Quotes from Michael F. Roizen

An easy way to estimate your resting metabolic rate is to multiply your desired weight in pounds by 8 and add 200, but this is very variable, so if anyone ever offers to measure your real metabolic rate, accept the offer.

Red pepper, when eaten early in the day, decreases food intake later in the day.

To help curb hunger and avoid binge eating, drink a glass or two of water before you eat.

eat a little fat twenty-five minutes before your meal (70 calories or so of fat in the form of six walnut halves, twelve almonds, or twenty peanuts), you'll stimulate a chemical that will both communicate with your brain and slow your stomach from emptying to keep you feeling full. (It takes about twenty-five minutes to kick in and takes about 65 calories of fat to stimulate.)

Four studies, all reported in the last five years, have found what many suspected all along: that a positive attitude makes a large difference in how long and how well you live.

In fact, behavioral choices account almost entirely for a person's overall health and longevity by age sixty. The older you are, the more your choices determine how long and how well you live.

Think of the cardiovascular system as a highway system. If roadways are the infrastructure of the city, the conduits that get us from here to there, then our circulatory system is the infrastructure of our bodies. Our blood vessels carry nutrients and oxygen to our cells and then carry carbon dioxide and other by-products away from our cells.

simple things like taking an aspirin a day, drinking a glass of red wine with dinner, and taking the right vitamins in the proper amounts are quick, easy, and painless ways to make your cardiovascular system healthier.

Looking younger starts with not smoking and limiting unprotected sun exposure. But try as you might to protect your skin, it is programmed to thin at a rate of one percent per year after age 30.

When you feel hungry, drink a glass or two of water first, to see if that's really what your body wants.

If any food has any one of the five ingredients below as any one of the first five ingredients on the label, don't let it near your mouth. ? Simple sugars ? Enriched, bleached, or refined flour (this means it's stripped of its nutrients) ? All syrups, including HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup—a four-letter word) ? Saturated fat (four-legged animal fat or palm or coconut oil) ? Trans fat (partially hydrogenated vegetable oil)

Making energy creates waste, like exhaust from a car. That's the byproduct of running the engine. Your cells work the same way, but this biological exhaust comes in the form of what are called free radicals, which are chemicals that can damage your cells.

Your body tries to remove free radicals via antioxidants, which try to bind the free radicals up (as if they were in handcuffs) and haul them out of your cells and then out of your body. That's one of the reasons blueberries and exercise are so good for you—they are two very powerful ways to increase your in-cell antioxidants. Regularly drinking black coffee is another.

Walk thirty minutes a day and build a little muscle. When you lose some weight, your cells become more sensitive and responsive to leptin.

Keeping mitochondria healthy (less sugar, less saturated fat, smaller meals, and less white fat promoting inflammation) slows down this aging process as we know it. And you end up with more energy every day. If your cells—via your power source—can become or stay much younger-acting, then your organs and systems will function much more youthfully, decreasing the chances of developing disease.

Eat more food early in the day and less later on. Try to eat only in a seven- or eight-hour window. Eat only when the sun is up and eat 75 percent of your calories seven or more hours before your planned bedtime.

Use a sauna a few times a week. Studies demonstrate reduced dementia in more than 15 percent of those who used one four times a week for 20 minutes or more; whether this benefit is the result of stress reduction or some other property is still unknown. We believe the benefit is due to the high temperature, which releases heat shock proteins, produced by cells in response to stressful conditions. This means a hot bath or an infrared sauna may have the same benefit.

The elderly tend to get fewer colds than kids, even though they have a weakened immune system. This happens because our systems develop defenses against antigens; we acquire antibodies to the germs we've defeated in the past (stored in plasma cells in your bone marrow, as mentioned earlier in Chapter 6), and destroy those antigens and viruses before they can multiply and cause that illness.

The key to loving relationships, research has found, is what's called "emotional responsiveness." This is just what it sounds like: being there for the people around you, not physically, but in an emotionally engaged way. This applies not just to romantic relationships, but to friendships as well.