F-Bomb Longevity Made Easy

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The expert shared that eating 30 plants weekly can also help boost your gut health, which is a “core pillar”. Kombucha is an example of a healthy bacteria, also found in yoghurts, sauerkraut and kefir Credit: Getty As I mentioned earlier, my adoption of the simple, smart wellness habits in January 2020 extended my healthy life expectancy by 23 years in just 23 months. Listening to loud music stimulates the nervous system when it produces “the chills”, and when experienced with others you get the added longevity benefit from social interaction. Listening to music before bed can slow down breathing and improve sleep quality. “Our brainwaves synchronise to musical rhythms, which makes music a great metronome, enabling us to influence the release of brain chemicals and the activation of brain networks,” Jones says. “And of course, learning a musical instrument is proven to be one of the best ways of slowing cognitive decline and building new brain connections. Music really is a super-tool.” Eat 30 different plants each week Dr Jones said: “Just to give our system a rest, so try and leave 16 hours overnight, fasting, and then eat within an eight-hour period.

Jones offers an eight-week programme to embed the lifestyle changes she advocates; several thousand have completed it online, many as part of corporate sign-ups. Her GlycanAge score is 51, very close to her actual age of 52. Middle-aged women often have high scores, she says, because of the menopause (inflammation can increase due to the decline in oestrogen). It’s why she is desperate for women in their forties and fifties to get on top of their daily habits as early as possible. “Many women I test in their early fifties come out in their mid-sixties unless they’re on HRT, so as someone who is combating declining oestrogen I’m pretty happy with a score of 51.”Embedding the smart wellness plan in my own daily routine had extended my healthy life expectancy by 23 years in just 23 months. I knew these smart wellness habits worked, not just for me, but also for other clients who successfully embraced them. Incidentally, pets are very good for the gut microbiome too, because you’re exposed to extra bacteria.” Turn your shower to cold for a burst, go swimming outdoors or have a hot sauna. 9. DO DAILY PUSH-UPS You also need to challenge the brain throughout life by learning new, complex tasks to build new connections – try learning a musical instrument or a new language. 8. GET COLD – OR HOT Why would someone who’s physically fit come out with such poor readings? “We’ve put so much emphasis on cardiovascular fitness in the past few decades,” Jones says. She was a sports and exercise scientist in the Nineties and helped to launch a chain of gyms, so advocated exactly that. “But fitness and wellness are not the same thing. You can be fit but not well, as measured by what state your cells are in.”

BEING exposed to very hot or very cold conditions is potentially life-threatening for the human body. Do slow-motion moves that make your largest muscles reach the point of fatigue – try doing push-ups or squats really slowly until you can’t do any more. 10. BEAT STRESS Jones, who began her career as a sports and exercise physiologist and psychologist working with Olympic squads, and later studied applied neuroscience at King’s College London, has been researching optimum wellness for 30 years. The trouble is, she says, we’re mostly doing the wrong things at the moment: prioritising physical fitness over wellness at a cellular level. What’s now considered vital for longevity is controlling inflammation in your cells. “Biological ageing is an inflammation- related process, and continuous low-grade inflammation is now known to be at the core of pretty much all our health problems. It happens over decades and is completely invisible until it erupts in physical symptoms that then result in a diagnosis, such as cardio-metabolic conditions, neurodegenerative diseases or cancer.” I’d love you to join me at the book launch if you’re in the London vicinity on Thursday 29th September .

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It helps to regulate blood pressure, supports the immune system and could reduce a person’s risk of heart disease and cancer and boost overall health. Then an unexpected snafu blew up in my personal life. It had a significant negative impact on my mental and physical health. However, these things happen. The research for this book was well underway when all that emotional and financial drama erupted. I decided to immerse myself even deeper in it. Partly to simply help distract me from all the stress that I was dealing with. What I discovered was a tonne of incredible research that I hadn’t properly dug into before. This longevity field is moving so fast. LOSS of muscle tissue leads to frailty and increased risk of falls and fractures. It also lowers the effectiveness of your immune system. As I dug deep into the research over the past few years, I began noticing that F-words were popping up freakishly often. So, I began collecting them. They will narrate our 6 million+ year health journey, and our quest for longevity, throughout the following chapters.

There is no reason why most humans can’t live to 100, says Dr Julia Jones, bluntly. The neuroscientist and author is annoyed that on a recent longevity predictor test, her healthy life expectancy came out at “only” 97. A lot of research is now showing that we’re just eating too often, and we’re eating the wrong things obviously, but we’re eating too often.

The Rove Aroma Atomiser is a brilliant way to fill your bedroom with aromatherapy essential oils to help you nod off Credit: Madebyzen.com It is so dinky I have taken it, with a bottle of ­lavender essential oils, when I have stayed away from home to help me nod off. Julia has been studying the effects of music and sound on behaviour and wellness for 30 years. The first book helped in boosting a surge of interest in this area and became a unique music-based wellness programme run at offices of some of the largest companies in the world. I discovered the latest longevity science breakthroughs that transformed my own health and that of my clients. Researchers have found that these pathways are activated when our body faces certain adverse circumstances, which is why you’ll find longevity scientists getting enthusiastic about intermittent fasting, taking cold showers and doing very short bursts of intense exercise. As a result, inflammation in cells is reduced and biological age is lowered.

The Mayo Clinic states: “Losing weight and being physically active help lower your risk of obesity-related diseases, such as diabetes, sleep apnoea and some types of cancer. Another technique is to have periods every day when you slow your breathing and exhale longer than you inhale. Turn your shower to cold before getting out

It doesn’t have to be the stairs; the idea is to exercise to the point where you can’t carry on a second longer. These really short bursts of intensive activity can activate the anti-inflammatory pathways that are the key to longevity. For some people that might be 20 seconds, for others longer. “It doesn’t really matter as long as you get to fatigue,” Jones says. This is to preserve and improve the quality of sleep, a key to longevity. “If you have any kind of sleep monitoring device you can see that when you drink at night you tend to go into a deep sleep, but it’s not natural sleep,” she says. “You’re increasing the levels of the brain chemical GABA — essentially putting the brain to sleep. That fake sleep isn’t healthy and it disrupts the quality.” Jones says she doesn’t tend to drink during the week and no longer drinks to unwind late in the evening. Persevere with kombucha and kimchi While there are many different approaches to this popular diet, eating within an eight-hour window describes "daily time-restricted fasting".