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Purposely Live to120

~ Living to the full potential life-span with full vigor

Monthly Archives: April 2014

Post #9 – When it comes to health, vitality, and aging what is really possible?

27 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by purposelyliveto120 in Aging, Reversing Chronic Diseases, Vigor, Vitality

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Tags

Aging, Allergies, living to 120, optimal health, Preventative Care, Vitality

We have all heard the story. Until Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile barrier, most folks believed that it was not possible to run at that speed. Few years after Bannister demonstrated that it was possible to run a 4 minute mile, even high schoolers were attempting that record. It became not just possible but an achievable goal.

I believe the same is also true in health, vitality and aging. It was not really that long when the first successful open heart surgery was demonstrated. Now, over half a million bypass surgeries are performed every year in the U.S. alone.

So, it is with this expectation of possible becoming achievable and eventually pervasive, I find it very inspiring to learn what is really possible when it comes to health, vitality and aging., without the intervention of “modern medicine”. Is possible to bypass the bypass surgery?

Through my personal and others experiences and documented studies, I have been collecting examples of what is possible in prevention of diseases or restoration of health and even more importantly how.

Here are some exciting possibilities I have discovered, so far:

  1. Allergies can be reversed

Evidence – My personal experience (see my blog post from last week)

How – By changing what we eat, detoxifying colon, liver, and kidneys and taking supplements to rebuild liver, e.g., CoQ10, Milk Thistle.

  1. Cartilage in Joints such as knees (often diagnosed as Arthritis) can be rebuilt

Evidence – My personal experience

How – By realigning joints if necessary, Bikram Yoga, nutritional supplements Glucosamine/Chondroitin, strength training and realigning joint to eliminate the root cause of wear and tear (see item 10 below). 

  1. Early symptoms of prostate enlargement can be reversed

Evidence – My personal experience

How – By taking supplement such as Saw Palmetto Complex

  1. Losing Inches of height as one ages is reversible

Evidence – My personal experience

How – By doing Bikram Yoga              

  1. Coronary Heart Disease can be prevented and reversed

Evidence – “Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease” by Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D.

How – By changing what we eat and drink

  1. Many types of cancers can be prevented and (in mice) turned on and off by changing diet

Evidence – “China Study”, by T. Collin Campbell, PhD

How – By changing what we eat

  1. Live to 93 years old and still be performing heart surgeries

Live to be over 100 and be disease free, fully functioning, independent, supporting family and community

Evidence – “The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived The Longest”, By Dan Buettner

How – By living certain lifestyle that includes what we eat, how much we eat, who we associate with, having a purpose, staying active, taking time off and managing our perspective.

  1. Reverse diabetes

Evidence – “Blood Sugar Solution”, by Dr. Mark Hyman

How – Changing what we eat and drink, taking appropriate supplements and engaging in physical activity

  1. Make a phenomenal transformation in matter of months, even at 60

Evidence – “The Life Plan: How Any Man Can Achieve Lasting Health, Great Sex, and a Stronger, Leaner Body”, by Jeffry S. Life M.D. Ph.D.              

“Body for Life: 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strength”, by Bill Phillips and Michael D’Orso

“The Joe Dillon Difference”, by Joe Dillon

How – Creating a health plan and sticking to it rigorously

  1. Make dramatic difference in back, neck, joint pains through body realignment

Evidence –   Pain Free: A Revolutionary Method for Stopping Chronic Pain Paperback by Pete Egoscue; Egoscue Treatment Clinics; Personal Experience

How – Learning and practicing the appropriate eCises

Are such possibilities not exciting?

Have you run into some exciting possibilities in the area of health, vitality and aging?

Do you have some personal experience of making something considered impossible possible in the area of health, vitality and aging?

I would love to hear your stories and add those to this list to further explore and make them achievable.

Post #8 – So, did I tell you the story about my allergies?

21 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by purposelyliveto120 in Living to 120, Reversing Chronic Diseases, Vigor

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Allergies, Biomarkers, Cholesterol, Chronic diseases, Lifestyle

Or, my first lesson that chronic “diseases” can be reversed.

One day in the fall of 1985, at the University of Maryland, I was walking around my office rubbing my itchy eyes to get some relief. My secretary Janice said that my eyes looked bloodshot and suggested that I should go get them checked out with my doctor. When I told her that I did not have a doctor, she promptly made an appointment with her own doctor.

The doctor took a quick look at my eyes and told me that it was “just seasonal allergies.” I had arrived from India eight year earlier and can honestly say that I had never heard of the word “allergies” before coming to the US. So naturally, I asked the doc what seasonal allergies were. He said not to worry too much about it. It is probably Ragweed that I was allergic to. I should just go buy a bottle of non-prescription one milligram Chlorpheniramine, a generic anti-histamine, to take it for a few weeks until the season passed. When I asked him how I would know when to stop taking it, he said to take it for just a few weeks, I would know when season changes and not to worry too much about it since it was not a big deal.

Well, the following year, my allergies were a little worse. I started sniffling in addition to having itchy eyes. So, I started taking 2 milligrams. Even bigger dose the next year and so on. A few years later, my allergies would now kick-in even in spring season with pollen from blooming trees. In DC area, we have a lot of those. By 1995, I was suffering from allergies for about six months in a year, two months of spring season and four months of the fall season. Allergies had gotten so bad that I would feel like a zombie for half of the year, sneezing, sniffling with fever-like symptoms.

In 1993, I started learning how to fly. I could not afford to take drowsy antihistamine while flying. So, the doctor started to give me cocktails – non-drowsy stuff during the day and drowsy meds for the evenings. I was taking equivalent of 12mg antihistamine during the day and another 12 mg at night. Some of these meds had side-effects, like increased heart palpitations. So, I needed to go the doctor regularly to get checked out. My immune system was getting worse. I would get viral infection two three times a year, each episode started to last longer and longer

During all this time I would ask my physician about what was going on with my body and he would say, “Well, it’s the immune system. We don’t know much about the immune system.”

While this was going on, I had also gotten my cholesterol checked. My first blood test, in July 1990, showed my total cholesterol as 275, LDL of 205, HDL 39 and Triglycerides 155. Doctor gave me some pamphlets about lowering cholesterol through change in diet. Following that diet guidance, my cholesterol came down by as much as 52 points; this was still much higher than the then standard of 180 for the total cholesterol and 130 for LDL. My doc told me that I probably had genetic issues and had to get on some cholesterol lowering drug. A couple I tried had serious side effects like itchy skin and rash, so I discontinued those.

In September of 1995, I attended a 10 day program, Life Mastery, my first of Tony Robbins’s three Mastery University programs. At that program, on the first day, as part of creating our health baseline, we got our blood work done. My total cholesterol that day was 265. Seven days into the program, everybody who had excessive cholesterol got tested again. This time my total cholesterol was 183, an 82 points drop in 7 days! I was pleasantly shocked. That is big a change in one week. I had never been able to achieve such results, nor had my doctor ever shared even a possibility that such a change was possible with any change in lifestyle.

Armed with that experience and more knowledge about some methods for cleansing, when I returned I started to aggressively explore the possibility of curing my allergies. In my search, I ran into an organization called Washington University of Integrative Medicine. Starting October 1996, I worked with them to undertake a number of different lifestyle changes and therapies. I changed my eating habits. I quit dairy, meat, alcohol, coffee, and chocolate. They did colonics for me every other week to cleanse my colon, coffee colonics to stimulate my liver, and I would take various supplements to support my liver and immune system.

When the spring of 1997 rolled around, results became very clear. I suffered allergies only for just a few days at the beginning of that spring season and on a few very bad pollen days. In the fall of 1997 also, my experience was similar. Every season that followed, my allergies got better as opposed to getting worse as I had been experiencing since 1985.

A couple of years after my experiment with the alternative methods of curing my allergies, I went back to my physician. I needed to have him sign some papers so that I could use my health savings funds for alternative therapies. I told him my story of how I had cured my allergies. He thumped the table and got visibly angry and yelled, “These things don’t work!” I had always known him as a very mild mannered gentleman. Then I told him the other reason I had pursued this therapy was to manage my cholesterol. Regaining his composure, he said that cholesterol he could measure objectively. He challenged me to get blood work done and then return to see him.

Well, in March 1998, I got the blood work done. Total cholesterol came out to be 192 with LDL at 131. See the chart below of my cholesterol history for the last 25 years. Back paddling a little, he said, “The reason we don’t push lifestyle changes is because 95% people cannot make those changes. Whatever you are doing you should keep doing since it is working for you.” As for the allergies he wrote on my chart, SPONTANEOUS REMISSION. I left doctor’s office shaking my head in disbelief and decided to change doctor.

Cholestrol History

Nineteen years later now, I am totally free of allergies and my immune is system is strong enough that I don’t much get sick from common colds and flus. If I do catch a cold I bounce back in a day or two. Cholesterol is a whole another story. Few years later, the new standard for cholesterol became 150 for total and less than 100 for LDL. In 2007, I finally gave in and started taking Lipitor to bring my cholesterol within that range.

More recently, I have learned some more about impact of nutrition and lifestyle on coronary diseases and as a result made further changes. About a year ago, I discontinued Lipitor and have done three blood works since then, each a little bit better than the one before. The most recent blood work shows total cholesterol of 146 and LDL of 90. Moreover, my HDL is a fairly healthy 46, while triglycerides at 48, the lowest ever in 25 years!

So, that is my story about curing my allergies and managing cholesterol through nutrition. Motivated by this experience, I have accumulated a few other personal stories about preventing or curing certain other issues and have also collected further knowledge that many of the “chronic conditions” I discussed in earlier posts measured through vitality biomarkers are preventable and curable.

And that’s where I get this passion for collecting and disseminating evidence and research based information about preventing and curing chronic conditions through lifestyle changes.

Do you have a similar story?

Have you been able to reverse certain chronic conditions through lifestyle changes?

I would love to hear of such stories, both as a means for gathering inspiration and for collecting accurate experiential knowledge that we can pass along to others.

Post #7 – Can biomarkers help in the quest for vitality and longevity?

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by purposelyliveto120 in Aging, Life-Span, Living to 120, Vigor, Vitality

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Aging, Biomarkers, Epigenetic Signature, Life Span, Lifespan, living to 120, optimal health, Telomere, Vitality

How do we die and how do we lose vitality questions so far have focused my attention on the hurdles to overcome. Some of these have to do with challenges that shorten or bring end to our lifespan. Other items are “diseases” that can decrease our vitality and vigor.

All of these items are, of course, important. For the moment, however, let me step away from these hurdles and reframe the questions.

Let us say, I don’t really have any disease, but I want to live a lifestyle to achieve the optimal health and lifespan. How can I objectively assess where I am presently and then either maintain or improve from here? In other words, how to pursue living an optimal health and vitality, not merely trying to be disease free?

Study of Biomarkers has been an area of aggressive research and pursuit in vitality and aging since the 1980’s.

Biomarkers (short for biological markers) are biological measures of a biological state. By definition, a biomarker is a characteristic that is objectively measured and evaluated as an indicator of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes or pharmacological responses to a therapeutic intervention.

In the context of aging, an important focus for biomarkers has been on finding “the clock” that potentially ticks away our lifespan. Discovery of telomere as a potentially genetic clock is one example of a biomarker that won Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California San Francisco a Nobel Prize. More recently, Steve Horvath of UCLA has introduced another important biomarker to measure human aging through epigenetic signatures.

Both of these works have sparked fascinating research into areas of aging and extending lifespans. I would like to explore these topics in future blog posts.

On the other hand, for vitality, William Evans, PhD, and Irwin H. Rosenberg, MD, professors of nutrition and medicine, respectively, at Tufts University introduced a concept of biomarkers back in 1991 through their book Biomarkers (Simon and Schuster, 1991), updated in their book, BIOMARKERS: The 10 Keys to Prolonged Vitality (Simon and Schuster, 1992) and more recently updated in the Tufts University Health and Nutrition Letter.

In these publications, Evans and Rosenberg isolated the following signposts of vitality that can be altered for the better by changes in lifestyle:

  1. Muscle Mass
  2. Strength
  3. Basal Metabolic Rate
  4. Body Fat Percentage
  5. Aerobic Capacity
  6. Blood-sugar Tolerance
  7. Cholesterol/HDL Ratio
  8. Blood Pressure
  9. Bone density
  10. Ability to regulate Internal Temperature

These same 10 biomarkers keep showing up everywhere in preventative care, in strength training, in other training programs, in nutrition/diet plans and so on.

Additionally, other important biomarkers I have seen show up in various medical and scientific literature and studies on health, vitality and longevity are:

  1. Stress
  2. Inflammation
  3. Sleep
  4. Body’s pH
  5. Flexibility
  6. Balance
  7. Musculoskeletal alignment
  8. Physical and mental reaction time

So, the way I see it is this: the goal of achieving optimal health and lifespan should focus on developing lifestyle that optimizes these objectively measureable / observable biomarkers.

Any exercise plan, nutrition plan, lifestyle adaptations, and any medical program for achieving optimal vitality and lifespan thus must be measured against these criteria.

What do you think?

Do you know of other biomarkers that we can impact that are important for attaining optimal vitality and lifespan?

Post #6 – How do we lose vitality?

06 Sunday Apr 2014

Posted by purposelyliveto120 in Aging, Uncategorized, Vigor, Vitality

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Acute Diseases, Aging, Chronic Disease, Living to120, Losing Vitality, Senescence, Vitality

So, just to be sure, my goal (and hopefully your goal) is to purposely live to 120 (or the maximum possible lifespan) with the highest attainable vitality. To achieve that, I feel, I must understand about anything that might get in the way.

In the posts so far, I have been talking about achieving the lifespan of 120 and thereby about a subject that might have sounded morbid to some of you. That is about death and dying.

Let us change our focus to the second part of the goal: Maintaining Vitality. More specifically understanding the potential hurdles to  maintaining vitality, i.e., answering the question: how do we lose vitality?

A good definition of vitality I have seen is in the Free Dictionary, as “the capacity to live, grow or develop.” A good synonym of vitality for our purpose here is vigor, including physical, mental, intellectual vigor.

You have seen it. A fried or a family member is full of vitality and then you notice that he/she starts “going downhill”. The person used to be out and about all the time, went running, then started merely walking, then walking but not as often, and then stared to just hang around the house, then on the couch more and more and then … – you get the idea. Decline happens, at times very slowly, and other times rather rapidly.

Another scenario could be that someone you know experiences a physical, mental or emotional traumatic experience and then never really recovers from it, with increasing physical pain or mental/emotional aguish rapidly goes downhill.

So, what can cause such a decline?

Well, as I started to compile a list of causes for losing vitality, I noticed that there are three broad categories: 1) acute illness, 2) chronic diseases, and 3) senescence or aging related causes. As you would suspect, there is much overlap between these categories, especially among lists for 2 and 3.

So, a list of acute illnesses may include:

  1. Tuberculosis
  2. Syphilis
  3. Typhoid
  4. Streptococcal
  5. Diphtheria
  6. Whooping Cough
  7. Smallpox
  8. Pneumonia/flu
  9. Depression
  10. Accident or Injury
  11. Heart attack
  12. Stroke
  13. Blood Clot/Thrombosis/Pulmonary Embolism
  14. Rheumatoid Arthritis
  15. Cirrhosis
  16. Kidney failure
  17. Other infectious diseases

A list of chronic diseases may include:

  1. Diabetes
  2. Coronary diseases
  3. Obesity
  4. Cancer
  5. Osteoarthritis
  6. Alzheimer’s diseases
  7. Depression
  8. Kidney diseases
  9. Liver disease
  10. High Blood Pressure

And, finally, the list of aging/senescence causes might include:

  1. Insulin resistance
  2. Hardening of the arteries
  3. Loss of muscle mass
  4. Osteoporosis or Loss of bone mass
  5. Gaining excess fat
  6. Inflammation
  7. Arthritis
  8. Stress
  9. Buildup of toxicity
  10. Loss of flexibility
  11. Loss of balance
  12. Slowing reaction times
  13. Slowing basal metabolic rate (BMR)
  14. Loss of appetite

It is interesting to ponder the implication of the overlaps between the lists.

For example, if you have known someone to have had a heart attack, it was definitely an acute illness event that probably changed their vitality curve and sent that person downhill.

Then again, may be that person was already going downhill since he/she had been losing cardio capacity due to chronic coronary disease.

And, may be the heart attack was in-part the result of hardening of the arteries due to old age.

To achieve longevity and vitality, we must overcome acute illnesses, chronic diseases and also slow the aging /senescence process.

What I am really excited about is first and foremost looking for those lifestyle activities that positively impact items on all three lists at the same time.

And, my search so far, indicates that there are such activities. The most challenging part seems to be picking through the controversies to find the optimal activities.

In any case, I think it will be an exciting journey. I look forward to sharing results of my search in the future posts.

What do you think?

Do you feel there are other hurdles that one must overcome to maintaining optimum vitality?

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  • Post #67 – What is the Minimum Stack of Supplements to Take?
  • Post #66 – Optimal Health through Optimal Breathing
  • Post #65 – Fasting, the old new technology and panacea for Optimal Health – Part III
  • Post #64 – Fasting, the old new technology and panacea for Optimal Health – Part II
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purposelyliveto120 on Post #66 – Optimal Health thro…
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