Choices. Life is a smorgasbord of choices. An education. A career. A love. Friends. Hobbies. Passions. Rent or buy? Save or spend? The permutations are endless. Virtually no choice would be unanimous amongst the billions around the world.

This one would.

A long, healthy life. A healthspan where we remain of sound mind and body until the end. We are alert and intelligent. We have mobility and can live independently with no pain. Right up until our final days.

The ability to enjoy the many wonders of this thing called life with strength, energy, and mental clarity, free of chronic disease into our later years, is a worthy ideal for most.

But many fear what are thought to be the inevitable symptoms of old age. “Get used to it, you’re getting old.” Pain and suffering are the future. The blank stares of drooling nursing home residents are a natural progression.

“Live to 100? Wouldn’t want to.”

We all know of people who have defied the relentless march of time. Jack LaLanne comes to mind. The recently passed Kirk Douglas. Betty White.

A logical question is, “why do some age gracefully while others ‘live too short and die too long’?”

Genetic predisposition plays a role in how we age—but much smaller than most think in anti-aging.

Lifestyle—it’s your habits

No one disputes that smoking increases the chance of premature death. The last time your heart rate was elevated was watching a re-run of Alien? Not so good.

Having a piece of cheesecake a couple of times a month isn’t a big deal. But that two-a-day diet soda addiction just doesn’t cut it.

Your habits—the choices you make day in and day out—shape your life. Nowhere is that more evident than the effect they have on your long-term health.

Your state of health at this very moment is the sum of all the decisions you have made in your lifetime up to and including today. Every choice has affected the state of the cells in your body.

And no choices have affected you more than your habits. Your daily and weekly routines.

Just what are the habits that can make or break your aging process? What are the means to a healthy end?

The MEANS to an End Lifestyle and Anti-Aging

There are five critical actions (‘means’) that affect the quality of your life (your ‘end’):

Mindset

Exercise

Avoidance

Nutrition

Sleep

You need to be mindful of each one. These MEANS are synergistic in nature because they provide the host organism (that would be you) the best chance of achieving your desired END.

Mindset

Decisions. We make thousands of them every day. Most we make without thought, habits deeply ingrained within us. Some habits serve us. Others conspire against us. But where do these come from?

Mindset is an established set of attitudes, intimate beliefs, and feelings about ourselves and the world in which we live. These assumptions arise out of our worldview or philosophy of life. This shapes our mental attitude because it determines how we will interpret and respond to situations. These fixed states of mind create habits. Habits shape our future in all aspects of life.

Beliefs about getting old. Having a life’s purpose. How we deal with the stress of daily life. All this impacts our future. In a big way.

Mindset is the first and most important ingredient to anti-aging and The MEANS to an End Lifestyle.

Exercise

The human body is meant to move. Until recent times, man moved. To hunt for food. To work. Today’s modern conveniences have removed the necessity to move for putting food on the table and to provide for our families. Work today involves hours of sitting. Eating means driving to buy pre-packaged, pre-cooked food. As a result, the effects of this modern world can be devastating on our bodies.

To maintain our strength, mobility, and endurance into our later years requires movement. Daily movement. Each component of fitness is important to living a vibrant, independent life.

Avoidance

Living a long life—healthy or not—means avoiding an unnecessary premature death. Smokers know they shouldn’t smoke. Driving under the influence risks your life and the lives of others.

In today’s modern world, the list of things to avoid is getting longer every year. New chemicals, untested for effects on the human body, are introduced. EMFs (electric and magnet fields) are thought to be dangerous. Plastics. Sodas. Medications. Distracted driving. The list is wide and varied.

While we can’t live in a bubble, we can be aware and avoid behaviours and things that affect our health and our future lives. Practicing avoidance is an often-overlooked key to anti-aging.

Nutrition

Our bodies are miracles. Think of all that happens within us without a moment of thought. Thousands of actions occurring every minute. Drawing breath. A pumping heart. Blood circulating. Digestion.

We are in a constant state of regeneration. We have trillions of cells that make up our body. Billions die and are replaced every day.

The entire surface of the small intestine is replaced every five days. We shed 600,000 flakes of skin every day. Liver cells are replaced every 300 – 500 days.

We literally get a new body every 10 years or so, including our skeleton.

But the quality of our regenerated body depends upon the quality of the raw materials provided. Our food.

We are what we eat. Literally. The food we ingest every day is used by our bodies to create new cells. Our nutrition provides the building blocks to create your future health—for better or for worse.

Sleep

Sleep is restorative. Our body regenerates itself while we sleep. Our daily dose of shuteye is critical to our health and quality of life.

Yet to Matthew Walker, the author of Why We Sleep, “the decimation of sleep throughout the industrialised nations is having a catastrophic impact on our health and our life expectancy.”

Sleep needs to be a priority in our lives. Good sleep habits are critical to ensure we maximise the benefits of its incredible restorative powers.

An Anti-Aging Sunset

The five ‘MEANS’ to a quality ‘END’. This is a summary of the components of a lifestyle that increases the odds you navigate life with true health. Adopting The MEANS to an End Lifestyle doesn’t require perfection. But incorporating positive aspects of each of these actions into your life as anti-aging habits by which you live will pay quality dividends for years to come.

The best time to adopt this lifestyle was in our teens or early twenties. The second-best time to start is today. Regardless of where you are on your health journey, it’s not too late. It’s not too late to start living a lifestyle that just may see you through to an inevitable but better end.