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Dare To Be 100: 99 Steps To A Long, Healthy Life - Softcover

Bortzii, Walter M.

 
9780684800219: Dare To Be 100: 99 Steps To A Long, Healthy Life
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0684800217 ISBN 13: 9780684800219
Verlag: Atria, 1996

Inhaltsangabe

TAKE 99 STEPS TO 100
A bestselling expert on aging and geriatric care offers a prescription for achieving longevity and preserving the quality of life. In DARE to Be 100, Walter M. Bortz II, M.D., explains how and why we should all strive to be centenarians with his unique and practical program. Supported by his lifelong research, this program is broken down into the categories of
* Diet (Take a Coffee Break; Beware of Free Radicals)
* Attitude (Be Necessary; Maintain the Creative Spark)
* Renewal (Recharge Yourself; Keep Working)
* Exercise (Keep Your Oxygen Tanks Full; Be Sexy, Be Fit)
The 99 steps in this book offer an effective plan for living long, healthy, and -- just as important -- fulfilled lives.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Walter M. Bortz II, MD, the author of We Live Too Short and Die Too Long and more than 100 scientific articles, is a member of the teaching faculty at Stanford University Medical School and a practicing physician at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. Past president of the American Geriatric Society, former cochair of the AMA-ANA Task Force on Aging, and participant in one marathon yearly, he also serves on the editorial board of Runner's World magazine.

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A bestselling expert on aging and geriatric care offers a prescription for achieving longevity and preserving the quality of life. In DARE to Be 100, Walter M. Bortz II, M.D., explains how and why we should all strive to be centenarians with his unique and practical program. Supported by his lifelong research, this program is broken down into the categories of diet (take a coffee break; beware of free radicals); attitude (be necessary; maintain the creative spark); renewal (recharge yourself; keep working); and exercise (keep your oxygen tanks full; be sexy, be fit). The 99 steps in this book offer an effective plan for living long, healthy, and - just as important - fulfilled lives.

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Chapter 1

You've got to have guts to grow old

To claim life you've got to be bold

But you have to be smart

As well as have heart

If you want your whole tale to be told.

Guts and Smarts

In 1995 the first of 75 million baby boomers turned fifty. We know this much. What we don't know is, beginning in 2045, how many of them will turn 100. Two principal credentials will have to be presented if most are to make it -- guts and smarts. Smarts is the accumulation and use of the cascade of new knowledge that provides the when, what, and how to aim for 100. The when, what, and how involve sorting out and disentangling prior ignorance and misinformation, which has until now prevented full extension of the lifespan. The when is the critical appreciation of the dimension of time in everything you do and are. The what is the simple assigning of life forces to the proper category, knowing what is changeable and what isn't. And the how is the understanding of the way the parts fit together. Our current era is the first in which sufficient knowledge has been accumulated to provide sound answers to these basic questions concerning human life. Having smarts affects each part of your life -- the biological, psychological, and social. It affects you individually and collectively as a member of the larger community. It is one of the two basic ingredients of living to be 100.

Smarts

When

What

How

Guts

Why

But smarts by themselves aren't enough. Smarts are necessary but insufficient. In order to squeeze all the good out of your life, you also need guts. Guts means having the valor of purpose necessary to pursue the why. The capacity to search steadily for a significance in life represents the highest nobility. The why is finding a meaning for all of the expanded living and also the energy and involvement necessary to make it happen. Nietzsche is quoted in Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Being: "A person who knows the 'why' of life can put up with almost and 'how.'" For the flame of life to burn brightly for all your days, a steady supply of active participation is essential. If apathy, discontent, and boredom are given room to thrive, your chances of seeing 100 are slim to none. If, however, you muster the guts, nourished by a sense of meaning, then a long vivid life beckons. You need to ensure that each minute of your life is crowded with active participation. It is simply the way nature works, and you need the guts to reach for your natural capacity.

John Gardner suggests that we amend our constitution to read "Life, liberty and the pursuit of meaning." It is the pursuit of meaning that gives life its substance. Without this search we humans are pretty much mindless voyagers on a lonely planet. Yet if we can strive for purpose, then life has a direction. This striving takes guts.

Such heroism does not connote an occasional dash into a burning building or pursuit of other episodic risk of personal safety, but instead reflects a steady, quiet slog across the peaks and valleys of everyday life. Guts and smarts. Courage and intelligence. These are the secrets of the fountain of age, the elixir of a long, bountiful life, the dream of the ancients. Guts and smarts are not mythical, mushy-brained ingredients. They are securely documented, tested, and integrated. They fit precisely into a coherent whole. There is now a sufficient fund of data and experience to allow baby boomers -- and, of course, younger generations -- to plan their 100th birthday party with calm assurance, prepare the guest list, and muster enough respiratory reserve to blow out all those candles.

But making 100 is not a sure thing. It will not happen effortlessly. It is your job, not someone else's, to see that it happens. As things stand now, the government would hate it, industry would scream, and almost no families would know how to deal with such widespread longevity if we did achieve it. There must be an awful lot of shifting around of old attitudes and social organizations for the boomers and beyond to fit in comfortably as centenarians.

Life inevitably brings losses. The longer you live, the more there will be. The losses themselves are not the principal threat, however. A lack of resilience is. How you confront and adapt to losses is a major ingredient in daring to be 100. There are many pitfalls along the way, disincentives, wrong information, stereotypes, prejudices, and asynchronies. There are many excuses for not wanting to be 100, but they are wrong-headed. The reason all of us should want to live a century are much stronger than the reasons not to. To wish for less than your full potential is dispiriting. We are born for one purpose, and that is to live. When you are ready to die, you must be able to say "Yes, I have lived." Don't spend so much time worrying about whether there is life after death. Worry instead about the life before death.

SMARTS -- THE WHEN

The first element of developing the smarts necessary for a long life is the new appreciation of the time dimension of your life. How far is it from womb to tomb? An 83-year-old friend of mine told me how he had been more or less looking idly out the window each day for the undertaker to pull up. Then -- "Eureka!" -- he miraculously recognized that "it wasn't time yet." But until this moment he had lacked the clarity of information to know what stage of life he was living, or put another way, what time it was in his life.

In all likelihood, until now, all of your estimates of your lifetime have been wrong. How do you know what time it is in your life? Usually you set your life clock by your parents' and grandparents' experience. If they died young or old, you more or less projected that prophecy onto your own life. My maternal grandparents died in their 50s and 60s of cancer and diabetes, which was pretty much what was expected of them in the 1920s. My paternal grandparents, however, lived into their early 70s, and I recall my parents and all of their friends feeling that Dad's folks were extremely old, outliving their allotted times. They were in overtime.

I am sure that my parents set their life clocks according to my paternal grandparents, making midnight for them around 70 years of age. Dad died at 74, just about on cue. But my mother lived to 95, the last survivor of twelve children, and a widow for twenty-two years. She was confused and awkward about her age, despite the fact that she was healthy until she died. She had lived way past her midnight. On birthdays and Christmases in our house, she was upset that my kids -- her grandkids -- did not turn cartwheels when they found her check for five dollars in her card. Despite my continued efforts to encourage her to play a role in our family, she was uncomfortable and out of synch. She often told us to "act your age," but the problem was that she didn't know how to act her age.

Mother lived to 95, not because she paid any heed to the advice of her physician husband and son. She took perverse pride in disregarding everything we ever said to her. She was at least thirty pounds overweight her whole post-me life. Mother lived to 95 because she was designed to live this long and longer. We all are.

When my mother was a little girl, the average life expectancy was only 45 years of age. No wonder she felt awfully old near her end. But there is now a virtual consensus that the maximum human lifespan is around 120 years, or one million hours. This does not mean, of course, that all of us will live that long. But at least two people have -- Shigecko Isumi was recorded by the Guiness Book of World Records as the oldest documented life -- 120 years, 237 days (but on February 21, 1996, Jean Calment of...

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Verlag
Atria
Erscheinungsdatum
1996
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0684800217
ISBN 13 
9780684800219
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande