two women facing away from the camera with both arms up in the air with a thumbs up overlooking a sunrise

Younger by Sara Gottfried MD.

This book is for all women who would like to reverse their aging and improve their health.

Dr Sara has also written other amazing books for women’s health [The Hormone Cure] which is great and is highly respected in the Health Industry

If you’d like to read through the highlights of this book that I have noted it will help give you come insight to what the book contains and I hope you get some A-HA moments from these.
I thoroughly enjoyed this read and highly recommend to help understand the shift in health from our mothers to us in this current generation of 40-50 year old women.

The content of this book is 269 pages with recipes included at the back.

The joys of an aging woman:


Fat loss does indeed occur in a woman’s face, as opposed to her belly, after a certain age because collagen no longer undergirds the architecture of the facial skin and bones. Even so, modulating estrogen levels with targeted lifestyle changes can slow down the loss of collagen.



Aging at 40 accelerates:

  • Cellular decline – muscle tightness, lingering hangovers, difficulty reading labels, and staying in shape is ten times harder.
  • Your endocrine glands, from your ovaries to your thyroid, start to sputter and gasp in their hormone production. Then muscle mass declines and gets replaced by fat, and suddenly you realise – that the activity of jumping is no longer an option.
  • You start waking at four in the morning for no good reason.
  • Words you’ve used for decades evade you.


The muscle factor:

  • You lose 2.5 kgs of muscle every decade, your mitochondria become tired, a process known as mitochondria dysfunction, which may make you feel more fatigued during and after exercise or cause muscle pain.
  • Your mitochondria are the tiny powerhouses inside your cells that turn food and oxygen into energy.
  • You have a thousand or two mitochondria inside most of your cells, and if they’re gunked up with debris and damage, you will feel tired and achy.
  • Causes range from eating empty calories such as sugar, flour and overly processed foods to exposures to toxins.
  • If left alone or ignored, your muscles usually get more doughy as they’re replaced with fat, and you’re not as strong as you used to be.
  • The key is to focus on preserving and building your muscle mass as you age past forty.


The brain factory:

  • Your neurons (nerve cells) lose speed and flexibility.
  • Connections between neurons, called synapses, are not what they used to be, so finding words may become an issue. The balance shifts towards ore forgetting and less remembering.
  • Brain gathers rust like an old truck left in the rain; free radicals induce damage to cells, DNA, and proteins in a process called oxidative stress if you don’t have antioxidant countermeasures in place (like vitamin A,C and E).
  • Your brain becomes resistant to the lubricating and mood lifting benefits of estrogen.
  • Gluten, found in wheat and flour products, may make the problem worse.
  • Your hippocampus – the part of your brain involved in memory creation and emotional control – may shrink, especially if you’re stressed.
  • The key is to focus on keeping your brain regenerating and malleable (or plastic) as you get older.


The hormone factor:


Lower estrogen-to-testosterone rations may trigger hair loss and heart disease. Unfortunately, your thyroid glands slow down and, along with it, your metabolism, so the bathroom scale climbs a few kilos each year (or even per month). You get cold more easily.
Your thyroid may become lumpy or attack itself. Your cells become increasingly insensitive to the hormone insulin, which leads to rising blood sugar in the morning. (After you hit age fifty, blood sugar levels rise approximately 10mg/dL every decade). As a result of higher blood sugar, you may feel foggier and experience stronger cravings for carbs, then notice more skin wrinkling along with an older looking facial appearance. Older adults are less able to maintain sleep, leading to chronic sleep deprivation, which results in more wear and tear hormones (e.g cortisol) and fewer growth-and-repair hormones (eg growth hormone).
More cortisol and less growth hormone translate into even more skin wrinkling, facial aging, and higher morbidity and mortality.
The key point in that the right food, sleep, exercise and support for detoxification can reverse many hormone problems associated with aging.


The Gut factor:

  • Your gastrointestinal tract contain 2-4 kilos of microbes, mostly bacteria and a small amount of yeast, that exist in your mucosa from your mouth to your anus.
  • The DNA from your microbes outnumber your human DNA a hundred to one and are collectively known as your microbiome. Several studies show that your microbiome may affect your hormones, including estrogen and testosterone.
  • Excess stress raises corticotropin releasing factor, which pokes holes in your gut, leading to food intolerances, MORE stress, and lower vagal tone, an indicator that your nervous system is out of whack.
  • Finally high stress can make you absorb nutrients poorly, especially the B vitamins your boost vitamins.


The toxic factor:

  • When you’re trying to preserve your youth and health, toxins from the environment accumulate in your fat.
  • Additionally, fat deposited in your belly is biochemically different that fat elsewhere; it makes an inflammatory brew of bad chemicals that causes you to age faster than someone who has only a minimal visceral fat.
  • While exposure to certain poisons are inevitable, we can attack the genetic flaws that cause you to accumulate them.

Fatso Gene:

Official name: Fat mass and obesity associated (FTO) gene

Job:
This gene is strongly associated with your body mass index and consequently, your risk for obesity and diabetes. When you have the variant, it gives you sloppy control of leptin, a hormone in charge of satiety. In other words, you are hungry all the time.


Your task:
You can turn off the fatso gene with exercise and a low carbohydrate food plan that’s high in fibre.


The fastest way to age are to gain weight, screw up your blood sugar, economize on sleep, sit a lot staring at a computer screen, feel chronically stressed and anxious, and eat the top inflammatory foods; sugar, gluten, and dairy.

  • After 35, your body fat rises 1% per year unless you take specific action to build more muscle and fight the war.
  • After 40, you lose muscle mass gradually.
  • By age 50, you’ve lost, on average, 15% of your lean body mass.
  • By 70 it’s 30% per decade.

    You lose fast-twitch muscle fibres first, the ones that put a spring in you step and allow you to jump and sprint. The fast-twitch fibres wane before you start to lose your aerobic capacity.

    Fat is bossy and tells your brain to eat more by making you deaf to the signal of insulin and leptin.


Collagen benefits:

  • Rich in antioxidants
  • Lowers blood pressure
  • Improves bone density
  • It’s an easily digested form of protein that improves skin, hair and nails. As you age, you break down more collagen than you make, leading to saggy skin, cracking fingernails, dull hair and wrinkles.

    Collagen latte:

    1 cup good quality coffee or tea
    1-2 tbls collagen powder (good gelatin)
    Optional – 1 tbls MCT oil
    Optional – drop of stevia

    Place brewed coffee and remaining into blender or thermi
    Blend for 5 -15 sec until frothy like a latte.


Oral health:

  • More bad bugs in your mouth are correlated with thickening carotid arteries, a sign of atherosclerosis and precursor to stroke, which reduces blood flow to the brain.
  • Powered toothbrushes are better.
  • Oil pulling reduces gingivitis and anaerobic bacteria in your mouth.
  • Flossing is great too.


Sleep:

  • Growth hormone and melatonin levels rise while cortisol decreases (sleep deprivation is associated with higher cortisol levels in the afternoon and evening and with elevated blood sugar, similar to what is observed in the aging process).
  • Memory is stabilized and expanded, both at night and in naps.
  • Slow wave sleep enhances declarative memory, the type of memory that is consciously recalled, such a verbal or factual knowledge that you can state in words.
  • REM sleep is most important for emotional recalibration and formation of non declarative or procedural memory, which is skill based (for instance, learning how to ride a bike).
  • Skipping any stages of sleep can age you faster.
  • Melatonin controls more than 500 genes in the body, including the genes involved in the immune system, so managing your melatonin is a sound investment.

    During sleep, the space between brain cells expands 60% more that when you’re awake. This allows the brain to flush out built up toxins with cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the clear liquid surrounding the brain and spinal cord. It’s called glymphatic system.

 

Movement:

  • Sitting is the new smoking because of how it increases your risk of diabetes and heart disease – but it can also make your belly look fat by tightening your poor hip flexors and increasing your waist circumference.
  • When you slump in a chair, abdominal muscles go slack while lower back muscles tighten, leading to sway back. The sway in your low back pushes out the abdomen, and your hip flexors are too tight to pull the belly back into the core. The result is a bulging belly.
  • When you sit too much you can trigger a cascade or bad outcomes:
  • Weak bones – too much sitting is one of the reasons that the incidence of osteopenia (thinning bones) and osteoporosis is rising.
  • Organ damage to the heart, pancreas and colon
  • Muscle decline
  • Hormone problems (just one day of prolonged sitting lowers your insulin response).
  • Bad back (disc compression, inflexible spine)
  • Poor circulation in legs (varicose veins)
  • Increases the risk of diabetes by 112%, the risk of cardiovascular events by 147%, ,the risk of cancer by 29%, and the risk of all-cause mortality by 50%.


NEAT


Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis:

– burning calories from fidgeting, pacing, parking further away than you need to – as this all adds up.



Schedule and take sufficient time for recovery


Recovery: – it’s more about galvanizing the full arsenal of repair mechanisms in your body; stitching together microtears in your muscles,ironing out the fascia when it gets jangled, reinvigorating mitochondria so you’re brimming with energy rather than feeling worn down or burned out.

Adequate recovery keeps your hormone profile in balance so that your adrenals don’t get fried and take your sex hormones and thyroid down with them.

The official definition of recovery is your ability to repair tissues damaged during exercise, rebuild muscles, provide functional restoration of the body such that you prevent injury, rejuvenate emotionally and psychologically, and feel prepared to meet or exceed performance the next time.


Yoga


When energy clogs, matter clogs. It shows up as pain, disease depression. Do yoga. Feel your emotions. Eat high vitality food. The clogs clear. The brain smog clears. Life becomes worth exploring.

Release allows your body to enter a restorative phase where it functions more efficiently, effectively, and optimally. That allows your circulatory system, both blood and lymph, to provide fresh nutrients and to whisk away toxins and other biomechanical by-products of your internal exposome.

EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) lowers anxiety, depression, and cortisol, some of the biochemical drivers of tension in the body.
In women with fibromyalgia, EFT reduces pain and anxiety and increases activity.
In a systematic review, EFT was found to improve posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), phobias test anxiety, and athletic performance.
EFT was shown to be superior to diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscular relaxation, an inspirational lecture, and a support group.

Self myofascial release


Self myofascial release may improve function of arteries and endothelial cells (the cells that line the blood vessels of all types), and it may optimize parasympathetic nervous system function, which could aid recovery.

An amped up perception of stress cause lower vagal tone (or responsiveness), which means the vagus nerve is not fully performing its functions. Your vagus nerve is the most important nerve in your parasympathetic nervous system. If the vagus nerve is not happy, you won’t be healthy and are more likely to age faster. Vagus means “wanderer”; the nerve wanders all over your body to import organs such as the brain, neck, ears, tongue, heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, liver, pancreas, gallbladder, kidney, spleen, and reproductive organs in women.

Lower vagal tone is linked to a variety of problems:

  • Anxiety
  • Poor satiety or sense of relaxation while eating
  • Difficulty access mind-body connection and flow state
  • Low stomach acid secretion
  • Poor absorption of B12
  • Low or slow bile acid production so it’s harder to clear fats and toxins
  • Constipation
  • Poor blood flow to kidneys
  • High blood pressure
  • Poor glucose control
  • Poor heart rate variability and greater risk of heart disease
  • High resting heart rate
  • Frequent urination
  • Limited or absent capacity for orgasms
    Coversley , high vagal tone is a marker of greater altruistic behaviour and closeness to others.

Beautiful Mantra: by Sylvia Boorstein


May I feel protected and safe.
May I feel content and pleased.
May my physical body provide me with strength.
May my life unfold smoothly with ease.

 

THINK:


We all know elders who are wiser and more accepting of the mixture of joy and sadness in their lives. They are less likely to feel angry, stressed or worried than younger people.
Psychological wellness- roughly, your overall appraisal of your life and mood-  reaches a low point at age 46. After that, with the brain and mind in a better place, the body benefits from improved stress resilience and wiser choices. Gratitude, forgiveness, appreciation, and a sense of calm peak at age 70 and stay high.


Inflammation:


Of course inflammation is a natural part of your body’s defense system, but problems arise when it doesn’t turn off – for example, when the immune system is chronically on high alert. Like when a wood oven that keeps burning until the house is torched.
Persistent immune activation leads to the flood of noxious chemicals in the body that can trigger neurodegeneration, as seen in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. When biomarkers of inflammation are elevated, cognitive decline is more likely.


Oxidative stress:


Is an imbalance between harmful chemicals (free radicals like reactive oxygen species and H2O) and neutralizing antioxidants (such as glutathione).
Oxidative stress is a major player in brain fog and accelerated aging.
When you have too many free radicals interacting with your genes, immune system and endocrine system, this stress generates that foggy feeling.
Your hypothalamus, the part of your brain that makes many essential hormones, is most influenced by oxidative stress.
This stress accumulates like rust and causes mitochondrial dysfunction, which then leads to more oxidative stress and increased inflammation… you can see the vicious cycle.


Mitochondrial dysfunction:


When you’re healthy, your mitochondria power your thoughts and actions. Millions of these tine organelles in your cells work together as a power grid for your body, a bioenergetics hub of energy.
Your mitochondria lose their might from various causes that usually overlap; nutritional deficiencies like neutralizing antioxidants, nutritional excesses such as carbohydrates and /or fructose, bad microbes and dysbiosis xenobiotics (particularly pesticides, herbicides, and substances such as hydrogen sulfide), abnormal mitochondrial DNA, and excess oxidative stress.
When your mitochondria don’t work, you age fast throughout your entire body. You feel tired and worn out, often because your mitochondria are tired and worn out.

 

Smell something essential.

Essential oils are proven to alter the biochemistry of your nervous system in powerful ways.

Some oils stimulate while others calm you. If you’re feeling low and unmotivated, try inhaling a stimulating scent such as grapefruit, black pepper, or fennel, which double your sympathetic nervous system activity.
If you need to calm down, try lavender or rose oil.
If it’s easier, buy a bunch of fragrant roses and inhale the aroma all week long; smelling roses has been shown to improve physiological and psychological relaxation.

I always offer a sample of essential oils for free – so please ask if you’d like to try this.

 

Biggest take home that you can start straight away to help energy and aging:

Take CoQ10 – it feeds your mitochondria (100-200mg per day) 

I hope you enjoyed the read and if you’d like to know more than purchase the book – here’s a link to purchase online : YOUNGER

The Hormone Cure is her other great read and here is my book review 

To your sophisticated side of life +40’s

Kerrie Fatone