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Anti-Aging

Women, Perimenopause, and Alzheimer’s Disease: A Call to Action

By Sara Gottfried, MD | June 28, 2018

When your hormones go down in your forties, your risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease go up. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia, accounting for half…

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Top Questions Women Ask About Aging

By Sara Gottfried, MD | April 16, 2018

As women age, their hormones take off on a roller coaster, often exacerbating any signs of aging. Most aging women have one major complaint: thinning hair and skin problems such…

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How to Look and Feel Your Best As You Age

By Sara Gottfried, MD | March 19, 2018
How to Look and Feel Your Best As You Age| Women's Health | Sara Gottfried MD

Do you want to feel your best as you age? What are the secrets to improving your healthspan and better aging? Here are the main steps I recommend to turn…

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Afraid of Growing Older?

By Sara Gottfried, MD | September 18, 2017

With the release of my newest book Younger, I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about aging. As a doctor, I not only look at the physiological external effects…

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Doctor/Author: How I Landed in the Writer’s Seat

By Sara Gottfried, MD | May 15, 2017

I am grateful for my career as a physician, treating patients in person and working with coaching clients online. My patients and clients inspire me to stretch in my understanding of…

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4 Ways to Slow Down Skin Aging Naturally

By Sara Gottfried, MD | April 24, 2017
Slow down aging naturally

Worried about wrinkles, sagging skin, and face blotches? It’s a part of aging, a part of life. But all hope is not lost – in fact, you can actively slow…

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Do You Know Which Foods Make You Younger? And Which Ones Age You?

By Sara Gottfried, MD | March 20, 2017
Do You Know Which Foods Make You Younger? And Which Ones Age You? |Women's Health|Sara Gottfried MD

Five years ago, I found out my body was in a failure state as measured by my telomeres, the protective caps on chromosomes that reflect how fast you are aging.…

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‎5 Secrets to Turn Back the Clock

By Sara Gottfried, MD | March 6, 2017

Jennifer was a forty-four-year-old patient who arrived in my office feeling defeated, worn out, and “older than her years” as she put it. As a third-shift nurse who worked grueling…

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How Stress Harms Your Health and Aging

By Sara Gottfried, MD | February 20, 2017
How Stress Harms Your Health and Aging |Women's Health|Sara Gottfried MD

Mary was a thirty-nine-year-old patient who visited me complaining she felt burned out.  Her sixty-hour workweeks left her beyond fatigued, with frequent headaches, miserable colds, and raging tension that cut…

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7 Anti-Aging Benefits You Gain from Consistent Exercise

By Sara Gottfried, MD | February 13, 2017

In a previous blog, I wrote about my fifty-year-old patient Gigi who complained about feeling “doughy” and stiff. Like many middle-aged female patients, Gigi found that maintaining lean muscle mass…

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What about exercise in postmenopausal women? I al What about exercise in postmenopausal women? I always get asked about walking and bone density in postmenopausal women, so here are more details: Walking improves one small part of the hip, but not other parts of your skeleton (Martyn–St. James, 2008). 👉So it’s a good idea to mix strength training with brisk walking for optimal bone density. One meta-analysis found that women who practiced combined resistance training (high impact aerobics together with resistance exercise) showed the greatest improvement in bone density at the hip and spine (Zhao, 2015). Women, who are more prone to osteoporosis than men, can help protect themselves with regular weight-bearing exercise (two to three times per week with handheld weights, body resistance, or weight machines) or yoga. Yes, yoga counts as strength building (although the data are mixed in postmenopausal women regarding bone density, yoga slows down bone resorption and has other health benefits (Patel, 2012; Phoosuwan, 2009). Regular strength training increases your bone density, helping counter both hormonal and metabolic changes that can cause osteoporosis. One study recruited a group of people seventy and older to perform resistance training twice per week for six months. These poor folks submitted to a muscle biopsy at the beginning and again after six months of strength training, so please take their important results to heart so that their service was not in vain. Ever had a muscle biopsy? Looking at the results of the second muscle biopsy, researchers found that 596 genes had reverted to a much younger state, giving a portrait of youthful vigor similar to healthy, active controls in their twenties who’d undergone the same muscle biopsies (Melov, 2007). Don’t forget that Increased muscle mass from strength training also keeps the metabolism revved up, which improves the body’s ability to burn fat. That’s why strength training is crucial as you age. If you are postmenopausal, are you adding in strength training to your weekly exercise routine?
Need a motive to move? We all know that exercise Need a motive to move? We all know that exercise burns away tension, builds muscles, conditions the heart and lungs, and cranks up the happy-brain chemicals known as endorphins, but here are more benefits of exercise that you may not know about. 1️⃣Helps convert white fat, concentrated in your belly and subcutaneous tissue, into something close to the brown fat that burns calories and generates heat and is located mostly in your neck and shoulders. White fat puts you at greater risk for diabetes and heart disease. 2️⃣Alters the expression of thousands of genes. Genes such as ADRB2 regulate your weight changes in response to exercise. When you exercise more than three hours a week, you’ll turn on APOA1, the gene involved in HDL, or good cholesterol, production. Exercise turns off the FTO gene helping to normalize leptin, the satiety hormone. 3️⃣Raises insulin sensitivity and good cholesterol. We have the option to turn off the diabetes genes with exercise. Researchers have learned that active women with the same variant of LIPC may improve HDL levels and have fewer heart attacks than inactive women with this gene variant. 4️⃣Improves methylation. Methylation improves with even a single session of exercise. Greater intensity in exercise begets greater changes in methylation and other epigenetic patterns and helps your muscles soak up blood sugar better and get stronger. 5️⃣Lowers blood pressure. High blood pressure runs in my family, but I inherited the solution: exercise. The gene EDN1 codes for endothelin-1, a potent constrictor of blood vessels. My variant of gene EDN1 puts me at a greater risk of high blood pressure if I’m inactive. As long as I keep exercising, I have normal blood pressure. 6️⃣Raises irisin, a hormone secreted from muscles in response to exercise. Irisin tricks white fat into behaving like brown fat, builds muscle, activates weight loss, and blocks diabetes. The combination of intermittent fasting followed by high-intensity exercise will also boost growth hormone as well as irisin. (Read WOMEN, FOOD, AND HORMONES for why women should focus more on increasing growth hormone as they age.) What's your motivation to move?⬇️⬇️
Physical activity is associated with reduced risk Physical activity is associated with reduced risk of early death: 30% risk reduction in men and up to 48% in women (Samitz, 2011; Hu, 2005; Schnohr, 2013). Both moderate and high-intensity exercise have their merits, with moderate exercise being sufficient for long-term benefits. Age is not a barrier to reaping the rewards of physical activity, as studies indicate improved mortality rates even if you start being active after 65. The idea is that fitness conditioning allows your heart to get more blood to your muscles more efficiently and at a lower heart rate. Cardiac slowing at rest may be one of the ways that exercise extends your life. Currently, physical activity guidelines suggest that you get: ▪150 mins/week of moderate physical activity ▪75 mins/week strenuous activity or an equivalent combination of both. More isn’t necessarily better. Moderate may be best because there’s a point of diminishing returns. The relationship curve seems to be U-shaped, meaning sedentary folks and strenuous exercisers fare the worst, and moderate exercisers fare the best, at least for joggers. Two additional studies suggest that when it comes to jogging and running, doing about 1-2 hours per week, ideally broken into a few 20-30 minute sessions of 2-3 miles seems best. Higher doses of extreme exercise such as marathons, ultramarathons, and full distance triathlons may cause cardiotoxicity (Lavie, 2015; Day, 2010; Kim, 2012; Hart, 2013). Telomere studies show that moderate levels of activity seem to protect telomere length best (Du, 2012). Both moderate- and high-intensity exercise at a dose of 2-4 hours/week was found to benefit women’s telomere length. There was no additional benefit to telomere length for more exercise, so moderate levels of activity are sufficient and that’s what I advise. While telomeres are at best limited at reflecting healthspan, see what’s true for you. To sum up: 👉Mortality studies suggest 1-2 hours per week of moderate activity 👉Telomere studies show a benefit at 2-4 hours per week So exercise dose should be between 2-4 hours/week for the average person, but adjust based on how it makes you feel and function. #theyoungerbook
It’s ridiculously easy to gain weight as you age It’s ridiculously easy to gain weight as you age. There's no need to binge or try at all— it just happens. Here’s why it is so easy to accumulate fat after 35. It starts with a silent war waged between fat and muscle. After 35, your body fat rises 1 percent per year unless you take specifc action to build more muscle and fight the war. Afer 40, you lose muscle mass gradually. By age fifty, you’ve lost, on average, 15 percent of your lean body mass. By seventy, it’s 30 percent loss per decade! There's a name for age-related loss of muscle: sarcopenia. Some of the decline is due to the loss of testosterone, the hormone that builds muscle and stimulates growth and repair. Some of the muscle loss is due to another hormone that belongs to the family of growth factors, myostatin, which is a powerful negative regulator of the size of your skeletal muscles, so you want to keep it low. It turns out that myostatin may control loss of muscle mass in aging women, although the full story is still unfolding. You lose fast-twitch muscle fibers first, the ones that put a spring in your step and allow you to jump and sprint. The fast-twitch fibers wane before you start to lose your aerobic capacity. Old fat ages badly. Think of butter or lard sitting out on your kitchen counter for a few months. In other words, body fat is not inert. Aging makes you fat, and then your fat makes you age— it’s a vicious cycle that’s hard to break. Not all fat is bad; brown fat in your neck and back keeps your body warm and your metabolism high. But white fat, particularly in your belly, where it’s called visceral fat, invades your inner organs, injecting them with inflammatory messengers like interleukin-6 and TNF-alpha. These cause the low-grade burn that makes you wrinkled and stiff. While aging is inevitable, fat gain is not. I am going to share strategies and solutions that will help you break out of the cycle. #womenfoodhormones #theyoungerbook
Any problems in this department? Do your clinician Any problems in this department? Do your clinicians ask you about yours? They need to! Thank you @dutchtest for raising awareness through your educational content and check out their testing to measure your hormones with a collaborative and knowledgeable clinician.
Aging begins in your muscles. The decline may not Aging begins in your muscles. The decline may not be noticeable at first, but on average, you lose five pounds of muscle every decade, so you definitely start to observe the change over the course of middle age. (Middle age is defined as age forty to sixty- five.) More fat accumulates while precious muscle mass takes a hit. On the cellular level, your mitochondria become tired, a process known as mitochondrial dysfunction, which may make you feel more fatigued during and afer exercise or cause muscle pain. Your mitochondria are the tiny powerhouses inside your cells that turn food and oxygen into energy. You have a thousand or two mitochondria inside most of your cells, and if they’re gunked up with debris and damage, you will feel tired and achy. What causes mitochondrial dysfunction? Causes range from eating empty calories such as sugar, flour, and overly processed foods to exposures to toxins. If left alone or ignored, your muscles usually get more doughy as you age as they’re replaced with fat, and you’re no longer as strong as you used to be. As we age beyond forty, we need to shift our focus to preserving and building muscle mass. What are you doing to keep your muscles toned and strong?⬇ Read my article - Why Fat Accumulates As You Age And How To Reduce It - which looks at fat partitioning and distribution in men and women particularly as we age - 🔗link in bio to read #theyoungerbook
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