5 Simple Guidelines to Extend Your Life Span

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Hardly a day goes by without something in the press about some new miracle cure for arthritis, or diabetes, or cancer, or some new miracle diet that will help you shed 10 pounds in 14 days, or some other amazing and virtually miraculous thing that is destined to change your life forever. It’s the same with dietary advice; we’re told to lay off alcohol, then we’re advised that a glass of red wine a day is good for us, then we hear that “most of the egg production in this country is affected with salmonella”, only to read later that this was a huge mistake and eggs are a perfectly healthy addition to any breakfast. What are we to believe?

If you tried to follow all of the advice dished out to you, you would be in all kinds of trouble and confusion, since a lot of it blatantly contradicts the rest of it. To say it can be a bit of an information minefield is an understatement, to say the least.

Good news then when some really useful information comes not from the National Enquirer or some other such august publication, but from no less an authority than Harvard. A recent study by the Harvard Chan School of Public Health found that Americans with the healthiest lifestyles were 82 percent less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 65 percent less likely to die from cancer compared to those with the least healthy lifestyles over the course of the 30-year study period. This is the first truly comprehensive analysis of the benefits of adopting healthy lifestyles in the US, and it makes for interesting reading.

The modern American lifestyle is not very conducive to long life

Americans, it turns out, have a shorter average life span (just a fraction under 80 years), than most other developed countries. In fact the US didn’t even rank in the top 30 in the world for life expectancy is 2015, which, for such a wealthy country, is shocking news.

This latest study, which looked at 34 years of data from over 78,000 women and over 44,000 men, focused on how five low-risk lifestyle factors might affect mortality.

The lifestyle factors were:

  • not smoking
  • low BMI
  • healthy diet
  • at least 30 minutes daily exercise
  • moderate alcohol intake

The study, published in the journal Circulation, concluded that men who follow all five health guidelines live about 12 years longer than men who don’t. For women who followed all five health guidelines the increase was even more dramatic; their life expectancy was likely to rise by 14 years.

We already knew this!

Not that any of these guidelines are a revelation. We’ve been told for years that it’s dangerous to smoke tobacco or to drink too much alcohol, and that it’s far healthier to eat a balanced diet than one based almost entirely on processed food and soft drinks. We’ve been told also that regular exercise is good for us, but we knew that, surely. What’s interesting is to see the evidence.

And the evidence is there, in the figures. Stick to the guidelines and your life expectancy is likely to rise, and rise quite dramatically. Not just that, but the quality of your life will be so much better. If you know anyone who is suffering from COPD or emphysema after decades of smoking, you know that their quality of life has been very severely affected. And if you know anyone who is suffering from obesity and some of the attendant ailments after years or decades of living on a very poor diet, you know that their quality of life is also severely depleted.

Sticking to the guidelines will make a noticeable difference, but even the researchers were surprised how much of a difference healthier lifestyle choices can make.

So let’s take a quick look at these guidelines then.

Stopping smoking

Smoking time bombSmokers try to give up smoking almost as often as dieters adopt new diets, and both pursuits often lead nowhere. It’s an ongoing process that rarely seems to reach a constructive conclusion.

They try to quit, and after a short while they fail. The bad part about this (apart from remaining a smoker, obviously) is that failing to quit generally makes the person feel like a failure. Which makes it more likely that future attempts will also fail.

Here’s a few tips that might help you quit for good:

  • Stop thinking of it as ‘giving up’ smoking. You’re not giving up anything, you’re quitting. What’s the difference? If you’re giving something up, it’s generally something you like and are reluctant to give up, whereas if you’re quitting it’s generally something you just want to stop doing. Get this idea clearly in your mind and it can be a good starting point for quitting. You want to quit!
  • Save your cigarette butts! I know, sounds disgusting. That’s the idea. Put them in a jar, together with the ash, and let the whole mess build up. Make sure to keep the jar right there where you can see it, on show, on the dining table or somewhere equally inappropriate. It will be a horrific reminder of what you are doing to yourself by smoking. Just seeing all that disgusting gunk build up will be enough, eventually, to make you scream: “That’s it, I QUIT!”
  • Practice not smoking. Smokers very often have to have a smoke first thing in the morning. Great! Now you know a great place to start! Don’t give in to the urge to have that early morning smoke. Just remind yourself that you can have a cigarette after an hour or two. Don’t panic, you’ve got all day to ruin your lungs, another hour or two of breathing clean fresh air won’t kill you (unlike cigarettes).
  • diseased lungFind a friend or neighbour who was a smoker and now has COPD. Ask them what advice they would give themselves if they could go back to when they were about to smoke their first cigarette. Listen carefully to the answer. And listen carefully to how much difficulty they have even speaking the answer, if they’ve had to walk for even a few minutes.
  • Tell your Facebook friends you’re quitting and ask for support. It’s been proven to be an effective and useful way to quit.
  • Spend a couple of minutes doing some deep breathing (while you still can). Deep breathing is one of the finest ways to energise your entire body. Enjoy it for the wonderful experience it is, and reflect on how misguided it is to persist in a practice that will almost inevitably make it impossible for you to do it at some stage in the future.
  • Recognise that smoking is a very powerful addiction, much like addiction to class A drugs. If you are ever going to overcome the addiction you have to approach quitting with a very strict outlook, and be prepared for it to be a tough fight.

According to Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), a charity the campaigns against smoking, about 10 million British adults still smoke, and more than 100,000 die each year from illnesses related to smoking . Another statistic that’s worth paying attention to: about half of all smokers will eventually die from the habit.

Some more startling statistics from ASH: