other information that many of us are already aware of (e.g. move more, strength train, eat healthy, avoid alcohol, etc) but it’s presented in a slightly different way that’s backed by science and makes it a little easier to comply with.
Three parts of the book that stood out for me:
Improving our “healthspan” versus simply focusing on our lifespan (living longer). Our quality of life as we age is essential. If we aren’t happy and we can’t engage in activities we enjoy when we’re old, what’s the point of living longer? He provides excellent information throughout the book on multiple ways of improving healthspan.
The idea of the centenarian decathlon. Our bodies are going to weaken as we age so we must be aggressively proactive now to ensure we can do those top 10 things (or more) that we want to be able to do when we’re 100, or at any older age. These decathlon activities can be as simple as living independently (cooking, bathing and other activities of daily living) or more ambitious as being able to ride a bike, hike a mountain, or travel well into old age.
The author doesn’t tell us what to do specifically, but rather provides enough overall information to help us plan and execute our own proactive plan to live our best life with optimal physical, emotional and cognitive health.
What I didn’t love about the book:
The author is a very big advocate of proactive medical and genetic testing and while I understand the importance of knowing an individual’s risk for certain diseases so they can be more vigilant in their efforts to avoid them, the knowledge that a person is at increased risk of these diseases causes many people to suffer from significant increases in stress and loss of sleep, both of which significantly decrease their health.
Maybe it’s a simplistic approach, but if we assume that any one of us is at risk of heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and type 2 diabetes and we do everything in our power to eat better food, exercise consistently, improve our cognitive functioning, enhance the quality of our sleep, reduce our stress, etc. we are significantly decreasing our risk for these diseases.
On the flip side, perhaps I’m wrong and people do need the extra motivation to do these things by knowing they’re at higher risk. Additionally, if they do know, there’s also medication that can be prescribed to assist in enhancing their health.
I’m also a trainer and nutrition coach and know how to engage in healthier habits and quite honestly I don’t always do so. I’m making an assumption that others know how to be healthy and then can chose to do so or not.
If you chose to read (or listen to the book) you’ll have all the information you need and can make your own informed decisions that are best for you!
