Introduction: Living Younger Longer
I give a talk called "Living Younger Longer" to our guests at Canyon Ranch. I do it at breakfast, at 7:30, to a roomful of people who've mostly been up for an hour or two already, out walking or playing tennis or swimming.
They always want to know what I mean by the title. It's a play on words, based on something I heard the anthropologist Ashley Montague say at a conference on aging. He was explaining that we get the whole concept of fitness from the ancient Greeks, whose ideal, as Montague put it, was "to die young, as late as possible." That's what we all want, I think. (Montague himself died not too long ago, by the way. He was ninety-four.)
Each of us has three clocks running throughout our lives. One is our chronological clock, and we can't do a thing about that. The second is our psychological clock, which measures how old we are mentally and emotionally, how old we think we are. And the third is our biological clock, which is a measure of our physiological and biological age, and which determines how well we function as we age.
Scientists have identified sixteen or eighteen biomarkers, measurements of how old your body really is. They include things like aerobic capacity, how robust your immune system is, how much bone and muscle you have, your sugar tolerance, and so on.
In the last twenty years the medical community has discovered that virtually every biomarker of aging is 70 to 80 percent reversible. While the hands on your chronological clock can't be turned back, your biological clock can be reset. You, however, are the only one who can do it. You must be motivated and even inspired to become responsible for your own health, well-being, and aging process.
In a wonderful book, Successful Aging, two physicians named Rowe and Kahn wrote about a ten-year study of several thousand people aged sixty to ninety-five. They found that by the time people reach age sixty-five, 70 to 75 percent of the likelihood of their having good health and functionality is determined by lifestyle. By the time people are eighty to eighty-five years old, how well they're doing is based virtually 100 percent on lifestyle.
Given that information, what will it take for you to decide to become an active, responsible participant in creating a healthy lifestyle? At Canyon Ranch, and in this book, we are very emotional about health, and we want you to become emotional about it too. We want to connect our "intention to health" -- our steadfast desire to inspire and motivate people to better health -- with your goal of feeling great and living long. We don't just want to give you information; we want to ignite the emotional energy you need for genuine life change. "Getting it" intellectually, in your head, is not enough -- you probably already know most of what you need to do to be healthier. You have to "get it" emotionally too. You must desire health and wellness and life.
Health is much more than the absence of disease. One of the pioneers of holistic medicine, Jesse F. Williams, defined that precept in the 1920s and 1930s, yet most of us still tend to think about health simply as not being sick. Consider how little sense that makes. You might as well say that wealth is the absence of poverty, or that knowledge is the absence of ignorance. Here are Williams's own words, the core of the Canyon Ranch philosophy:
It's of value to think of health as that condition of the individual that makes possible the highest enjoyment of life. Health, when thought of simply as the absence of disease, is a standard of mediocrity, but when thought of as a quality of life is a standard of inspiration and ever-increasing achievement.
When do most of us realize that health is a precious and positive thing over which we have some control? For most people, that realization, that critical experience of emotional connection that I like to call the "Aha!" moment, comes too late. Usually it happens in a doctor's office, or in an emergency room or a cardiac care unit. For too many people, the moment when they emotionally "get" the connection between their actions and their state of health is a very painful one.
Let me tell you how I know this, and why Canyon Ranch exists.
I'm seventy-two, and I feel great. I work fifty hours a week, exercise nine days out of ten, and honestly enjoy life. But for the first fifty years of my life I had a health profile I wouldn't wish on anyone.
I have had asthma all my life, and one of my most vivid childhood memories is of getting a shot of adrenaline from our family doctor in New Jersey one morning when I was eight, after an all-night attack. The doctor was telling my mother, "Don't let this boy exercise. He'll get sick if he exercises."
It was 1936, and that was the advice they gave you then if your child wheezed -- "Don't let this child breathe too hard." Our doctor was also the school doctor. We'd see him maybe once a year for a ten-minute exam, and I remember him well. He must have weighed four hundred pounds, and he always had a cigarette in his mouth -- even when he was examining all these little children -- even when he was giving a shot of adrenaline to an asthmatic child. That was how it was then.
High blood pressure ran in my family, and I had it by the time I was twenty. By age twenty-four I suffered from duodenal ulcers, and by my mid-thirties I had diverticulitis and a hiatal hernia. When I was in my forties the doctor told me I had the beginnings of osteoarthritis. And though I had been a very skinny kid, I was overweight for most of my adult life.
I was not happy about any of this, but I didn't know what to do about it. What you were supposed to do in those days -- by now it was the late 1960s and I was a home developer in Tucson -- was to wait until something went wrong and then go to the doctor.
Just before I turned forty, I decided to see my doctor for a complete physical. He told me about a new battery of tests that compared your results with those of other people of various ages to determine your biological age. These tests were forerunners of the more exact workup available now. This was the first time I'd ever heard of such a thing as biological age.
My doctor told me that it would take a couple of days and that I'd have to go around to various offices to get tests that would measure my physical abilities and my reactions to stress. I would also have to undergo a full medical exam to determine risk factors. I decided to do it. I was curious.
It took about three weeks for the results to come in, and as I waited I became more than curious; I was worried. I'd had health problems my whole life and I was overweight. I started to be nervous that maybe the tests would show that my biological age was four or five years higher than my real age. How would I feel if that was the outcome?
When my doctor called, I was in the basement playing Ping-Pong with my son. I picked up the phone, feeling very tense, and he said, "Well, there's good news and bad news.
"The good news is, we didn't find anything medically wrong that we didn't know about before." And the bad news? "You're in the body of a sixty-five- to seventy-year-old."
I was dumbstruck and didn't say anything for about twenty seconds. I think he could tell I was upset because he said to come in the next day and see him. "There are things we can do about this."
In those days doctors never told you there was something you could do about your health. The doctor was the only one who did things.
I had a bad night. When I went in, he took me into his office and sat down across from me and said something I suppose he thought was really profound. I was certainly hoping it was going to be.
"Mel, the first thing you must do is lose forty pounds."
I saw this doctor often. I was in his office every few months for one problem or another. And this was his big answer?
I said, "Lose forty pounds? Doc, I've lost a thousand pounds in the ten years you've known me."
It was true. I'd go on all these horrible diets -- grapefruit diets, protein diets. I'd get desperate and go on one for a few weeks or months until my wife, Enid, was ready to leave me because I was so impossible to live with. Then I'd go off it and put the weight right back on again, because of course all that deprivation hadn't changed the way I lived.
There was, for example, ice cream. I ate ice cream like nobody has ever eaten ice cream. We had a big freezer in the laundry room that I kept full of half-gallon containers of Rocky Road ice cream -- that's all that was in there. When I'd come home at night I'd have a big dinner, two helpings of everything and dessert, then sit down to read the paper or do some work. But then, after I'd finished the paper or my work, I'd start feeling bored. That's when I'd think about ice cream.
I'd go to the freezer and get a half gallon of ice cream and bring it into the kitchen, where we had an early microwave oven. I'd put it in there and set the timer. After twenty seconds, I'd give the container a turn, so the whole half gallon would get a little soft, just the way I liked it. Then I'd set it for another twenty seconds. In the meantime, I'd get my spoon -- a soupspoon. Never a dish, never an ice-cream scoop, just the spoon. You can see how clearly I remember every little detail; this was an important part of my life.
Then I'd sit down and eat until there were just a couple of spoonfuls left at the bottom of this half-gallon container. That's when the guilt talk would start.
"Zuckerman," I'd think, "surely you are not going to eat a half gallon of ice cream by yourself."
And so, even though I really wanted those last two spoonfuls of ice cream, I'd put the lid back on and put the tub back in the freezer. Less guilt, I guess.
And then I'd go to bed. I never slept through the night back then, although these days I sleep pretty well. I'd wake up after a couple of hours, and what had I always been told you should do when you couldn't sleep? Eat, of course. So it was back to the ice cream freezer, and into the pantry for my favorite cookies and of course the fridge for a container of milk.
You see, I did everything wrong. Continuously!
But let's get back to the doctor's office. "Lose forty pounds" was a very disappointing answer to the fix I was in. I knew I'd gain it back. Then, though, my doctor gave me a piece of news that was important, even profound.
He said, "You're off the charts in your reactions to stress. You're what we call a hot reactor. You must learn to control stress."
I was interested, and I asked him how I could do that.
That's when the profound part stopped. "You just have to learn not to take things so seriously," he told me. That's it?
Today there are maybe fifteen simple techniques you can learn to control stress, and they work. After decades of research, we've learned about ways to reverse biological markers, but in 1968 this was the best advice there was: Go on a diet and learn not to take things too seriously.
I went home, very upset, and said to Enid, "Get me into one of those fat farms. I've got to lose weight."
I went to Rancho La Puerta, in Baja California, and although I really wasn't ready to change, part of me must have been emotionally engaged. Otherwise, my mind never would have let me consider going to a sixties fat farm.
It was very nice, but I was the only man among about eighty women. I remember being in the hall outside one of the exercise rooms, watching these women bend and move. I was just standing there for the longest time, trying to get up my nerve to go in. When I finally did, it was horrible, even though I tried to hide in the back. There was all this stretching, and the instructor would say, "Now ladies -- oh, yes, and you, sir -- just grab your ankles and..."
And there I was, barely able to get my arms around my knees. It was totally demeaning. And the talk was all about cesareans and teething and clothes -- I had nothing to contribute to the conversation. On the third morning I hitchhiked out and flew home.
It had not been the ideal place for me, and, as upset and full of dread as I was, I still wasn't ready. I was still operating from my intellect, not my emotions.
It would be another ten years before my "Aha!" moment came.
My father and mother moved out to Tucson to be close to their grandchildren. My seventy-six-year-old father, who hadn't been to the doctor for years, decided to get a checkup.
I got a call at my office to come with my parents when they went in for the results. The doctor just told me the news was "bad." Enid and I accompanied my parents, and there we sat and listened as the doctor told my father that he had inoperable lung cancer.
My father had smoked all his life. He'd tried to quit a few times, and I have to believe that if he'd known what secondhand smoke does to an asthmatic child, he would have quit for good when I was young.
Now, as we all sat there in a state of shock, I watched him pull out the pack of Camels that had been part of him as long as I can remember. I fully expected to see him tap one out and light up, as I'd watched him do thousands of times before. Instead, he crumpled it between his hands, threw it down on the doctor's desk, and said, "I won't smoke any more! I promise!"
It was his "Aha!" moment -- too late.
My father had finally made the emotional connection between his behavior and his health. We buried him six months later.
During those months, I sat and talked with him every day. That's when my father gave Canyon Ranch to the world. Every conversation ended with him sitting with his head in his hands, moaning, "If only I'd quit. If only I hadn't started. If only I'd listened. If only..." I can see him now.
That was my "Aha" moment -- in time.
When my father died, I was nearing my fiftieth birthday and my weight was out of control. I still have a photo that was taken of me at my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary, just two months before his death. I'd reached an all-time high on the scales, and I look awful, unrecognizable -- bulging cheeks and a forty-one-inch waist.
My biological age at that point must have been eighty-five, or maybe one hundred and five. I didn't know what to do, but I knew I had to do something. So I told Enid, "Get me back into Rancho La Puerta." I was desperate.
But it turned out that Rancho La Puerta had a waiting list, and I could not wait. So I asked her to find me another place.
Enid saw an ad in a magazine for The Oaks at Ojai, in California. Like Rancho La Puerta, it's a very good place, and it's still there. We sent for the brochure, which had an attractive blond in a leotard on the front. Under the photo it said, "Lose a pound a day with Sheila." There was no waiting list.
I thought, "Okay. Maybe I can learn something there."
I drove this time -- I wanted to be ready for my getaway. My plan was to stay for ten days. It turned into four weeks.
When I arrived it looked like the same sort of thing as before -- all women, plus me. But there was a wonderful person at Ojai, the assistant director, a woman named Karma Kientzler. She noticed me and took me under her wing. (Karma later became executive fitness director at Canyon Ranch, and a vice president.)
I wasn't interested in humiliating myself, so Karma worked with me privately. She took me out walking, away from everyone else, for three miles every day.
Let me make clear that the only exercise I was used to was doubles tennis with friends. And the most strenuous part of that was when we'd wave our rackets for our partners to get the ball. I hadn't walked more than a block in years.
But Karma got me walking, and then walking and jogging. On the tenth day, she had me jog a mile and a half as she timed me. My time was eleven minutes and thirty-eight seconds. Then we walked back to the spa.
When we got there, I found out why she'd timed me. She had a book, by Kenneth Cooper, who'd devised an unscientific rough measure of how fit a person was, based on how fast he or she could traverse a mile and a half. Karma showed me the chart, which plotted ages against times. According to Cooper, if, at age fifty, you could traverse a mile and a half in less than twelve minutes, that put you at the top of your age group.
This gave me the most incredible thrill -- I can't even tell you how wonderful it made me feel. And I had done it in ten days. It was a rocket-boosted "Aha!" moment.
Ojai in those days was an old-fashioned fat-farm-type spa -- they starved you, worked you out for five hours a day, and then gave you a massage. I'd never felt so good. I wanted to stay, to do more, to feel even better -- and never to lose the tremendous feeling I'd discovered.
So that evening I called Enid and told her I wanted to stay, that something very special was happening to me. There was a long silence at the end of the line, and then Enid said, "That special thing that's happening -- it better not be Sheila." Funny lady, my wife!
I called again at the end of the third week and begged Enid, "Please come out here. I've found what I want to do with the rest of my life and you have to see. If this can happen to me, we have to teach other people. We have to share this."
In fact, Enid had suggested about five years earlier that maybe we ought to build a fat farm. She'd noticed that there were a lot of places springing up in California and thought Tucson would be a good spot for one. I'd just rolled my eyes and kept on building houses.
By the time we left Ojai, I'd lost twenty-nine pounds, was running three miles a day, and felt better than I had since my early twenties. Twenty months and eight days later, after liquidating all our real estate holdings to finance it, we opened Canyon Ranch. This was our dream -- to live healthily ourselves and to educate others who were willing to come to us.
It was a struggle at first. On the day we opened, we had eight guests, only one of whom was full-pay. We never dreamed that we were headed to where we are now -- three properties, two thousand employees, and more than seven hundred guests a week at the two destination resorts. Our intention, though, never changed.
Our intention is to help you reach that "Aha!" moment, at which you are emotionally connected to your best intentions for living and aging well. That experience is the difference, literally, between life and premature death, living at home or in a nursing home, enjoying life versus just enduring it.
A good diet, stress control, and exercise -- above all, regular exercise and lots of it -- are how you create your own opportunities to live well. No one can do it for you, and it's not enough to just know what you should do. You've got to do it.
Seven years ago, when I turned sixty-five, I had a much more sophisticated battery of tests to determine my biological age. This time, according to the tests, I had the body of a forty- to forty-five-year-old man. While my chronological clock had moved forward twenty-five years, I'd turned my biological clock back to where it should have been when I was forty.
There are no guarantees -- we all accept that. We don't know how long we'll live. But by creating a healthy life, you create for yourself the possibility of living out your days with vitality, joy, energy, and dignity. And without ever having to look back and say, "If only..."
Mel Zuckerman, founder of Canyon Ranch
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