Healthy Diet and Exercise May Reverse Aging

Remember Brad Pitt in the Curious Case of Benjamin Button where he “grew younger”? Growing younger is crazy and that is a truly unique fantasy flick, or is it?

I recently came across an article about how eating a healthy diet and exercising can not only reverse some diseases, it may also reverse the aging process at the genetic level.

The study was done by a team at the University of California, San Francisco and later published in Lancet Oncology. The study was based on a few men and some with prostate cancer. What they found was remarkable.

Men who switched to a vegan diet, added exercise and stress reduction had longer telomeres.

I’m not a medical professional so I looked up what “telomeres” is on Wikipedia. You can look it up if you’re interested. Naturally, they get shorter as part of their function. However, after the 3 months of eating whole foods, fruits, vegetables, unrefined grains and keeping fat intake to 10 percent of calories, the researchers observed the lengthening of of telomeres by 30%!

It’s important to know that the participant also exercised.

…walking at least 30 minutes a day, six days a week, did yoga-based stretching and breathing exercises, practiced relaxation techniques and went to weekly one-hour stress-reduction group sessions

I don’t know about you but all these sounds like something that the P90X diet and exercise plan has been telling us. In the P90X diet plan, we’re recommended to consume as much whole food as possible and limiting our fat intake to 20%. P90X is a 6 days a week program with at least 45 minutes workout each day. And guess what, one day out of the week is Yoga X. On the rest day, there’s also Stretch X routine that we can do. To learn more about P90X, you can check it out here. (By the way, P90X3 is coming this Winter!)

A lot of people rely on drugs way too much. They wait until their doctors tell them that there’s no other way to fix what they got going but by taking medications or undergoing surgeries. A lot of that can be prevented and even reversed by simply CHANGING THE LIFESTYLE! And ENDING THE TREND!

I know that because I was overweight and had really high cholesterol. I conquered that by starting my 3-months P90X journey — working out 6 days a week, eating clean and be smart about my choices. That was one of the best decision that I’ve ever made!

On the left is me in August 2012. On the right is me in August 2013. A 37 lbs difference!