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The Best Ways to Optimize Your Body As You Get Older


A man's face with a line down the middle. On the left side is the man's face when he was young and in his 20s, and on the right is the same man's face when he's in his late 50s, showing the need to optimize your body as you get older with surgeries like a rhinoplasty, neck lift, or facelift.

As we age, it is important to maintain our physical health and make sure our bodies continue to function properly. There are a variety of ways to care for yourself as you age, from surgical procedures to taking vitamins and supplements to receiving injections. In this video, Dr. Anil Shah shares the best ways to optimize your body as you age including:




This video has been transcribed using an automated service. Please forgive any typographic errors or other transcription flaws.


Okay. So we're talking about body optimization. And body optimization is one of those things that happens, you know, in some patients as they're younger. But as you get older you're going to think about, more and more about this term. And body optimization is making your body run and function the best it can. So there's different things that happen at different ages that you can look at. And I'm talking specifically about men. 


So when you're in your 20s one of the things we'll talk about if you're trying to optimize your body is fixing your nose. Why would you want to fix your nose? Well, if you're not breathing through your nose, and 80% of the population has a deviated septum, and if you're not able to solely nose breathe, you might have a deviated septum. So if you do have a deviated septum, it's worth fixing. If you have allergies, it's worth addressing that, but fixing your nose in some manner might be something that you potentially optimize. If your nose is not in harmony with everything else, That’s more in the aesthetics but we’re thinking just in terms of optimization and how your body functions. Why do you want to breathe through your nose? The nose has many important purposes, but several that are important that we'll talk about are going to be number one- humidifying air, number two- warming up air, number three- filtering the air we breathe in, which is super important. And then number four, a lot of people don’t know this but the nose actually makes nitric oxide. Combined with endothelium, nitric oxide relaxes your blood vessel. For those of you men who take Viagra, that’s what, you're making more nitric oxide. That's important for men and for women; it helps us relax. So nose optimization is something I'm looking for in someone's 20s.


Other things we can talk about as we get older. We talk about eye optimization and as we get older, our browns get heavier, we get extra skin through here, and so we're actually not going to see and function as well. For some of us it can be so severe that we can't even drive. And so if we're thinking about that we're like okay, I can't drive, and I can't look at this out of my eyes, that can actually improve the way we look at things. Sometimes it's actually a strain. We're lifting up our brow so much so we can see that we're actually getting headaches. It's actually putting tension on us, and actually, and some people think it can actually change the way we think because we're animating certain muscles. and there's a little bit of a feedback loop. If we’re squeezing our muscles that make us angry all the time and we’re squinting, for example, some people feel like they have more anger emotion, it's opening all this up. They might have more of an anxious emotion. So that might be one of those interesting things that optimizing the way our eyes function as we get older can help us actually see better.


Another thing that we don't talk about enough is getting our neck to be optimized. When we're younger, A lot of us will not snore, but almost all of us will start to snore, sometimes in 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. So just solely removing fat from the neck, and sometimes even some of the deeper fat from the neck, doesn't really optimize how we sleep. So snoring happens when the tongue falls into the back of the airway. So there's a couple choices. One way of optimizing this is to buy this little device on Amazon that grabs your tongue, it’s like this or suction thing, and you stick your tongue outside. I don't know anyone who can do that for more than like ten minutes. It's really uncomfortable, but it does bring your tongue forward. You can also stick a shocking device inside. It stimulates your nerve. It kind of constantly tries to engage your muscle if you're trying to go forward. and that's okay. But again, I don't want something shocking my tongue. For me, it's like, just fix the problem and to fix it surgically, what I'll do is I'll actually lift the tongue and the hyoid bone up. And when I do that, not all patients but many patients will tell me that their breathing and snoring has improved. So optimizing the body in that level and by optimizing our sleep, we're definitely going to have improvement in multiple areas of our life. And again, if you take anyone, any normal human being, and you deprive them of sleep, at some point you’ll die if you don’t sleep enough. And at some point before that you'll go crazy. And so giving someone and before that you'll be angry. So again, this is different tiers of how sleep can actually make us function better, perform better at this natural rest that we get. There's lymphatics we worry about. Even in the brain there's these things called glymphatics where our brain will just sort of, help all that process drain and restore and recharge. And by having that improvement in our sleep, in our sleep numbers, that’s super helpful. 

Other ways we can optimize ourselves. That's going to be potentially, as we get older with supplements and some of the things I take, for example, in the morning, I take every day, I take oral NAD, and there's two ways you can take NAD. NAD you can take in the form of NR or NMN. They both work. They both are really not that different. The prices are not that different, so I think it's worth taking that. I only take mine in the morning. You can take yours morning and night, but I like to get it in the morning. That recharges your mitochondria, improves your appetite, and when you get older, you have less NAD. Your mitochondria kind of gets worn down a little bit, so it’s worth looking at that. The further thing you can do is actually take an injection of NAD which we do in our office. And ideally, you want to do that maybe about once a week, once a month. That can be done either in the muscle or in the IV. They both work about the same. And that's another way of kind of getting that recharge where you feel better because again, your mitochondria are going to be functioning much more efficiently.


Another thing you can do as you get older is I think optimization is taking enough fish oil, and fish oil is something we don't get enough of. And most people say, well I buy fish oil from the store and I'll take one tablet. And I think I'm doing what I’m supposed to, But you want to make sure you get at least two grams at EPA and DHA. That's the minimum I like to get in my diet. And by getting that, it's hard to do that with fish. It's actually a lot of fish you have to eat. But again, the idea with that is by having that with that supplemental form, I'm worried really mostly with that, with cognitive function. Now as we get older, you know, we don't function as well. And so again, if you can be optimizing the way your brain works, the way your body moves, even with joints, and cardiac issues, you can kind of improve that. There's a recent study looking at, you know, taking fish oil and showing that some patients are having arrhythmias, versus not taking that. But that means that for me, weighing all these things together, as long as I'm monitoring things in my heart and I rather have a higher dose of fish oil than a lower dose and works for me, but you can see what works for you.


Other things I like to do to optimize myself, especially for cognitive, is creatine. Creatine is known in the muscle building world of building up muscle and the studies show that you should take about five grams of creatine. And this can be in the normal form of secreting monohydrate. And we don’t have to do anything fancy here. Regular creatine is going to work as well. The studies are on. It's made pretty simply. And you want to add anything to this part. You just add it. You can add it to your smoothie. You take it in a pill form Creatine is going to improve your brain function. And again, it's one of those things that again, I'm worried about cognitive decline. If you look at these aspects and having creatine, you can enhance your, the way your brain functions. Vitamin B, methylated vitamin B, it’s something we can talk about using. Vitamin B helps almost all of our nerves and nerve function better. And again, I'm worried about cognition. In that aspect of it, people always talk about getting a vitamin B shot, but methylated vitamin B is another way of getting that through there, you know, get different types of vitamin B with that. Another thing we can look at as we get older is magnesium. Magnesium affects the way we kind of sleep and breathe and many other aspects of that, and the way we function, even our electrolytes. So having enough magnesium, I use three different types of magnesium. I'll put links on this below, so we can look at that aspect. 


And so looking at this body optimization, there's ways of doing this through exercise, which I should talk about now. For me personally, I like to bike to work rather than to drive a car to work. Because again, if I bike to work, I'm going to get about 15, 20 minutes of biking one way, 15, 20 minutes biking the other way to get me 40 minutes plus lifting weights every day. So again, my goal is not to be the next bodybuilder. My goal is actually to wake up every day and feel awesome, have my joints preserved, have my muscles feeling good, have my posture, decent. Which, again, everyone's posture can be better, but that’s okay. And improve my brain function as well. That's the reason I do all that. There's a lot we can talk about.


There's so many other topics to talk about. But body optimization for men, if you're thinking about optimizing your body and actually having it function better, there's a few surgical things and a bunch of oral things and habits you can do to kind of put that together. And again, if you're trying to have that amazing life where you don't have pain and you're as healthy as possible and you're functioning well and you're making great decisions and you feel your best and look your best. I think that combination of surgery and taking good care of yourself, with good supplements and diet and working out all can go together to make an awesome life.

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