What Ponce de Leon missed

Want to look younger? You will: until we're about 25 we want to look older. After that we spend the rest of our lives wanting to look younger. Well, forget the expensive potions and creams. You can do it for a lot cheaper: just exercise 30 minutes every day. Ponce de Leon searched Florida for the fountain of youth. He never found it--though certainly thousands of American retirees followed him much later on apparently a similar quest. But Ponce is just the most famous of the rich, the powerful, and the aging throughout history who have desperately sought ways to slow down the sand of the hour glass.

There is no way to stop it, apparently. But today we do know there is one way to slow it down. We know that exercise can stave off heart disease, diabetes, even cancer, but discovering it can also make us look and act younger might be just the incentive some of the motivationally challenged need to get off their butts.

I'd like to think so. But I'm a natural cynic. When I was in school, each class had its "fat kid," and everybody made fun of the poor guy. Now there are so many kids to make fun of that maybe we don't do it anymore--at least I hope not. That's probably the only good outcome about the weight that more and more young Americans are dragging around. And of those of us who are normal weight by the time we reach adulthood, how many do you think will eventually get fat? The statistic really is amazing:

...will get fat sooner or later. Even if you reach middle age in trim shape, you'll probably get fat: half of the men and women who were okay in middle age ultimately got fat, one third of them dangerously obese, according to research at Boston University.

Ninety percent of us guys! It seems hopeless.

Why do we get fat? Eat too much? Well, duh. But it's not only that. The older you get, apparently, the less likely you are to get the least little bit of exercise: only 6 percent of retirement age folks get the government's recommended level of daily exercise. Six percent! Put these numbers together: 90 percent of us guys get fat, and 94 percent of us lie around the pinochle tables and shuffleboard lanes.

That 4 percent must reflect the winners of the so-called health "crap shoot." We just presume doddering about stiff as a pine plank and weak as a paper napkin is part of "the aging process." Not. More and more studies are showing that chronic health conditions of old age actually are not from age, but disuse.

So when we look at the oldsters among us, and see a few of them able to keep up with those half their age--what we're looking at is the 6 percent. We say, "Boy, I hope I'll be lucky enough to do that when I'm 90!" But why not start now, and give Lady Luck a little boost? Probably it's easiest to get into the exercise routine when you're still young and fit. The older and more out of shape you get, the harder and steeper the trail to fitness. If we don't do it at 20, or 30, or 40, are we going to do it at 60, 70, or 80? You'd like to think so, but the cynic in me doubts it. The people who do are so rare they're worth a feature story in the newspaper.

If you don't care about your health, do it for your looks. And then let your health take care of itself.

--Ross Collins