Bombshell: Explosive Medical Secrets That Will Redefine Aging (7 page)

How much sleep you are getting nightly and how well you are managing your stress are also key components in determining how you look and feel, as well as how you age.

Don’t blame your genes, though; genetics account for only 25 to 35 percent of how fast you age. The rest is determined by your metabolism, which is largely under your control.

The rate at which your
catabolic
(breakdown) activity exceeds your
anabolic
(restoration) activity gauges how fast you age; conversely, the rate at which your restoration activity exceeds breakdown gauges how fast and how far you can
reverse
your aging process. And that’s
what we are looking to do here … once the damage is done, what can we do to “up” restoration and put our metabolic system back to healthy, optimal, even prime function?

Within the next fifteen years, as described by Ray Kurzweil in the next chapter on the future of medicine, we will have tools at hand that provide the ultimate protection as well as repair ability. He talks about nanobots, blood-cell-sized injected robots that will roam through our bodies repairing and correcting conditions that at present are taking us down, namely, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. When nanobots are a reality, the present paradigm of medicine will become obsolete.

But until then, to best access these great advancements, we must keep our bodies in the best health and shape possible to continue living with great quality. And that is the goal: quality of life. A life of vitality, energy, sexuality, and great health is ours if we understand what it is that is stealing our health and how we can reverse that. That is what
Bombshell
is all about: blowing up the myths surrounding aging, as well as taking down the obstacles that are standing in our way to the healthiest end point possible.

Free-radical damage is the biggest of these culprits that steal our lives. As such, combating it is the ticket to redefining aging. Let’s see what else is out there to make our ride smoother.

Let’s start at the end
. What’s coming, what’s your incentive to make healthy choices today and why? In other words, why go through all this work?

Well, imagine this.

In just a short thirteen to fifteen years from now, the diseases of today will be on their way to being obsolete. Imagine, heart disease gone, cancer cured without any of the present torturous protocols inflicted on people today. Imagine Alzheimer’s no longer as the final, sad exit we now somewhat expect at the end of our lives. Imagine the end to suffering from Parkinson’s and autoimmune diseases; imagine being able to grow new limbs or, as I have already done, regrow a breast taken in cancer. Imagine brains being regenerated. Imagine so much more.

I believe when you know the great strides being made, you will take your daily choices very seriously. You think you don’t want to live to 100, 110, or some even say 120 years—or more—but what if you could do so in perfect health? What if, aside from this great exponential growth in science and medicine, we could even
reverse aging
?

Imagine knowing your great-great-great-grandchildren. Imagine the acquired knowledge you would have if you were able to live that long. Imagine your incredible perspective. Imagine how valuable we would be if we were the greatest wisdom pool that ever existed in humanity. As true elders of the tribe, we would be the ones the younger generations would access, not put out to pasture the way our seniors are today.

At present, just when we are at the top of our games, just when we are really good at “who we are” and “what we do,” our health betrays us due to a lifetime of poor lifestyle and dietary choices. Then suddenly it’s too late. You are now on a downward spiral leading to hospitals, pills, more pills, brain fog, lack of energy, bones that won’t hold you up, and eventually the nursing home. That’s how it goes with everyone, right? We’re living longer. Can’t escape it, right? Happens to everyone.

Wrong. There is another way, a new way.

This book is giving you the tools, and each one of them will be discussed in depth.

If it seems overwhelming, remember that making the choice to be healthy to live longer requires a shift in your thinking. And many of you have stuck around with me through my personal journey to these answers. In my series of Somersize books, I asked you to make the first shift: to understand that the way you had been eating was not serving you well and that to be thin and healthy, you had to completely change your thought processes about food. It wasn’t about dieting; it was about eating the right foods, foods that build you up and enhance your health, weight, and energy. It worked, obviously, because ten million of you told me so by reading the books and writing to me of your tremendous successes. The letters all mentioned greater health, weight loss, renewed energy and vitality—and that you didn’t think you could do it but you did.

My next set of books on health and hormones required another shift in your thinking: doing away with the preconceived notion that with aging came hormone loss and there was nothing you could do about it except accept the pharmaceutical protocol of sleeping pills, antidepressants, antianxiety pills, blood pressure medicine, cholesterol-lowering drugs, and much more. But hormone loss led to the devastating symptoms that stole your quality of life. You gained weight again, you lost your sex drive, and you felt left out of life both sexually and emotionally. You felt vacant. The pills put you in a fog. Or they numbed you
but did nothing really about your symptoms. You learned to accept it, the sentence of invisibility described by so many, sexless and lonely. I asked you to assume another shift in your thinking: understanding that if the aging you were experiencing was due to declining hormones, then to feel good again it was necessary to restore yourself to perfect hormonal balance with youthful, optimal, healthy levels. I explained that you didn’t have a Prozac deficiency, you had a hormonal deficiency.

You had never heard of bioidentical hormones, the natural nondrug ones, yet you took a leap of faith with me and the doctors I presented—Western doctors who had the courage to step outside of the standard-of-care box to use common sense in medicine—and you went to them in droves. These were the same Western doctors who the orthodox medical practitioners and the media tried to pass off as practicing junk science, yet you went. After all, you had been doing it their way and you weren’t doing so well.

You adopted a “shift in your thinking,” and millions of you around the world found “restoration” to be glorious, that reaching middle age wasn’t the terrible dreaded state of “deterioration” we had been watching before us, but that your middle to later years were a glamorous, sexy, vital, intellectual time of life. You understood restoration versus deterioration and got to feel good again. You threw away the notion that the orthodox community had all the answers. You started to think for yourself. You became the contractor of your body and your good health. You began to realize that doctors were not gods but merely well-educated, well-intentioned people you hired to help you take care of your body.

You realized your body was your very own personal Maserati, the greatest piece of machinery of all time, and realizing this, you wanted to finely tune this machine: fuel it perfectly, listen to its language, and fix and repair it before it broke down. This was a new concept: true health care instead of the disease care we had all been practicing.

How different you felt taking this first step and you wanted more. You wanted perfect health, but then the environment started catching up with you. Why was there so much cancer? Why were there autoimmune diseases? Why so much heart disease? Why so much Alzheimer’s?

What else could you/we do?

Plenty. Plenty now and plenty in the future.

Here’s where it’s going to get exciting.

You want the life you have to be of ultimate quality. That would be a wonderful thing, being happy, healthy, energetic, and vital.

Well, here’s the thing …

That wonderful life is yours, depending on the choices you make from this moment forward. Do you realize that most people make choices on a daily basis that unconsciously constitute a slow suicide? What do you think consuming, using, eating, breathing, and drinking chemicals does to us on a daily basis? What do you think unmanaged stress on a regular basis does to us? What do you think consuming junk food; nonfood; genetically modified, nutritionally void food; and packaged, chemically treated, lab-produced food will do to you? A body requires fuel, the best fuel (remember the Maserati?), to operate.

Feeding your body chemicals is like putting sugar in the gas tank of your Maserati; that’s the end of the car. It permanently destroys the functionality of the automobile; it’s ready for the trash heap, that beautiful piece of machinery, done in by the wrong fuel.

That’s what we have been doing and continue to do to our bodies. Tragic, isn’t it? Why can’t we see the slow death we are choosing? But we do it, over and over—the cigarette that is so soothing, the extra helpings, the rich desserts, never knowing which bite is the tipping point, the one that activates the heart attack or stroke. Or the sugar that diabetes and cancer so love and thrive on.

Choices …

We make choices every day that move us either forward to our desired end point (the grandest vision of who we end up to be and for how long) or away from it. Aside from an unforeseen accident, we are in total charge of our health. We are in charge of our end point, whatever that means to us.

Healthy choices can become a way of life. Healthy choices can become who you are. Exercise can be who you are. These activities become enjoyable when you know they are extending your life and
health. There are days when I go to the farmers’ market, or to my vegetable garden, and glow with excitement at the bounty we enjoy in this country: organic, fresh, in season, beautifully colored, delectable foods and produce that inspire me to prepare delicious, life-sustaining meals, perfectly cooked or raw, drizzled with heart-healthy olive oil or sautéed in coconut oil. I seek out organic protein, grass-fed beef and lamb, organic chickens, wild salmon—life-enhancing food for all in my family. This gives me a profound sense of satisfaction that I am providing high-octane fuel for all of us.

No unpronounceable ingredients for me. Not worth it. Even though chemicals are designed to taste scrumptious, they are the worst thing that ever happened to us. They do not sustain; instead, they rob us of our health, and they rob us of our brains. Dr. Russell Blaylock will describe later our “dumbing down” through the use of aspartame and other killer chemicals most people ingest every day.

If you choose to live a healthy life, then what is awaiting you is the most exciting science of our lifetime. You can jump on this fast-moving train, but you have to start now and commit to choosing “life” and not the present paradigm of “death” by disease.

To get you excited, turned on, and give you all the reasons you need to want to live longer and healthier, I am going to start at the end. Hang on to your hats; Ray Kurzweil is the Edison of our time. What he will teach you will make you want to start right now to take perfect care of yourself and your family because the rewards in the future are so incredible.