Your body is amazing: You get a do over; it’s not that hard, and it doesn’t take that long! We want you to know how much control you have over your quality and length of life. But many women make excuses for not making healthy choices.

“I’m too busy,” or “the kids need more attention,” and, yes, we know you’re busy, but taking time for yourself is showing love for those you love and who love you. So, what’s really your excuse for not taking care of yourself?


We live in a society where making excuses is as easy as making a sandwich. Nowhere is that more apparent than when it comes to our health. The reason we’re frazzled with stress? Blame the boss. The reason we’re sick? Blame the sniffling kids. The reason our societal waistbands are stretching and snapping at alarming rates? Blame your aunt’s Alfredo sauce or those alluring golden arches.

The #1 excuse, however, revolves around the biggest four-letter word of them all: The gene. Blame your genes. Why not? Everyone else does!

Truth is that we blame our genes for just about everything—for baldness, for fatness, for sickness, for illness, and for every other health-related problem we can think of. In our minds, that means that our mom, pop and the rest of the family tree are on the hook for the ultimate health question of them all: How long—and how well—will we live?

But that’s exactly where most of us have it wrong. While we were certainly born with genes that help determine everything from our height to our risk for heart disease, we’re making a monumental mistake by assuming that we can’t influence our genes—especially when it comes to aging.

Truth is, much of aging is actually in our control. We have the power to nudge our biological systems so that even our unwanted genes can work in our favor—as long as you know what to do and why you’re doing it.

Perhaps the best way to explain the dynamics of aging is to take a look at another complex system that’s subjected to the same forces as your body: a city.

Now, every city has its own genetic code, just as you have yours. For a city, genes are geography—for example, whether it’s built on a river, or whether it’s located in a hot or cold climate, or whether it lies directly in a prevalent hurricane path. A city’s geography can’t inherently change. But a city can adapt to its environment, say, with locks and levees for preventing floods, earthquake-proof construction, or with underground tunnels for walking in wintertime. This adaptation is what’s crucial to this city’s survival and vitality. And the same goes for you.

Just because you’ve been dealt a genetic hand that predisposes you to heart disease or diabetes, or needing pants as large as a parachute, doesn’t mean that you can’t mitigate the effects of those genes. While you can’t change your genes, you can change whether they are turned on or off, or as scientists say, how you express them.

Not every aggressive detrimental gene needs to be turned on, and not all of your sleepy protective genes have to remain dormant. Just like a city, you can compensate elegantly if you understand your options. While some cities can deteriorate if they’re not managed well, others can be maintained and revitalized if the right resources and investments are made. That’s the way you, too, can live gracefully and passionately with a fundamentally older infrastructure.

You just need to learn how to manage your personal metropolis so that you begin to see that your immune system is your body’s police force. Your arteries are like roadways that can be clogged, blocked, or worn down by years of abuse. Your brain is like the energy grid that supplies power to the entire city—and it can be knocked out here and there if you let neurological branches fall on your power lines. Your skin is like a city’s parks and green space contributing to the overall sense of beauty and vibrancy. Your fat? Yep, landfill.

And you? What’s your role in this? Consider yourself the mayor with the power to make all the decisions about what’s best for your biological city. Our ultimate goal isn’t just to keep your biological city from naming tumbleweed as the town flower—in other words, to keep you from dying (though that sure is a biggie). Our goal is to put your body at the top of the “10 best cities to live in” list. It’s to make it vibrant and hip, with lots of resources and good management of those resources. Perhaps most of all, it’s to give it the ability to adjust rapidly to changing times—to reinvent itself.

So, now that you’ve elected yourself mayor, how will you get to know your city and learn to manage all of the things that influence it?

Here’s how we’re going to look at it: Science has pointed to 14 major processes that drive almost all of the aging we experience. Those causes of aging—everything from wear and tear to neurotransmitter imbalances—indicate the tools you’ll need to get at what you really want: to help your body live younger and stronger, and to have more energy than a Labrador retriever puppy.

Throughout this series, we’ll be talking about “Major Agers” and how these affect the various parts of your body as well as specific, practical suggestions about how you can counteract their effects. Understanding the reasons for aging will give you insights into the action steps for extending your own warranty, which we unveil in later issues this year.

But for now, know this: Women die most of heart (arterial) disease and its consequences. Women are disabled most by osteoporosis and its consequences. Yet women fear breast cancer most. The good news? There’s one action that decreases your risk of all three by about 40%: just walking 30 minutes a day.
How does walking just 30 minutes a day do this? It turns on key genes that block the growth of cancer, increase the density of bone, and decrease inflammation in your arteries.

So for today, as your first major anti-ager, start walking an additional 30 minutes a day. If you don’t walk now, start. If you’re clocking at least 30 minutes daily, add another 30. Buy a great pedometer and aim for 10,000 steps a day.

If you do that every day, no excuses—so, if there is a hurricane, walk 30 minutes; an earthquake, walk 30 minutes, you get the point—if you walk 30 minutes straight and 10,000 steps a day, you will have taken the first and maybe most important step toward staying young.