Reverse Your Biological Clock

Your birthday marks your chronological age. With every year that passes by, and every candle that is added to your cake, your chronological age increases. Your biological age, on the other hand, is measured by your hormone levels which is the most scientifically supported marker out of all biological markers. You are as old as your oldest organ. If your organ says that you're 50 years old, and it’s your 40th birthday, the harsh truth is that you’re 50.

The beauty industry is promoting anti-ageing skincare, makeup and sophisticated technologies at every turn with the claims of anti-ageing. Unfortunately, the results are temporary and external. It’s like a nine-year-old Ferrari that is repainted, and has new changed rims and tyres. It may look new, but once you open the front of the engine, you discover that it’s in fact a 15-year-old engine that isn’t going to last long.

Instead of turning to these supposed quick fixes, if we start addressing the root of why people are ageing faster, we have a higher chance of slowing down the ageing process. The way that someone lives impacts how fast they age. Certain factors cause our hormones to start falling at a faster rate than they should for our age. If we address this at its roots and fix our lifestyle and nutrition, we can help improve the state of our hormones and consequently the rest of our body.

Many people don't realise they are unhealthy until you ask them a few specific questions. There are some questions you need to start answering to assess your health. For example, what time do you go to bed? How many hours do you sleep? Are you actually able to go into sleep or do you wake up in the middle of the night? What type of diet are you normally having? The answers to these questions reveal a lot about your health and the state of your hormones. I'll lay out these questions and explain how some lifestyle and nutrition choices affect your body's ageing.

Hormones are vital for our body’s functions. DHEA which is a precursor to making oestrogen and testosterone is the mother of all sexual hormones but it actually helps us to have good metabolism. DHEA also helps in muscle bulking, gives us good mental agility, and helps with cellular activities which makes our cells young. Oestrogen helps us to multitask, protects us against heart disease, osteoporosis, and gives us good memory. However, oestrogen alone is not the only important hormone.

Other vital hormones to look out for is insulin. Unfortunately, as we get older, our insulin increases. It is the only hormone that increases while other hormones decrease with age. As insulin goes up, it increases our storage capacity, so it stores sugar as fat. More insulin is produced during winter to stores fats. As you get older, this extends into your life all year round! Naturally your body shape changes. You constantly feel hungry because the sugar keeps getting stored and you have none in your blood. There’s no medication to bring insulin down, but what we can do is to improve our lifestyle with more cardio which decreases insulin.

What time do you go to bed? How many hours do you sleep? Are you actually able to go into sleep or do you wake up in the middle of the night? If you are sleeping late, for short hours and keep waking up in the middle of the night, you are missing out on the human growth hormone which is made between 12 midnight and 2am. Without this growth hormone, your internal single cell activity is going to be very bad. Your cell cycle gets shorter and your cells would die faster. When your cells die faster, your body is not able to replenish well and your organ functions will drop. This drop in function is definitely not ideal, so you want to be sleeping early and having enough sleep. One way to improve your sleep is to have an active lifestyle with regular cardio workouts and reduced sugar intake in your diet. For all cases it is always best to consult with the doctor in case any supplements and hormonal pills are required.

Additionally, the quality of your sleep is vital. If you had a crappy night, you will likely have a crappy morning too. If you keep waking up in the middle of the night or snore, then you may not be getting enough oxygen in your system. You will know this by how you feel when you wake up so it’s important that you pay attention to this.

If your night is normal, and you still wake up tired then you may suffer from chronic fatigue or adrenal fatigue. Some people go to bed at 11.30 pm and wake up at 8 am, but they still feel that they never slept. This means that your adrenals are not working, because there isn’t an adrenal spike in the morning, which should be happening. One way to address this problem is to eat wholesome foods with high nutritional density and high quality fish oil.

Next, how many cups of coffee do you take a day? Do you have cravings for snacks? Do you have a craving for snacks at certain times of the month? Is your menstruation regular? If you are having a lot of such cravings with an irregular menstrual cycle, chances are, you’re oestrogen dominant. You've got more oestrogen than progesterone and that's when you start to crave sugar the week before your period and you become very water retentive. You're also very emotional and have mood swings. A way to curb this is to have more green leafy vegetables when you’re craving for sugar and make sure that your diet is free from hormones, pesticides and antibiotics.

Do you have eczema? Are you feeling constipated? Do you have constipation alternating with diarrhoea sometimes? Do you see food floating in the toilet bowl? If you do, then it is likely that your gut is not healthy. You need to go back to a healthy, wholesome and diverse diet. You are what you eat.

It’s also important to note that drinking is as bad as smoking. Alcohol is not good at all. So two units a week for both drinking and smoking is more than you should have. Your hormones compensate for such bad lifestyle habits, and as a result, they start declining more rapidly.

Regardless of your age, you need to exercise. Your exercises change as you get older, but you still need to be exercising. Especially for men, the most essential hormone is testosterone which increases in production when you do more strength exercises and have a higher protein intake. Smoking and drinking kill testosterone significantly. The best exercise, in general, is walking long distances; followed by swimming because it has both strength and cardio. You kill two birds with one stone. It’s also a good idea to have a watch or tracker to monitor your heart rate to measure whether it’s fat burn or for cardio.

Taking care of what you consume can help slow down your ageing process. It isn’t just about eating more greens but also about eating more wholesome food, having a diverse diet, and getting supplements that care for your gut.

Wholesome and Diverse Diet

You can get wholesome food by eating food in its original form. You can easily assess if something is considered as wholesome food by looking at the packaging. If it comes in a box, it isn’t wholesome. If you want to eat a chicken, it should be a chicken; you must see the actual animal. It’s the same with fruits and vegetables. Everything that has been processed and made into chunks or a little ball, is bad for you. You must eat food in its original form.

Next, you have to be eating diverse food. A varied diet gives you all the amino acids you need. Having animal protein through fish or eggs once a week is good. I try to avoid gluten and dairy because they cause inflammation. The rule of thumb with meals is that you need to be having low caloric, high nutritional value foods. Most of us eat high caloric, low nutritional value foods such as white carbohydrates like white wheat, and white rice. A better alternative of carbohydrates with high nutritional value and low calories are sweet potato, yam, butternut squash. You must eat a wide variety of foods to avoid intolerance which is developed after long exposure to the same type of food items. Variety is key.

Get the Right Supplements

We generally don’t need supplements if we’re eating a wholesome and diverse diet. Unfortunately, many people are eating a lot of junk, and so they need to be supplemented.

It’s tempting to buy vitamins from A to Z and think you are covered, but anything more than four to six supplements will end up cancelling them out. People often fall back on multivitamins which have a little bit of everything but are in reality filled with a whole lot of nothing. Certain supplements are overused, and certain supplements are not. You need to know where you are by finding out your baseline before you start taking supplements.

Beyond four or five supplements, these supplements can cancel each other out if you don't understand what the supplement does. You need to know what you are treating. Are you treating thyroid, are you treating ovaries, adrenals, insulin, growth hormone or your gut? Some supplements will be good for one organ, but not so good for another organ. So to deal with a certain dysfunction, people need specific supplements. They can’t just have everything from A to Z and expect the problem to be fixed.

Because of this, doctors tend to give specific supplements. This means if you need zinc due to menopause, andropause or any other reason, I’ll give you zinc. I won’t give you a multi-mineral complex. Likewise if you need B12 because you are anaemic or feel tired and weak, I will give you a high dose of B12 to manage that. We use specific vitamins for particular issues.

Gut Health

Before the nutrients or junk gets passed through your bloodstream, there’s a whole delivery process. Your mouth is like the first immigration gate where the parcels get sent out. Your gut is like the second immigration gate that processes the parcels into nutrients and junk. Then you have your third gate – the liver, which is like the general post office that filters, sorts and organises big packages, small packages, non-registered mail, and junk mail. Lastly, the final gate is to see if all the nutrients have entered and metabolised in the cells

You can tell what kind of packages you have in your body based on the quality of your bowels, the number of times you have bowel movement, the colour of it and even whether your food has been fully processed. A healthy movement means that you see bulky, large calibre stool. It should be mustard yellow colour and odourless. Of course not everybody has that. Most people’s stools tend to be small calibre, constipated, muddy or dark and someone would know that you've been to toilet because of the smell. Everyone's regularity is different. Some people have bowel movements once or twice a day while others will go three times a day and it's all normal.

You can also do a digestive analysis of your stool where you can find out how much enzymes, food, good bacteria and bad bacteria are present. A digestive analysis will reveal the functions of your intestine, unlike a colonoscopy which tells you what your physical intestine looks like, ensuring no growth.

A great way to improve your gut health apart from wholesome food is to get some probiotics. They feed the bacteria you have in your system, and they will multiply the good bacteria. 50% of our serotonin which is our happy hormones come from probiotics in your gut. Depressed people have a bad gut. You can get probiotics from fermented foods like Kombucha, Kimchi, Yoghurt. If you have a tough time digesting dairy or spice, you can consider kefir, coconut kefir and coconut yoghurt.

“Good skin comes from good food, not chemical treatments.”

The beauty industry offers many creams with chemicals to promise glowing faces. If you want to see how old you are, you can look at the back of your hand. That is your skin’s condition. I am not saying you should leave your skin to dry on its own but if you want really good skin, you don’t need to add more chemicals to your face, you need to be consuming or applying healthy ingredients like collagen, vitamin C, vitamin A, which helps to make your skin elastic.

No one wants to get older but since we can’t control our chronological clock, then let’s do what can actually be controlled which is to live a healthy lifestyle that slows down biological ageing. Start with baby steps and watch your health be transformed bit by bit.

1. Answer the Questions

Take out a piece of paper or open the notes section on your phone and type out your answer to the questions in chapter 2. Based on your answers, come up with the areas you need to work on. For example if you have constant cravings, you might want to check your insulin and oestrogen.

2. Wholesome Food

Swap out your processed food for wholesome food. Instead of always going to the supermarket, you might want to start going to farmers market or the wet market and start picking out your ingredients. When you go to the supermarket, you want to stick to the periphery of the supermarket, and not the aisles. Don’t get anything that comes from a box.

3. Care for Your Skin

Instead of only using moisturiser, start eating a diet rich in vitamin A, vitamin C, and collagen. You can achieve this simply by eating fresh food, food in its original form. A great skin smoothie includes a green juice with kale, cucumber, half a lemon, spinach and green apple.