Younger Next Year for Women: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy - Until You're 80 and Beyond Paperback – October 10, 2007

I read Dr. Lodges and Chris Crowley's book and it changed me forever. I first saw these two authors on CBN and then ordered the book, "Younger Next Year for Women". What I like about this book in terms of its style and reading is that it is balanced between Dr. Lodge's biology and DNA subject matter and Chris Crowley's shoot from the hip style. Yes, they do advocate exercise, but nothing so mundane as you find in typical exercise or motivation books. Nothing in any other exercise book ever woke me up like this book. More than just another exercise or fitness book, this book explains why and how we age, why we get fat, why and how we program our body and cells to die instead of grow. This book explains how our modern life style has confused the programming of our body and caused us to get fat, grow old, get stiff, get diseased and finally die. These things don't just happen to us - we cause them to happen! That's right, we program our DNA and cells to age and die by our life style and activity, or lack thereof, which tells our body what to do with the next generation of cells. It also goes into what our bodies were designed for and how to work in harmony with that perfect design to obtain optimum performance. Once I learned this, I suddenly became aware that I had been setting my body up to die, day by day, one dead cell after another. I changed in the instant I read the first couple of chapters. This book is a real eye opener and instead of motivating you to do push ups or do this or that, this book integrates the whole life system of human evolution and biology and social attitude based on the design and makeup of the human genetic machine. It puts you on the right track to do what your body and cells were made to do and to do it well for a long and healthy life. I read this book cover to cover and it motivated me to begin an exercise and "life" program which completely changed my health for the better. I now do six days a week of cardio and exercise, have more energy, more drive, more motivation each day than I've ever had in my life and for the first time in my life, I'm pain free with more flexibility, endurance, and resiliancy than ever before. I've lost 15 lbs and dropped to a size 2 and can meet my daily work challenges with so much energy, I'm amazed. I have no longer programmed my body and cells to die but to live, and live fully and live each day with zeal and motivation. In changing my diet I also discovered I had food allergies which I never knew I had before. This book took me into a new direction and opened a whole other area of thought about my health, diet and exercise and spurned me in a new direction of wellness and wellness research. I've told many people about it and am buying several copies for friends and family. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to awaken their minds and bodies and be alive again. And especially for anyone in that age zone where health becomes a daily issue of concern.

This book has come at an interesting point in my life. Each year I determine a word that will be my mantra word for the coming year. This year I had decided that the word would be Strong. I would be retiring in February and was well aware of the traps that could await me : TV, boredom, and loneliness and was determined that I was not going to be that little fat lady feeding the pigeons in the park, naming them and considering them part of her family. Not so funny, cause its pretty close to the truth. Anyway, I digress, this is not about me, its about this wonderful book. I retired in February as planned, and was already taking steps to be active, joining a women's hiking/walking group, my goal was to become fit enough to hike in Glacier this summer with the kids/grandkids and not be holding everyone up "waiting for ol' grandma."Then, a wonderful thing happened. Someone in this group started talking about this book, and I became intrigued. WOW. I was already heading down the right road, but missing pieces, and this has filled in the blanks. One thing I hadn't done was weight training. Oh, I had bought some five pound weights for use at home and haphazardly used them, but it became really obvious that I was too lazy and disinterested to actually put them to use. So, I joined the Y, and yesterday I had my first weight training session. During it, I hated, hated, hated it. Then a funny thing happened. Last night I lay in bed anxious to get back! (Yup, I know, no weight training days in a row.. Still, I was surprised at how much I hated it while I was doing it, to how much I was looking forward to the next session. We're a weird specie, aren't we?)If it sounds like I am going on and on about me, well, yeah, I am. But I am just excited to find a book on wellness/fitness that resonated so strongly, and one that I not only read, but am putting to use. And, if it motivates lazy me, then imagine what it can do for others?Anyway, without laboring on much longer, much of this I already knew intuitively, but so much I was unaware of and this really fine tuned, encouraged and instructed without being redundant, or mind numbingly boring. NOT boring, fun, easy read, but not fluff and pycho-babble. At the risk of sounding like a crazed sales rep, if I could get just one gift to all my women friends "of a certain age" then this is the one.