The Longevity Book: Live stronger. Live better. The art of ageing well.. Cameron Diaz

each image bringing me closer to the woman I am today, each pointing towards the woman I will become. I don’t yet know who she is, but I look forward to meeting her. We all want to know what, when, and how our stories will unfold, and all we have to go on is the life we have experienced so far, the choices we have already made, and the stories we have lived through, from beginning to middle to end.

      I wrote this book because I wanted to peek into my future. I wanted to get a sense of what might happen, what could happen, and what I could possibly do for myself now to continue the journey, and to enjoy the journey for as long as possible. In the years that come, I may grow weaker, but it is my hope that I can also grow wiser, warmer, and more resilient. I hope we can all find the power to grow older together, each of us doing the work we must to become stronger and more loving and more at home in our hearts, in our bodies, and in the world.

      Photographs make it possible for us to watch ourselves age. We can see ourselves grow taller, observe the cheekbones that show up as we pass from adolescence to young womanhood, notice the wrinkles that begin to appear just a couple of decades after that. What is less easily grasped by a camera lens is the inner growth, the way the heady passions of youth grow into the steadier fascinations of adulthood, or the privileges that time offers with every passing year.

      Time can be kept by clocks and calendars, measured in inches and wrinkles, and caught in images and photographs. But if we are very lucky, it can also be counted in a life well spent, full of learning, love, and laughter.

      AROUND MY FORTIETH BIRTHDAY, I started thinking about what it means to age. It is a fundamentally human question, one we all start to consider at some point. None of us is immune to the passage of time, and one day, when you realize that life just keeps moving forward and there really is no going back – the wondering begins. Poets write poems about it and musicians write songs about it and scientists design experiments to understand it. All of us humans wonder what will happen to us when we get older.

      I had been living in this body of mine for more than four decades when I started thinking about the changes that might be coming down the road. I have experienced a lot of changes throughout my lifetime, of course, but I found myself unable to stop thinking about how the decades ahead were going to reveal some even more drastic changes – and how I didn’t really understand the ageing process, or what it would mean for me. I had seen people I love get old and decline sharply and painfully, and I wondered if that would be my fate, or if I could hope for something better.

      Around the same time, I was also writing a book called The Body Book, which focused on the foundational aspects of human life. It was full of the kind of stuff I had been learning about over the course of nearly two decades – information about nutrition, exercise, and cultivating strong habits – along with some of the latest scientific insights about overall physical health. I already had intimate knowledge of the ways in which fitness and diet could change my body for the better. Now I wondered: how could I stay healthy and strong in the years to come? We all want longevity, of course. We all want more calendar pages to turn, more time to experience life. But what is a long life without strength, without physical and emotional health and resilience?

      So I called my writing partner, Sandra Bark, with whom I had written The Body Book, and I told her that I had figured out that our next book would be about cellular ageing.

      She laughed and said, “Great, an easy one.”

      To be clear, there is nothing easy about this subject of ageing – not the science of it, and not the experience of living through it. But easy or not, it will happen, and it is happening right now. We can avoid most uncomfortable truths for a very long time, if we want to, but there’s no denying that this one catches up with us eventually. It’s my hope that with a better understanding of what ageing really is – the science of it, the biology of it, the cultural and historical context of it – we can all become empowered to live well in the years ahead.

      One thing that I’ve learned about uncomfortable truths is that you make life a whole lot harder for yourself when you pretend they aren’t real. You can waste a lot of precious time and energy trying to make something into what it is not. Once you stop fighting reality, everything becomes a lot easier. Youth is a beautiful part of life, and the discoveries we make when we are young are invaluable. They are the lessons and the memories that we will carry with us as we move into each new phase of our lives. It’s important to keep those lessons close to us, but it’s also important to let go of what no longer is, and to accept and prepare for what is to come.

      As babies and toddlers, we were blissfully unaware of the fact that we were zooming ahead developmentally. As adolescents transitioning into teenagers, we were equipped only with the information the adults around us decided to share (for better or for worse), and our understanding of what was around the bend and how to deal with all the crazy changes we’d soon experience wasn’t up to us. This round, it’s our turn. When it comes to the next phase of our lives, the responsibility of preparation is solely ours. We have the opportunity to gather our resources, our abilities, all the wisdom we have gained over the years, and design a plan for healthy ageing that will help us stay strong while also making us more aware, more conscious, and more connected to ourselves and to one another.

      Before we embark on this journey together I would like to offer a disclaimer: This is not an anti-ageing book. I’m not going to tell you how to trick time or reverse the ageing process in thirty days. Some books and articles about ageing claim that the latest groundbreaking discoveries can show you how to turn back the clock. Others offer strategies for making yourself look younger, or suggest that certain miracle foods or supplements are the newest fountain of youth. This is not that kind of book. This book takes a step back, to examine how the ageing process really works and how time will affect us physically and emotionally – because these two components of our health are inseparable.

      What you will find in these pages is information and an ideology that I hope will help you find a new way of thinking about ageing. I don’t want you to live in fear of ageing, or beat yourself up about the fact that your body is doing something totally natural. I want to reframe the way that we, as women, talk about ageing. I want to offer a perspective that is healthier and more scientifically accurate than the fear- and shame-based conversation that permeates our culture.

      What I want for you, for me, for all the women I care about – those I already know and those I haven’t yet met, those who are crossing the threshold into middle age now and those who are following behind us – is to be able to approach this subject with knowledge and with confidence instead of sheer terror and a heavier hand with the foundation. And by “knowledge”, I mean having the facts to live better, longer, and stronger. And by “confidence”, I mean having the ability to own our age instead of hiding from it or apologising for it. I’m not saying that ageing isn’t scary. It is. But we can prepare ourselves now for the changes that lie ahead.

      I also want you to feel empowered to participate in the new conversation about ageing that is turning up everywhere. From public and private funds for scientific research to articles to podcasts to books like this one – everyone is curious to learn more about how we can age better. Part of the reason there’s such a sudden flurry of interest in how to age well is because this topic of ageing is still so new. As you will learn in the pages ahead, at this particular moment in the history of human evolution, our life expectancy is longer than it has ever been. Our relationship with and our understanding of the ageing process is still unfolding.

      The newness of the interest in ageing makes the exploration of this topic all the more challenging and all the more thrilling. So when Sandra and I set off on our journey, we went in with open, inquisitive, and studious minds. We talked with researchers and physicians and educators, and visited universities and research centres like the National Institutes of Health (NIH). And to our surprise we learned that although