Eat to Nourish
The purpose of food is nourishment. We all know this, don’t we? Food can sometimes be entertaining, quell boredom, or be the center of a family gathering or social activities, but your body functions because you eat. The proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals, as well as the antioxidants and other anti-inflammatory and healing elements in food, especially in plants (we have only begun to identify all the healing compounds in plants), are what our bodies use to stay alive, remain healthy, and thrive.
Rather than following a strict eating plan, Anthony says variety is the key to maximum nutrient diversity, and choosing foods with a lot of nutrients in them is the key to nutrient density, which simply means getting a lot of nutrition for the calories. Either change up your meals frequently (breakfasts could rotate between fruit and yogurt, eggs and veggies, oatmeal and nuts, or a green smoothie on rushed days, for example), or if you always have fruit and yogurt, vary the types of fruits you eat based on what is fresh and in season. If you always have a salad for lunch, change up the veggies and vary your protein (chicken, beef, black beans, tofu, salmon, shrimp). Variety not only provides a wider range of nutrients but keeps you from getting bored with your meals.
Eat to Cool Inflammation
You have an unlikely ally in your fight against inflammation: bacteria. The bacteria in your digestive tract is especially good at reducing inflammation indirectly. As they digest the fiber and resistant starch that your own digestive tract can’t digest, the little bugs in your gut produce metabolites that have anti-inflammatory effects on the macrophages that produce inflammation in your body. These metabolites include short-chain fatty acids and lipopolysaccharides. They can have a noticeable effect not just on your immunity but on the way your skin looks.
Our meals have become essentially sterile, lacking both prebiotics—the fiber and resistant starch our good bacteria like to eat—and probiotics, the beneficial bacteria themselves. You might not be able to find fermented foods rich in probiotics at the local drive-through, but you can find them in stores if you hunt a bit. Once you get used to that sour taste, you may find you really enjoy these foods.
One of Anthony’s favorite fermented foods is kimchi. This is a spicy pickled cabbage that is a staple in the Korean diet. Kombucha is a probiotic-rich drink made from fermented black tea with sugar, but most of the sugar gets digested by the bacteria so it’s overall pretty low in sugar and calories. Kefir is another fermented drink, kind of like a drinkable yogurt, but with more probiotics than a typical serving of yogurt. And what about yogurt, that popular food people most often think of when they think of probiotics? That depends if you know it doesn’t give you a problem and you like yogurt, Anthony recommends organic yogurt made from the milk of grass-fed cows because it has higher levels of anti-inflammatory omega-3 fatty acids.
Eat to Firm Up Collagen
Collagen makes up about 75 to 80% of skin, and it gets thinner with age. But it’s not just skin that’s made of collagen. Of all the types of protein in the human body, collagen is the most prevalent. It has a matrix-like structure that holds us together, via our connective tissue, and it’s the primary protein making up our bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage.
Foods that promote collagen production help give the skin and connective tissue its structure, strength, elasticity, and youthfulness. Choosing foods that encourage healthy collagen production can firm and plump skin, but they can also make it easier to maintain muscle and decrease the risk of injury with exercise.
Attacking collagen degradation is a focus of many anti-aging treatments available today, ranging from collagen supplements to retinol creams to lasers. These interventions rearrange the collagen fibrils, often with good effects, but the best way to rebuild collagen is to eat enough—and a wide variety of—protein.
Cleansing for Ageless Skin
Skin is the largest organ of the body, covering almost two square meters on average. The skin of our entire body ages, but it does so at much different speeds, depending on how much it’s exposed to the elements. Compared to the skin on your face, which you’ve probably at some point treated with cleansers, moisturizers, and sunscreen, the skin of your hands likely looks older.
Most people should cleanse their skin twice a day, but if you’re only going to do it once, do it at night. It’s very important to wash off pore-clogging makeup and the day’s pollution, oil, and dirt that has built up on your skin. The cleanser you choose should leave your face feeling clean and comfortable. It shouldn’t make your face red or dry or leave it stinging.
Here is some more guidance, based on what kind of skin you have. For the driest, most sensitive skin, use surfactant-free cleansers that don’t require rinsing. For slightly sensitive, slightly dry skin, consider trying a creamy cleanser with botanicals like green tea, which will leave your skin feeling moisturized. For normal to oily skin, try foaming cleansers. These are more aggressive but very effective at cleaning the skin and removing makeup. They can also be drying and can irritate sensitive skin.
For people with acne, try an oil-based cleanser. Although not for everyone, some people with oily, acne-prone skin find oil-based cleansers work the best for them. These can leave the skin feeling clean but not oily. Although it sounds counterintuitive, oil-based cleansers are very effective at cleaning oily skin because, as the saying goes, like dissolves like. In other words, oil cleanses oil. These cleansers can efficiently get into oil-clogged pores and clean them out.
Protection for Ageless Skin
If you want to prevent premature skin aging, it’s mandatory to use sunscreen, especially on your face, neck, and upper chest, but ideally also on your hands and arms if they are exposed, every single day. Believe it or not, as much as 60% of the sun’s damaging radiation penetrates the clouds, even on really cloudy days.
A study of identical twins from Case Western Reserve University showed that increased sun exposure and lack of sunscreen use led to an older appearance in one twin as compared to the other, and that this difference accelerated with age.
To get full protection from both types of rays, look for sunscreens labeled broad spectrum. The FDA has implemented a rule that a warning now be placed on sunscreens that lack adequate UVA protection. Anthony also recommends an SPF of at least 30, which will absorb 97% of the sun’s rays. This is also the recommendation from the American Academy of Dermatology.
Treatments for Ageless Skin
A large portion of the upper layers of skin is composed of dead or dying skin cells. These dead cells can cause a flat or dull look to the skin. Exfoliating will help remove the upper layers of dead skin and speed up cellular turnover, which starts to slow down in your twenties and thirties. Basically, exfoliation causes the skin cells to send signals to produce new ones.
There are two main ways to exfoliate: physical and chemical. Physical exfoliation works via tiny particles you scrub over your skin that gently abrade its upper layers. This is the most budget-minded way to exfoliate, but be very choosy if you decide on this route. Make sure the scrub feels soft and sandy, without sharp particles that can cause damage.
You don’t need to scrub hard. Let the texture of the exfoliation scrub do the work for you. Some doctors believe that aggressive physical exfoliation can create microtears in the skin which long-term can result in increased inflammation and unnecessary skin trauma. If you have sensitive skin, then a physical exfoliator may not be your best option. Instead, you may want to go with chemical exfoliation.
Chemical exfoliation uses alpha or beta hydroxy acids to exfoliate. You could try an over-the-counter (OTC) alpha hydroxy acid peel to see if you like this method. Light chemical exfoliation is the preferred method for people with sensitive skin, issues with breakouts, and mature skin, which can be thinner and more delicate.
If you have sensitive skin, Anthony recommends you exfoliate no more than once per week. Normal skin can exfoliate two or three times per week. Slow down with exfoliation if your skin gets red and irritated.
Autojuvenate with Better Sleep
Once you’ve gotten your diet, supplements, and skin care routines in place, you are probably already noticing some pretty profound changes in how you feel and look. But there’s so much more you can do! The way you live your life can accelerate or slow aging, so a true autojuvenating lifestyle will take more into account, and your next priority, if you really want to slow down aging, is to do a better job of getting a good night’s sleep.
Sleep is super important as we age. “Nearly every disease killing us in later life has a causal link to lack of sleep,” says Dr. Matthew Walker, a UC Berkeley professor of neuroscience and psychology. “We’ve done a good job of extending life span but a poor job of extending our health span. We now see sleep, and improving sleep, as a new pathway for helping remedy that.”
We spend tens of billions of dollars on sleep remedies every year, yet we’re still having trouble sleeping. Many Americans are using prescription sleep aids like Ambien and benzodiazepines. Problem is, the sleep you get on Ambien isn’t the same sleep you get naturally.
But sleep is critical to reversing aging. One study published in Clinical and Experimental Dermatology showed that people who sleep seven to nine hours had better quality skin and looked younger than people who sleep fewer than five hours per night. A well-rested face certainly looks younger, but a well-rested body works better and will be more adept at staying younger longer.
Autojuvenate by Managing Stress
Stress management is one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself because it will affect everything else. You probably have experienced how hard it is to eat healthy meals, take a walk, remember your supplements, take care of your skin, or get a good night’s sleep if you’re stressed. Stress, or the lack of it, underlies everything, so even though this is at the end of a long list of things you can do to autojuvenate, stress management is as important as any other intervention in this book.
So how do you manage stress? There are many ways, but my favorite, and the one way that has been well-studied and proven to make an actual physical difference on the body’s stress, is meditation. If you would like to try meditation, there are multiple methods. You could simply sit and focus on your breathing. Deep breathing alone can reverse the stress response, and diaphragmatic breathing in particular can help your body shift into a more relaxed state, reducing the level of the stress hormone cortisol in your blood and making you feel calmer and in a better mood. To do this, focus on expanding your diaphragm—a round muscle under your lungs—as you breathe deeply, by allowing your abdomen to expand and contract without moving your shoulders.
Another way to practice deep breathing in an organized way is with a kind of breathing popularized by Dr. Andrew Weil called 4-7-8 breathing, in which you exhale fully, then inhale through your nose for a slow count of 4, hold for a count of 7, and exhale through your mouth for a count of 8. Different types of deep breathing are fundamental to a yoga practice called pranayama, which is where many deep breathing exercises originated.
If you want to do something beyond deep breathing, you could follow along with a guided meditation from an app or any of the many guided meditations available online for free. You could sit quietly with your eyes closed and imagine calming scenes or being in a favorite relaxing place, or, with your eyes open, focus on a single point, like a candle flame or a picture of a calming scene.
Stress is unavoidable, but if you take steps to ease it and commit to habits (like a healthy diet, good skin care, good sleep, and regular exercise) that help you fight it off, you will feel better, and chances are very good that you will also look and feel younger—maybe younger than you have in many years. Cap it off with a youthful attitude, and you’re looking younger already.