The Lazarus Strategy: How to Age Well and Wisely

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The waiter arrived with the soup course, but Lazarus put down his spoon and folded up the napkin. It was time to get serious about getting healthy, before it was too late. Donating your last heart piece to a devil beggar and respawning as Lazarus Risen activates the beggar an extra two times for a total of three. Lazarus' Rags: Grants Lazarus two lives. Dying for the first time on a floor uses his inherent ability. Dying a second time will only boost his damage like a normal death, due to Lazarus being Lazarus Risen. Travelling to the next floor will revert his stats as per normal, but does not reset his life count to x2, nor does his ability and the item combine. That means for example, when preparing dinner, say to yourself, let’s just make a little bit less of everything than we were before. Then a month or two down the line you might want to begin looking at your nutrient intake, but to start with, the best thing you can do (preferably with the support of friends and family) is to begin to eat less, changing your habits in a healthy way. Which leads nicely on to the third part of the trinity of living healthily: mental wellbeing.’

The Lazarus Strategy: How to Age Well and Wisely - Goodreads

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Prepare not to be particularly surprised by the answer. Eat less, and eat smart. Exercise more, and regularly. And pay regard to your mental health. Those lovely children that 45-year-olds are now raising are going to have to spend a lot of their time worrying about their aged parents. I think that can be avoided." The second element of the trinity is exercise. You don’t have to follow Lazarus into epic middle-of-the-night cycling odysseys. Being ultra-fit actually adds little to your level of health, he says. What you need is to exercise regularly, not haphazardly, to the "set point" where you improve heart and muscular function such that you aren’t vulnerable to disease.

We are all living longer. There are already more than 8 billion people on the planet, and by 2050, two billion of us will be over the age of 60, and around 434 million over 80, according to the World Health Organisation. Instead, Lazarus wants to re-emphasise that this isn’t just about him, or me, or you. “Because 80 per cent of the population are sedentary and overweight, an enormous part of that population are going to need medicines and doctors’ support,” he says. It’s not a catch-all solution by any means but changing your surroundings will help more than you think when it comes to improving your mental state. Will taking a walk every day and eating more leafy greens cease all mental health issues? The answer is no. But the probability of improving your situation increases significantly. The key takeaway here is that you are in control of more than you realise when it comes to your mental health and treating yourself well is an excellent first step to improving that at large.’

The Lazarus Strategy: How to Age Well and Wisely : Lazarus

And, as with nutrition, he has a pro tip: “The other thing is, and this is absolutely crucial, you’ve got to enjoy it.” He isn’t prescriptive in the book, but he says that getting to that point about three days a week, for about an hour a time, should do it. Plus some resistance training (light weights). Speaking hypothetically, let’s imagine a person who has done little to exercise or manage their diet, they’ve reached the age of 60, and they decide that now is the time they would like to make behavioural changes to improve their wellbeing, where might that person begin? Well, really there are three key factors for influencing how we age: As Professor at the Centre for Human and Applied Physiological Sciences at King’s College London, Dr Norman Lazarus is an expert on the physiology of healthy human ageing. And if that isn’t enough to convince you that his advice is worth heeding, the fact that he represents living proof that, well into your 80s, it’s possible to lead an active and medication-free lifestyle, should be. Yes, but I’d just like quantify that a little bit first. Obviously, there are lots of diseases which can affect us as humans, some of them are genetic and we have no control over them, others are behaviour related and depend on how we conduct ourselves as adults. There is no doubt that anyone can turn their life around, it’s simply a matter of changing behaviours and consequently altering the course of these diseases. Of course, if you already have a disease related to behaviour, then it is more difficult, because you’re working against that disease, but even under adverse conditions, you can still begin to ameliorate many conditions and improve your health in general.

But where is that set point? “You’ve got to make sure that your heart rate is operating round about 60 to 70 per cent of maximum. It’s easy to calculate your maximal heart rate: it’s 220 minus your age, and then exercise at 60 per cent of that.” If 40-to-45-year-olds don’t put in the trinity now, you are going to suffer from at least three diseases,” he says. "It means that those extra years you are going to live are going to be taken up with doctors’ appointments, queueing for medicines and relying on those around you.