Five ways to improve your chances of living longer

Longevity in the 21^st Century would seem on the surface to be pretty good in comparison with say, that of 100 years ago. Go back to ancient times and you’d think we were way ahead.

All our amazing technological progress and modern medical know-how is allowing us to live much longer lives. Isn’t it?

Not quite. As with most things, the statistics are open to interpretation.

It’s a problem with numbers, and how life spans and life expectancy work. Basically, you can spin the numbers in our favour or not.

When life expectancies are talked about, they are worked out on averages. But if we look at a time when infant mortality was extremely high it would average out that the life expectancy would be a lot lower than today. But it would not tell us, if a person survived the perils of infancy, the age they could expect to reach. This is the major problem with looking at the numbers alone. It would also be very hard to work out ages from the limited ancient remains we’ve uncovered.

An interesting article called “Length of Life in the Ancient World” from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, studied the subject between circa 100 BC until 1990 and concluded that we have managed to add a mere 6 years onto our life spans. And when you take into account medicines and medical interventions, plus accident prevention we can easily attribute those 6 years to them.

More worrying than this is that we are at a point in human history where we will probably start to see life span decrease due to the average 21^st Century lifestyle causing health problems on a scale not seen before. So you might reach a ‘good’ age but how many of those years will have been in poor health? The statistics for England on the Kingsfund.org page shows that in 2017-2019 although the average male could expect to live until 79.8 years, approx. 16.6 years or 21% of his life would have been lived in ‘not good’ health.

This all seems very gloom and doom until you realise that there are some really easy and inexpensive ways to improve your longevity. Thank goodness!

Here are five ways to improve the longevity of your life:

1. Eat real food. Of course, you should put this one first. Eggs, meat, offal, oily fish, and leafy green veg being your main priorities. The cheaper the cut the better, on the bone and cooked low and slow. You can get FREE recipes and advice by visiting Natasha is wide eyed.
2. Include intermittent fasting daily, eating in an 8 hour window, which allows your body time to repair and rebuild your cells during the quiet times not having to digest food.
3. Walk in nature. Even if it’s just the local park but get outside.
4. Be sociable and make time to see friends or join a class.
5. Lower your stress levels. Easier said than done I know, but it’s worth looking into free apps such as Calm or Headspace or try typing ‘stress relief’ into Google. Believe it or not you need to learn how, so become the perfect student as stress management benefits cannot be underestimated.

Natasha from Natasha is Wide Eyed can help you with the first two points, book an appointment with her today by emailing natasha@natashaiswideeyed.com.