You have two options.

Option one is that you don’t think at all about your health in the future. You live ‘for the now’ and you focus on making sure that you are having fun, enjoying life and not worrying about what tomorrow might bring.

You’ll have some fun in the short term sure, as you smoke, drink and sunbathe without sunblock. You’ll lie around the house relaxing as you watch your favorite show and you’ll try and earn and spend as much money as you can in true hedonistic fashion.

But then one day, you’ll get a call. It will be your old high school inviting you to a reunion. Sounds great you think!

And then you arrive and realize that you have aged worse than everyone else. You’re that person who looks tired, haggard, wrinkled and covered in sunspots. Your teeth look unhealthy and appear to be falling out and your body is sagging and wrinkled. You’ve got nothing exciting going for you and in all meaningful ways… you’re spent.

But there’s that other option. Option two is that you have fun now and enjoy life too – but while holding something back and doing a little work to fortify yourself for your future. You think about how you want life to be when you’re in your 40s, your 50s, your 70s and your 90s and you do what you can now to ensure the best possible outcome then.

And when you arrive at that reunion, the story is a little different. While other people will look worn down by life, you’ll look young, healthy and happy. You’ll be brimming with energy and you’ll have a look that’s mature, while still beaming with energy. ‘Glowing’ is not just for people in their teens!

If you’re single, then you’ll have the pick of all the highschool ‘hotties’ that everyone was after back then. Except that you’ll be out of their league now.

Don’t believe it’s possible? Then just consider celebrities like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Helen Mirren, Joana Lumley, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Matt LeBlanc, Jennifer Anniston… These are examples of people who are past middle age – well past it in some cases – and who still look amazing.

Why? Because they’re celebrities of course. Their looks are their biggest assets and they have unlimited financial resources to invest in face creams, personal trainers and the best possible diets.

So yeah, they have an unfair advantage. But as we’ll see in a moment, it’s possible for you to keep up with them in terms of looks, health and attitude for much less. You just need to be willing to put in the time and the effort. They simply prove that lifestyle can make a massive difference. And once you uncover the secrets of that lifestyle, then you can look and feel amazing at any age too.

In this post, you’re going to discover some powerful ways you can make sure you look at feel great at any age and you’ll see that these are things that don’t necessarily have to mean spending thousands of dollars on face creams, or giving up your more enjoyable lifestyle.

1. Consume Anti-Oxidants

Okay, let’s start with a simple one: consuming antioxidants. An antioxidant is essentially a substance that is able to neutralize the effects of free radicals. Free radicals meanwhile are reactive molecules that roam the body and which cause damage to the cell walls whenever they come into contact with them. This is called ‘oxidation’ and while it is microscopic, it can add up over time in order to result in macroscopic (visible) changes. In other words, the cells become lined and wrinkled and this is actually enough to cause visible wrinkles on the skin when you’re older. Not good!

Worse is that these free radicals can eventually penetrate through the cell walls all the way deep into the nucleus. This is bad news because it can result in damage to the DNA, which in turn prevents that cell from operating as it should. When cells reproduce, they do so via a process called mitosis which means that the cell actually splits in half to create an exact equal copy.

In other words, the DNA damage now becomes repeated as well and that in turn can result in the growth and spread of cancerous tumors. In other words, antioxidants don’t just extend your youthful looks – they also extend your lifespan.

So how can you make sure you are getting enough antioxidants?

One option is to consider the best sources of antioxidants – and that means berries in particular. Blueberries, raspberries etc. are all incredibly high in antioxidants and the best way to get these in your diet conveniently is with a smoothie. Swap your morning coffee at Starbucks for an Innocent smoothie and you’ll immediately extent your lifespan.

Another tip is to consider using ionized water. You can ionize your water using a water filter and what this will do is to increase the ORP or ‘Oxidation Reduction Potential’. All you need to know about that, is that the water is ionized via an electric current in order to gain new electrons. This in turn alters the pH value of that water and reduces acidity. This increases hydration as well and many people say they can feel the beneficial effects in as little as 30 days.

Another useful tip is to look out for the ‘master antioxidant’, which is glutathione. Glutathione is a tripeptide made from three amino acids called cysteine, glutaminic acid and glycine. It is more powerful than any other antioxidant and has numerous important roles throughout the body – including the maintenance of other antioxidants like vitamin C and E.

You can’t get glutathione from your diet directly but you can consume more of those three amino acids to encourage its production. Unfortunately cysteine is toxic when taken in supplement form, so instead try to get it by eating more dairy, fish, meat and cheese. For vegetarians, soybeans, spinach, pumpkin and kale will do the job.

Your skin could also use some extra boost of vitamin C. Check out our Super C Serum that promotes collagen growth for your skin along with an extra boost of vitamin C. Your skin will feel love of the vitamin C and you will feel young again.

2. Protect Yourself From the Sun

One of the best-known ways to hold onto those youthful looks for longer is to avoid the harmful rays of the sun which will damage the surface of the cells through radiation and can likewise cause damage to the DNA. The sun is responsible for many of your wrinkles, not to mention sunspots and other issues.

The best way to protect yourself from the sun is to wear sunblock on your face all the time. If you aren’t willing to go that far though, then you can get a similar benefit by wearing a moisturizer – which will also be good for hydrating and nourishing your skin – that contains sunblock in it.

COUI's Moisturizing SPF 30 Facial Sunscreen Lotion has the protection your skin needs to block the damaging UV rays from the sun. In addition to the protection, your skin will be nourished by the vitamin E and Japanese green tea extract that will make your skin smooth and radiant.

Another consideration is that you need to be aware of windows. Go and take a look at your face in a mirror right now and you may notice that you have more freckles on the left side of your face. What’s causing this? That would be driving and being near the window on your left side. Problem is that while windows can block out UVB rays, UVA rays will still penetrate through and can actually get even deeper into the skin. That’s just one more reason to wear sunblock permanently: even when you are indoors!

3. Do Mobility Work

One of the symptoms of aging that makes us feel so tired and lethargic is the fact that we lose mobility. As we get older we start to experience knee pain, back pain, neck pain and shoulder pain. We end up crouched over and struggling to stand up straight and this eventually results in us spending more time indoors and less time doing new things – which as we’ll see in a moment is responsible for much of the mental deterioration we see in old age.

In other words, a lack of mobility will often cause something of a downward spiral of deterioration. First you experience pain in your knees. Then you end up walking strangely to compensate and reducing exercise. This causes pain in your back and a reduction in energy. You end up housebound and thus your mind starts to deteriorate too.

And we accept this as ‘normal’. This is simply ‘part of aging’.

Except many thinkers now suggest that this is not the case: or should not be. It is not inevitable that we should start to experience poor mobility and pain as we get older. In fact, the body is designed to last us until we are well into old age and if it doesn’t, then this suggests that you are doing something wrong.

Specifically, what you are doing wrong is not engaging in mobility exercises.

Problem is, we spend much too long sitting in one place at work, with our neck craning, back hunched and glutes being squashed. Our legs are bent too – often for nearly 8 hours a day – while we rapidly type and use our hands.

This causes RSI (repetitive strain injury) in the fingers, it causes the quadriceps to become elongated and the hamstrings to become shortened and tighter. The glutes become weakened and the back develops a hunch. Your pecs shorten too.

And then you wonder why you have pain at 60! Not only do all these issues cause strain on the body but they also cause compensation and change the way you move. These things cause you to walk awkwardly and make you more likely to have accidents and injuries.

So what is the solution? The solution is to use mobility work and functional training to reduce tightness and to restore normal range of motion. You should be able to squat, to reach your hands straight up over your head and to run at any age.

Look for functional fitness classes, gymnastics or even yoga to help restore flexibility and normal movement.

4. Engage in HIIT

Want another form of exercise that can drastically improve your health as you age? Then consider HIIT.

HIIT stands for ‘High Intensity Interval Training’. This is all the rage right now, so if you’re at all interested in fitness then you might well have heard of it already. If not, HIIT basically involves alternating between periods of rapid, intense activity and periods of slower, more deliberate recovery.

So, you might spring for 1 minute and then jog for 2 minutes. Or sprint for 30 seconds and jog for 1 second.

Either way, this forces the body to work in a way that it is not used to. When sprinting, you are engaging in what is called ‘anaerobic exercise’. This means that you are moving too fast for the body to rely on oxygen and fat stores for fuel. Instead, it is forced to get ATP immediately that is stored in the cells and in the muscles.

When it does this, it uses the mitochondria – tiny ‘energy factories’ that live inside the cells and convert glucose into ‘ATP’ (adenosine triphosphate, the most basic form of energy that the body can use).

In exercise, there is a useful term to keep in mind, which is ‘SAID’. This useful acronym stands for ‘Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands’. That is to say, that the body will change itself in response to the training you challenge it with. And if you place greater demand on the mitochondria, then this will actually increase the number of them and their function.

That in turn means that you will have higher energy levels and greater mental performance as you get older. This is actually quite a profound change in the way you will function. Normally, we associate old age with a reduction in energy and movement, while we think of young children as having limitless energy to run around and exert themselves.

This is thought to come down almost entirely to the function of the mitochondria. In other words, HIIT can give you the youthful vigor and energy you had as a child.

And it gets better too: if you use HIIT then you also increase the efficiency of your mitochondria. This means that you’ll produce less oxygen through the use of your mitochondria which is one by-product that is responsible for the deterioration and damage of the cells over time.

HIIT is the best form of exercise for preventing aging.

5. Keep Learning and Experiencing

I hinted earlier at the idea that a reduction in activity and going outside could result in the effects of mental aging. Why might this be the case?

The answer is simple: the brain needs to keep learning and keep being challenged in order to stay healthy and youthful.

This is due to something called ‘brain plasticity’, which describes the ability of the brain to grow by creating new neural pathways/connections, by strengthening those connections via myelination and to even birth entirely new neurons through neurogenesis.

The brain is designed for learning and it craves new experiences and challenges. This way, it can help us to learn new skills to better help us survive in our environment. And the body is all about survival.

Once you remove that learning and challenge though, the brain has no reason to produce the neurotransmitters that are responsible for the growth of the brain such as brain derived neurotrophic factor. This in turn causes us to get set in our ways, it causes certain neural pathways to deteriorate and it ultimately causes us to become a) more set in our ways and b) more likely to experience age-related cognitive decline or even dementia.

Think about how easily a child can pick up a new language or skill. Think about how rapidly infants learn to walk. This comes down to the greatly increased plasticity seen in young children. But where does that extra plasticity come from? It was once thought that this was simply something that we were born with and that we lost as we got older.

But actually, thereason the brain is so plastic when we are young is that we’re learning so much. As you age, this slows down more and more until eventually, you stop learning anything new at all – especially if joint pain etc. is now preventing you from being able to go outside etc.

To keep your brain youthful and limber then, you need to keep providing yourself with more challenge, with new experiences, with new social interactions and with new learning opportunities. Never settle into your comfort zone or get into a rut.

6. Have the Right Attitude

A lot of this comes down to having the right attitude as you age.

The problem is that a lot of us will tend to ‘give up’ once we get older and then just allow our bodies to deteriorate. We have had children and fulfilled our ‘evolutionary imperative’ (look up ‘the evolutionary shadow’ for something very interesting on this topic) and we are now tireder and less driven than ever before. Thus, we allow ourselves to become complacent and allow our bodies and minds to deteriorate.

Many people will even experience a ‘mid-life crisis’ at this point. That is to say that we will become depressed and stressed at the thought that we might now never be able to accomplish all the things we dreamed of as a child.

But here’s something to remember: it is never too late to be what you always wanted to be.

The only difference is the way you go about it. Always dreamed of being a Hollywood actor? Well there is actually a lot of work available for older people to play parts in movies!

Always wanted to start a business? There are actually more entrepreneurs that are in their 40s and 60s than there are in their 20s and 30s – you have more experience, more resources and more connections now.

Want to be a rock star? That might be tricky, but you can set up a YouTube channel sharing your music and maybe even try marketing yourself to an older audience.

There is so much to live for and so much you can accomplish at any age. The only change is the way that you see yourself and if you give up mentally, then your body will start to give up physically. Having a drive and goal, having something that matters to you… this is what will give you the interest and the focus to keep on learning those new things, to keep moving and to keep training even when you’re tired.

7. No More Stress

Let’s finish with one more tip: reduce stress in any way you can while you’re young.

Stress is actually incredibly bad for you and especially ‘chronic stress’ which causes cellular damage and increases oxidative damage while also damaging your brain and suppressing your immune and digestive systems.

You need to reduce stress at any cost then and recognize it as the life-force draining enemy that it is. Not only does that mean lifestyle changes to avoid those sources of stress though: it also means looking for ways that you can manage stress in the short and long term.

And the best tool for doing that? Meditation. Meditation has been shown to drastically reduce the effects of stress on your body and mind as well as to actually enhance brain plasticity and cortical thickness while protecting against age-related cognitive decline.

This is one of the best tools there is for protecting your mind and body while you are young so that you can get more energy and brain power in your older age.

Closing Comments

As you can see then, there are many different ways you can avoid the effects of aging and ensure that you will look and feel amazing no matter how old you get.

But it all starts with right mental attitude. The single most important thing is to not give in to the temptation to ‘relax’ and surrender to your old age. Keep challenging yourself, keep growing and stay young and adaptable.