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12 Ways to Slow the Aging Process

While no one has figured out how to reverse or slow the aging process, we can slow it down. Who wants to live forever? Well, if you can stay young, everyone. Being young and staying young is the aim most people would pursue as long as they could afford it.

“People long for immortality when they don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Saturday afternoon.” anonymous

Slow the Aging Process Naturally

If maintaining a more youthful body is going to be a lifelong activity, you should seek the most natural and healthy options. Ideally you would seek the practices that are most pleasant and enjoyable for you, daily habits, after all, you wouldn’t want to include overly complex practices in your daily routine, this would simply deny you the joy of the practice altogether.

Having stated this, you should always consider healthy, natural and easy to do things to slow the aging process, which will be the next best thing to being forever young. Namely, because it is impossible to stay forever young.

Slow the Aging Process with These Activities

There are many changes you can make to your daily activities to aid in reducing and slowing the aging process. There are three categories, foods to eat, foods to avoid and practices that would affect your lifestyle.

Let’s start with what to avoid if want to slow the aging process.

Sugar Speeds Up the Aging Process

Excessive intake of a sugar spike up your blood glucose levels, and aside from the fact that it would affect your weight and health overall, excess glucose binds with collagen and elastin in a process called glycation. In glycation the glucose binds to lipids and proteins in your body rendering them ineffective through dehydrating them, the whole process is automatic without the involvement of an enzyme.

The real reason to avoid sugar

And if elastin and collagen are rendered ineffective, your skin, connective tissue, and even your joints start to suffer.

Refined sugar in the diet and elevated sugar in the bloodstream is possibly your #1 enemy. One of the more accurate blood tests to determine your biological age is HbA1C, which tells us how much of your red blood cells have been “cooked” by excess sugar in the blood. The lower this number, the better.

Avoid pollution

Avoiding pollution can be difficult in today’s world, especially if you live in a big city, but pollution harms a lot of systems in your body.

The most obvious of course is your skin that gets bombarded with air pollutants increase the rate of its aging 5x time the normal. 5x time is really a lot.

Not only does your skin suffer, but your bone, joints and even blood production are also affected negatively by pollution.

We take in pollutants through air, food, and water. Then we generate pollutants in our gut when our microbiome is imbalanced. Use a water filter on your kitchen sink. Eat organic foods. Eat probiotics, like yogurt, to keep you gut happy.

Sunshine Can Slow the Aging Process

That nice flashy tan might be killing your skin and destroying your subdermal layer. Seriously, some sun rays are good for your body and for the health of your bone, but in excess, it is quite dangerous and render your war to slow down aging useless.

A tan is good. A burn is bad. Modest doses of sunshine irrigate our retina of the eye, provide nourishment to the cells, since the mitochondrial membrane has photoreceptors. So, use sunscreen, wear sunglasses and a hat when out in the sun for long periods of time.

Minimize alcohol consumption

The difference between a medicine and a poison is dosage. Alcohol is a prime example. Modest consumption of red wine has a health advantage. Knowing when to quit drinking is key here. Some people with alcoholic tendencies cannot drink alcohol at all.

Aside from liver cirrhosis and stomach ulcers, alcohol dehydrates your entire body. This dehydration is the main cause of hangovers, but besides that, it also ages your skin and connective tissues. Go easy on alcohol if you want to stay young.

Slow the Aging Process with These Foods

Eat yellow fruits and vegetables

This might sound vague, but yellow fruits and vegetables contain retinoids, which is basically the raw form of vitamin A. Vitamin A is what keeps your skin smooth, your eyes sharp and your hair lustrous. If you are confused, eat carrots, oranges, and mango. Berries are powerhouses of anti-aging nutrients.

Drink green tea

All those drinks have one thing in common, antioxidants. Free radicals destroy your body and make the aging process an accelerated nightmare, antioxidants fight off free radicals. This gives you a clear advantage to maintain healthy young looks. Green tea is rich in anti-aging compounds.

12 Ways to Slow the Aging Process

Use spices in your food

Spices in the kitchen are fun and tasty, and also many of your everyday spices and herbs have an antioxidant effect and anti-inflammatory effects. Spices like turmeric, cinnamon, and chili are actually heaven sent for your skin. Ginger, parsley, and dill are not only full of fibers but are also full of antioxidants.

Healing Spices Found in the Kitchen

Eat mushrooms

Mushrooms are rich in proteins and low on carbohydrates (sugars), but not only this, they rich in fibers, antioxidants, and anti-inflammatory agents. Practically, if you have to one type of food every day to keep young and healthy looks, you wouldn’t be at an error with mushrooms.

Slow the Aging Process with These Lifestyle Choices

Allow your food to digest before sleeping

It sounds pretty mundane, but this is actually very good advice. When you eat, the blood is redirected towards your gut for the digestion and absorption of nutrients, if you sleep during this period of time, you are actually slowly programming your body to redirect the blood flow away from your connective tissue, meaning your skin and the underlying layer.

Walk at least 30 minutes every day

Walking of all form of physical exercise is the easiest and the one that grants the best effects for the effort. Walking pumps the blood to your entire body uniformly increases the endorphins which give your better mode, burns the extra sugars in your blood and tomes your body muscles.

30 minutes is quite easy to achieve as well without disrupting your schedule in any way.

Meditate daily

After your walk, sit in a cozy seat, close your eyes and relax, emptying your mind for the next 20 minutes would help to relieve your stress levels and elevate your mood. Meditation will also help you to regulate your breathing and heart rhythm, and this decreases the load on your circulation.

Sleep well every night

The thing you hear about beauty sleep is completely true. When you sleep during the night your hormones and metabolism levels are maintained at a healthy constant. And while sleeping for 4 hours during the night might achieve this, sleeping for 8 hours helps also to relax your brain and decrease the tension levels of your body. All of this help to slow the aging process of your body.

Incorporate these 12 natural methods to slow down the aging process, try and assimilate into your daily routines.

Dr. Patrick Quillin

Dr. Patrick Quillin, PhD,RD,CNS is an internationally recognized expert in the area of nutrition and health. He has 30 years experience as a clinical nutritionist, of which 10 years were spent as the Vice President for a leading cancer hospital system where he worked with thousands of cancer patients in a hospital setting. He is a Best Selling Author with 18 books which have sold over 2,000,000 copies and also a Keynote Speaker.