The best part is that you can achieve all this without having to live in a dietary bubble. You will learn how to make healthy choices and still enjoy food in a nonrestrictive manner — both at home and while dining out, whether it’s at a mainstream restaurant like Gennaro Sbarro’s or at a four-star restaurant with a chef like David Bouley.

You will get some really sound pointers on the functional effects of particular foods. You’ll learn not just which foods are good for you and why, but also what gives them their rejuvenating properties. As we age, we get immunologically weaker; changes in our genetic expression cause us to be prone to diabetes, heart disease, and excitotoxic damage to our brains (excitotoxins are food additives like MSG and aspartame, which can literally stimulate neurons to death). Food can be a critical tool in protecting us against the tectonic shifts that occur within our bodies as we get older.

You will learn that fitness is extremely critical as we age, not only to maintain physical strength and muscle mass but also to keep our minds sharp and efficient. For this book, I have consulted with some of the top experts in the fields of mind and body fitness for people in their forties, fifties, and beyond.

You will also learn that managing stress becomes more important as we age. Things that were once seen as far out (such as yoga and meditation) or self-indulgent (such as massage and the spa experience) have now been proved to be major components of longer, healthier lives. I will help you understand what stress is, and how you can regulate and reduce it.

The main reason I wrote this book was to identify the key elements in redefining this midpoint in our lives. Being fifty (and beyond) today means living in an option-filled environment. There are so many things you can do to maintain the state of good health and well-being described in this book simply by following certain protocols laid out here. These steps are not radical. As you will see from reading this book, in every field there are various points of view, so you can choose which may be best for you, your circumstances, and your lifestyle. But each one gives you a barometer, a means by which you can gauge how you are doing now, what you can do going forward, how you can erase years of wear and tear on your body, and how you can prevent damage in the future.

It isn’t that I want you to be fifty years old and look as if you’re twenty. I want you to be fifty years old and have your body respond as if you were a fit and healthy thirty-five-year-old. I want you to be able to spend the next fifty years able to regulate the speed at which you’re aging by how you use food, supplements, and nutraceuticals; how you manage stress; how you incorporate fitness and exercise into your life; and how you take care of and maintain your youthful appearance.

The goal of this book is to present you with options. I have mined the knowledge of health professionals in both traditional and alternative medicine to present the best of what’s available for the “boomer” population. These professionals are at the top of their fields; I have worked with many of them and greatly admire their practices. They are all extremely smart, caring professionals who share my philosophy of health: to help people attain and maintain active, vital lifestyles for as long as possible by combining the best of conventional medicine with the newest discoveries in health care.

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