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

Ancient Greeks:

Sought youthful skin through application of white face cream laced with, you guessed it, lead.

Ancient Romans:

Relied on the ammonia in urine (#litres_trial_promo) to whiten their teeth.

1513:

Ponce de León set out to find the fountain of youth. Ended up in Florida (#litres_trial_promo) (currently the state with the highest percentage of elderly people in the United States) instead.

Circa 1600:

In the kingdom of Hungary, Countess Elizabeth Bathory reportedly bathe in the blood of virgins to maintain her youthful glow, giving rise to centuries of vampire legends.

15th-19th century:

Europeans learned nothing from the fall of Rome and sought fairer complexions by using poisonous creams made of lead – because dying young is a great way to stay young forever.

1905:

Surgeons began to offer skin-tightening procedures whereby they made a couple of facial incisions (#litres_trial_promo) at the side of the face and tugged the skin back. Voilà: the facelift was born. The first textbook on the subject (#litres_trial_promo) was published a year later in Chicago.

1906:

Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which said that Americans must stop putting poisons (like lead) on their faces.

1992:

Botox (#litres_trial_promo) was introduced as a treatment for brow wrinkles, and we began to inject poison into our faces instead of simply applying it on our faces.

2010s:

A predilection for exotically sourced face masks emerged, a throwback to Cleopatra’s reptile-excrement treatments. Bee venom (#litres_trial_promo) and placenta face masks (#litres_trial_promo) can easily be purchased online.

2015:

A woman in the UK said that she will quit smiling for forty years in an attempt to avoid getting wrinkles (#litres_trial_promo). Other women laughed about this.

There are plenty of methods to make ourselves look like we’ve shaved off a few years, of course. American women spend $30 billion a year on cosmetics (#litres_trial_promo), and I am no different from most women. I’ve applied makeup to my face for more than a quarter of a century. I’ve spent hours in salons getting my hair coloured and cut. I’ve visited my fair share of dermatologists’ offices exploring their anti-ageing arsenals, from creams to lasers to Botox and fillers, all for the sake of maintaining a look of youth and beauty. Many beauty products and procedures really do live up to their promise. They make us feel a little shinier, a little plumper, a little smoother, a little bit better about ourselves. They help us look younger on the outside, which can make us feel like we are younger on the inside. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But while a fancy treatment can make you look like you’ve had eight hours of sleep a night for the last decade, your cells know the truth about how you’ve been spending your waking and sleeping hours. Looking younger is not the same thing as “anti-ageing”. The ability to colour our hair and smooth our skin doesn’t change the fact that every part of our body is ageing every single day.

Believe me, I know that it’s easy to get caught up with what you see in the mirror and use it as a metric for how well you are ageing. But don’t be fooled: just because you look younger than your friend doesn’t mean your body isn’t experiencing some wear and tear. This ageing thing is a process, and we all have our own individual journey through it. What I’d like for you to be aware of as you take that journey is that ageing isn’t just about your face (or your neck, or your upper arms, or your hands, or …). It’s about your whole body. And how you take care of your whole body will affect each and every one of your parts, inside and out.

THE NEW CONVERSATION ABOUT AGEING

I made my career in a business that must bear a large part of the responsibility for how we, as a society, view ageing – a business that tells us that older is ugly or older is less valuable. The message is screaming from every elevation. Think about all the places we see it each day – in magazines, at bus stops, in shop windows, on billboards, and in our homes via television or the Internet. Everywhere you look, the signal is broadcast to women loud and clear: act fast, buy now, change who you are so you don’t succumb to the ravages of age. Do not, under any circumstances, let yourself get older.

We’ve been getting messages from society about how to look for our entire lives. Even teenagers and young women are sent plenty of messages about how they should and could be more attractive. Women of all ages are bombarded with ideas about a standard of beauty that make them feel lousy or as though they have to be different. But with age it gets even more challenging, because these messages begin to suggest that we should actually be younger than we are, which is impossible. How can anyone feel good about that?

The physical reality of ageing is going to present a real, true challenge to all of us one day. The external signs of getting older are one part of the conversation, but they are not the whole conversation. Societal pressures that encourage women to deny ageing or pretend that it’s not happening – as though we should somehow be immune to the passage of time – make it an even more painful challenge.

I think it is possible to change the conversation around women and ageing – and it starts with conversations like the one we’re having here. Instead of whispering about each other for not looking twenty-five, let’s encourage real and open dialogue about what we’re feeling, what we’re wondering about, what we’re afraid of, what we’re hopeful for. Let’s agree to put more value on being a better mother, daughter, sister, wife, friend, colleague, or mentor to those around us, instead of acting as if those accomplishments are less important than having smooth skin and a perky bum.

There are many ways to make yourself look younger, but from what I’ve witnessed among the women in my life, the only way to actually feel younger is to embrace the reality that you are in fact getting older – and deal with it. Teenagers look different from toddlers, women in their fifties look different from women in their twenties. That is healthy. That is normal.

So I’d like to propose another message: I’d like to suggest that we all agree, as a group, that every age a woman passes through has its own beauty. Let’s raise our standards of beauty and remember that learning and growth and kindness are what we truly value and appreciate in our friends and our sisters and our mothers – and ourselves.

We do not need to look like the images that we are bombarded with at every turn. We do not need to accept the faulty messaging behind those polished-up pictures. We can choose our own role models, women who inspire us to be our best, not someone else’s best. We can be the healthiest, most vibrant version of ourselves that we can be.

AN APPRECIATION OF TRUE BEAUTY

For years now, I have been painting on different versions of my face in my own beauty routine. Each variation has reflected a different standard of beauty, of what I thought made me attractive to the world at that time in my life. With age, I realize, I have had an opportunity to refine not only my skill with an eyeliner pencil but also my ideas about what makes us beautiful.

Now when I say a women is beautiful, do I mean that she has good bone structure, bright eyes, coiffed hair, muscles that show she works out, curves like a racetrack? Maybe. More likely I mean that she is vibrant, that she is energetic, and exudes an understanding and an acceptance of herself and the world around her. As I make my way towards fifty, I want to earn the next milestone of my life. I want to have lived and learned something new every one of those days that got me there. I accept that I won’t be the same person at fifty that I am today. But I hope that I will be wiser, stronger, more compassionate, more conscious of the world around me. Those are the images I want to focus on when I visualize myself growing older – not this compulsion towards youth, towards yesterday, towards a picture of myself that I will never be again. That is my vision for my life. Not looking backwards at what I used to have. Looking forwards at what I might grow into.

I was at a gathering of family and friends recently, and the women in attendance spanned ages and generations. There were infants and toddlers and children, eleven-year-old girls with knobby knees and their slightly less awkward teenage sisters, and women in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties. I couldn’t help but think how each woman’s beauty was different, distinct. Their smiles were all unique, the colour of their skin, their hair, the way they gestured, the way they draped their arms around one another’s shoulders or laughingly passed forks and napkins around. There was so much beauty, and none of it had anything to do with age. It had to do with the light that shone from each individual person, from their way of seeing the world and their way of being in the world.

One of the women there was someone I’ve known since I was sixteen and she was seventeen. She had been a gorgeous girl, and she is still gorgeous today. And looking at her in the sun, I suddenly wondered about how amazing it would feel thirty or forty years from now to know her still, how excited I would be to have made this incredible journey through life with her, women grown up from the girls we used to be. My mother was there, and she also looked so beautiful, and it wasn’t because of her makeup skills (even though her blue eyes still look great with a bit of framing), but because of the way she smiles and makes everyone around her feel calm and cared for. She is a beautiful woman because her nature is kind and generous, loving, grounded, and authentic in who she is.

More and more I’m finding that the circle of women around me aren’t relying on procedures to help them “appear” to be younger. They are women who are engaged in maintaining the well-being of their mind, body, and spirit. Some of them are fit and full of energy, some have the shine and sparkle of youth, and some have a wicked sense of humour that keeps them laughing at life. But what they all possess in spades is an acceptance of the journey, with all of its unpredictability. Their vitality comes from that embrace, and they meet each new challenge with all the accumulated wisdom they have earned over the years. They have become the women that they were always meant to be.

That’s true grace. That’s true beauty.

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A FEW YEARS AGO MY friends Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann made a very funny movie called This Is 40, about a husband and wife dealing with midlife crises and the marital issues that ensue. Part of what makes the movie so great is that it captures, both with humor and poignancy, a popular theme in our culture. Everyone is familiar with the idea of the midlife crisis – that post-forty struggle between accepting that you’re getting older and still wanting to remain young and relevant. But the interesting thing about the term is its prefix – “mid-”, as in “middle”. Because “mid-” implies that we are all bold enough to assume that our forties are the middle of our lives.

While we may feel that turning forty means we’re getting old, the truth is that forty used to actually be old. Really old. It wasn’t “the new thirty”; it was pretty much geriatric. Because in 1850, the life expectancy for a woman in the United States was about forty years old. Less than two hundred years later, that figure has doubled. Doubled!

I have to say – I was pretty shocked to learn that only a couple of generations ago, women my age were considered elderly. Forty used to be the end of the line. Nowadays it’s more like a springboard for professional advancement and family building and new learning and personal development. Today, people in their forties are working their butts off and building careers and nurturing relationships and starting families while training for marathons and learning how to grow their own herbs and make their own jam. Or they have raised a family and are starting the second phase of their lives, free of the responsibility of child rearing, allowing them to focus once again on their own development.

We are among the first generations to lay claim to our forties as an extension of our thirties instead of a preamble to our seventies. Many of my friends in their forties make jokes about getting old, but they will be the first to admit that they feel, overall, pretty damn young. This does not mean that we are immune from the subtle reminders of ageing. Our bodies start to communicate with us in new ways, and sometimes with different needs. I am well aware that the wiggle room I had when I was thirty-five will not be the same when I am forty-five. I try to be constantly in check with the daily choices that make up the equation of my well-being, noticing where there’s room for improvement or where I might have room to indulge a little bit more. These days I see and feel the impact of those choices, for better or worse, on my skin, my flesh and muscle, my energy, and my mood a lot more quickly than I used to. But I’ve still got a lot of energy, and strong muscles, and I work hard to keep those going. And I know that discipline and the strength it builds are the assets I will need if I want to age with health.

I will continue to work hard because I know that this opportunity to live through the decades, let alone to keep learning and growing with the decades, is new. If forty was still the end of life instead of the beginning of a new phase, I would never have had the chance to experience marriage. I would be six feet under instead of planning the next forty years with the love of my life. I think it’s so sad that instead of applauding our birthdays, instead of appreciating them, instead of being grateful for this extra time, so many of us lie about our age. As women, we are routinely shamed for ageing. We are made to feel that getting older – and especially, looking older – is somehow a personal failure.

When Sandra and I learned that 165 years ago, our sisters had one foot in the grave at forty – our age! – it changed the way we thought about our midlife. That fact that we can grow old enough to look old, in droves, is far from a failure. It happens to be the end product of arguably the biggest success story in human history.

THE MIDLIFE CRISIS CELEBRATION

In order to really appreciate why our midlife crises should actually be midlife celebrations, we need to take a step back and look at the whole of human history as well as our own personal and familial stories. Medicine has made some huge advances over the past century, and all our lives reflect those benefits. Many of us walking around today might not be alive had we been born a hundred years earlier – including me, and including Sandra.

When I was only three months old, I woke up with a slight fever. My mother called the doctor, who said that she should continue to monitor me throughout the day. My temperature kept rising. By the middle of the day, my fever was so high she didn’t need the thermometer to know something was very wrong. She called my father to tell him to meet us at the hospital. Once we arrived, I was diagnosed and treated quickly. The A&E doctors gave me some medicine, my parents took me home, and I recovered within a few days. When Sandra was a child, her mother noticed that she had a strange rash: her body was covered with a smattering of tiny red dots. They rushed to the paediatrician, who diagnosed scarlet fever and gave her some antibiotics. A few days later, she was fine. It was our great luck to be born in an age when drugs like penicillin are easily obtained. But before modern medicine, children died regularly from fevers (#litres_trial_promo).

And how about those less dramatic events, the daily occurrences we barely even notice? If I get a cut, I don’t think too much about it. I wash the wound with hydrogen peroxide, give it a consistent slathering of antibiotic cream, and it’s as good as new by the next weekend. But without those over-the-counter antibacterial and antibiotic helpers, life-threatening infection (#litres_trial_promo) could set in. People used to die from scrapes, but you and I are confident that we’ll be just fine without having to give it another thought.

We all have stories. Scraped knees. The bugs you caught from the neighbourhood kids. All those earaches and sore throats. Minor maladies, eased with a trip to the doctor. Our lives are routinely saved by pills and ointments and injections. But for most of human history, infections from cuts could lead to blood poisoning. Illnesses like pneumonia and strep throat, even diarrhoea, could be life threatening.