Prime Time (with Bonus Content)

by Jane Fonda

  1. NOT ABUSING ALCOHOL

  Never having abused alcohol is considered by some gerontologists to be the single highest predictor of successful aging. In his book Aging Well, Dr. George Vaillant defines “alcohol abuse” (rather than simply “reported alcohol consumption”) as “the evidence of multiple alcohol-related problems (with spouse, family, employer, law, or health) and/or evidence of alcohol-related dependence.”3 He goes on to say that “alcohol abuse is a cause rather than a result of increased life stress, of depression.”

  2. NOT SMOKING

  Never having smoked or stopping at a relatively young age is another major predictor of healthy aging. According to the Harvard Study of Adult Development, “If a man had stopped smoking by about age 45, the effects of smoking (more than a pack a day for 20 years) could at 70 or 80 no longer be discerned.”4

  As critical as these first two points are, I have not elaborated on them because I feel they are self-evident.

  3. GETTING ENOUGH SLEEP

  My father always told me that you need less sleep as you get older. Well, Dad, I’m still waiting! On average, I get eight or nine hours of sleep every night and, frankly, I don’t do well on less. I rarely feel stress if I’ve slept enough. Perhaps that’s because sleep is one of the best remedies for stress.

  Unfortunately, Dad was right in one way: As you get older, your sleep lightens progressively. Many older people say they spend more time in bed but sleep less; when they do sleep, it’s what is called “dream sleep,” as opposed to deep sleep. Deep sleep is important throughout the life span, but it is essential when we are older, when our tissues need replenishing yet our human growth hormone and testosterone levels are diminished. When we are in a state of deep sleep, there is a surge of growth hormone. This is important for the restoration of our body’s tissues, especially the tissues of the heart. Regular exercise, by the way, is a wonderful way to develop your ability to sleep more deeply.

  If you are sleep challenged, try not to drink coffee or caffeinated tea or sodas after lunch—duh! Better yet, do away with all of it, except perhaps one cup in the morning. At night, try eating foods that contain natural tryptophan—milk, turkey, and complex carbohydrates.

  4. BEING PHYSICALLY ACTIVE

  I have a lot to say about this point. Maintaining a healthy weight, a strong heart, and strong bones through regular physical activity is a major ingredient in the recipe for successful aging. And what is truly good news is that even if you first start to incorporate exercise into your life after age sixty, you can reverse many of the problems associated with inactivity, and you will feel so much better. That in itself should be an inspiration to keep you moving! The next chapter, “The Workout,” goes into detail about this, as do Appendixes II and III.

  ANNA-MAREE HARMAN, AMHPHOTOGRAPHY@YAHOO.COM.AU

  My first big gobbler.

  5. EATING A HEALTHY DIET

  Never has the phrase “You are what you eat” been truer than in the Third Act. As individuals and as a nation we must pay more attention to reducing the amount of sugar and fats we eat, and to increasing our consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables and complex carbohydrates. There’ll be more on this in Chapter 7, “Now More than Ever, You Are What You Eat.”

  6. MAINTAINING A HEALTHY, ACTIVE BRAIN THROUGH LEARNING

  The current wisdom says that if you regularly do crossword puzzles or Sudoku, your brain will remain healthy. Maybe, if you’re not used to doing them! Certainly your brain is active during those activities. But I have chosen to use the word “learning” here rather than “mental activity” because what brain science tells us today is that to maintain healthy cognitive function, we need to do things we aren’t accustomed to doing—things that make new demands on our minds, force us to make decisions or choices. Furthermore, this learning has to be sustained over time. There will be more about the brain in Chapter 8.

  I took a yoga class at Tara Stiles’s Strala Yoga studio in New York taught by this ninety-three-year-old instructor.

  7. POSITIVITY: ENCOURAGING A POSITIVE ATTITUDE

  Almost all the people I have met who are in their nineties or even older seem to have one thing in common: positivity. Scientists at the Stanford Center on Longevity adopted the word “positivity” to express what they, too, have observed. Positivity is an attitude, a way to approach life; it is expressed through humor, gratitude, forgiveness, playfulness, creativeness, and adaptability. I am conscious of this happening to me in my Third Act, which shows that what the experts say is true: We can attain these positive attributes even if we didn’t start off with them! This is one of the aspects of aging that fascinates me the most, and so I have a chapter to come on Positivity—Chapter 9.

  8. REVIEWING AND REFLECTING ON YOUR LIFE

  I was somewhat surprised when I discovered, in the writings of Dr. Robert Butler, that many gerontologists and psychiatrists advocate this for their older patients. In Chapter 2, I wrote about how important doing a life review was for me; in Chapter 10, I talk more about how to do it.

  9. LOVING AND STAYING CONNECTED

  Humans are hardwired to interact with others. Having friends, loving partners, and strong social supports have long been demonstrated to have a direct positive effect on health, better cognitive functioning, and longevity. I will explore the various aspects of connectedness—to friends and to spouses or to lovers—in Chapters 11 through 15.

  10. GENERATIVITY: GIVING OF ONESELF

  This term, coined by the social scientist Erik Erikson in his conceptualization of the stages of human development, refers to older people’s responsibility to care for younger generations by giving of oneself—one’s knowledge, experience, time, resources, and values. This can mean mentoring a child, being a coach, reading to your grandchild’s class—and making sure she is in class!—or helping girls and boys in your community or in the developing world. In Aging Well, Dr. Vaillant writes that “mastery of Generativity tripled the chances that the decade of the 70s would be for these men and women a time of joy and not of despair.”5 I discuss this subject in Chapter 16, “Generativity: Leaving Footprints.”

  11. CARING ABOUT THE BIGGER PICTURE

  Moving from a focus on oneself to caring about things greater than oneself makes us whole and strong so we won’t be overwhelmed by the inevitable losses that come in later life. This can mean a focus on your community, your nation, or the planet. You might, building on your experiences, talents, interests … your wounds, even … make a difference. For example, a retired CEO helps set up a microfinance project in Kenya; a former schoolteacher volunteers to teach adults to read; a former UPS employee offers to help working mothers by providing carpool services; a chemical engineer teaches corporations how to become green.

  Jane Lynch of Glee fame helping me warm up the crowd before Maria Shriver’s march to defeat Alzheimer’s disease, 2010.

  FREDERICK M. BROWN/GETTY IMAGES

  Chapter 17, “Ripening the Time,” further develops this concept.

  The ingredients that keep us vital, happy, and continuing to grow are there for a majority of us. During our last three decades, as we move from being the “young old” to becoming the “old old,” we can have some of the best years of our lives, and the best news of all is that it is never too late to start making it so. A lot of it—most of it—has to do with lifestyle choices we make and how willing we are to live with real intention, instead of just drifting.

  Lifestyle Choices

  Genes may predispose us to, say, heart disease or arthritis, but the right lifestyle and the right attitude may help us overcome these infirmities. I know older people who are disabled and even ill but who do not feel sick. They experience joy and vitality and, in my opinion, exemplify successful aging. Some of the lifestyle and attitudinal choices we can make are best addressed before we enter our Third Acts. But even if we decide to change our ways after sixty, we can still make a big difference in how we age.

  In the chapters that follow, I go into more dept
h about how I and others have incorporated these ingredients into our own lives, and how you might do the same.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Workout

  It’s not that very old people … can exercise because they are healthy … rather, they achieve a healthy old age because they exercise.

  —JANE BRODY, New York Times HEALTH WRITER

  I’ve been screaming at the top of my lungs at my family, “Work out! Work out! Old age is coming!” At some point you will need the strength. Who would have ever thought you would get this old?

  —CHER

  Dad as a young actor. My only proof that he sometimes worked out.

  ONE DAY, AT AGE FIFTY-NINE, I WAS DRIVING WITH TED TURNER to one of his ranches in Patagonia when we came around a corner and I caught sight of the most magnificent snowcapped mountain I had ever seen, a perfectly symmetrical extinct volcano named Mount Lanin, rising straight up from the flat pampas to twelve thousand feet. Right then I vowed to climb that mountain as a present to myself for my sixtieth birthday.

  My stepson Beau Turner said he’d go with me, along with two guides. I trained for several months, bought the needed gear to scale the glacier that composed the top two thousand feet, and off we went. We camped overnight in a blizzard at about ten thousand feet, getting up before dawn in order to make the rest of the ascent and get back down before nightfall. I was totally psyched as we set out in the dark. My heart was pounding with the exertion of hiking through the thigh-deep snow at that altitude, and I felt great about being out ahead of everyone else. One of the guides shouted, “Don’t go too fast, Jane, you’ll sweat,” but I wanted to prove (to myself, mostly) that a sixty-year-old woman still had her mojo. Stupid me. A thousand feet from the top I had to turn around. Just as the guide had warned, the sweaty, damp inner layer of clothing—evidence of my ego—had gotten cold, and my plummeting body temperature put me at risk of hypothermia.

  On his way down from the top, Beau picked me up at the mid-mountain campsite and regaled me with descriptions of what it had been like to scale the ice at the summit. I felt like such a failure.

  You’d have thought I’d learned my lesson. Right? Wrong! For my seventieth birthday, I wanted to climb to sixteen thousand feet (two thousand feet higher than I had ever been). But I learned that you can’t get that high without getting very cold, and I don’t do cold well.

  My boyfriend at the time liked scuba diving and suggested that, instead of going up, I should try going down. Together we went to Ambergris Cay, a small island in the Turks and Caicos chain, where, with a couple of friends, we spent three days training in a pool. We passed the written exam to qualify for scuba diving, and then the time came for the three ocean dives needed for certification. Our guide again stressed the importance of going down slowly and equalizing the air pressure as we went. As I descended, I looked up at my boyfriend, who seemed to be lingering near the surface, and thought, “What a wuss!” I sank down toward the bottom, feeling pretty cocky, until my ears began to hurt; the pain forced me to pass my (much more sensible) boyfriend on my way back up. I lay on the deck of the boat feeling miserable, realizing that for a second time (at least, that I could remember) my need to be competitive had made me go too fast and fail.

  I said to myself, “Jane, you’re seventy now. How many times do you have to do something wrong before you learn a lesson? Can’t you finally understand the value of taking time and being deliberate with your actions rather than driven? Promise that you will never make this mistake again.”

  I returned to Turks and Caicos four months later for a second try. “Slow down” was my mantra this time, and together with my already-scuba-certified daughter and son, I made two successful dives to eighty-five feet. I descended at a pace that seemed preposterously slow, but I wasn’t about to fail again! The sheer joy of swimming with my children along a spectacular coral shelf among reef sharks, stingrays, barracudas, sea turtles, and many colorful fish was the big payoff, and I learned a big life lesson: This is the stage of life where there is less room for ego and more need for humility, balance, and common sense.

  In Women Coming of Age, I included a photo of a woman in her eighties jogging with her daughter. I was utterly confident that that’s how I would be when I got to that age. Well, I’m ten years younger than she was, and I haven’t been able to jog for nearly a decade! My replaced hip and knee won’t let me. But I’ve found that that’s okay, just so long as I do something. It would have been easy to stop exercising after my hip surgery, or because my knees sometimes hurt due to osteoarthritis. For a while I felt sure I’d never be able to do anything close to what I had done before. But when, mostly for vanity reasons, I started up again, I soon discovered that moving, walking, swimming, lifting light weights, and stretching made my muscles and joints feel much better. It was when I was inactive that the arthritis got worse—and so did my mood.

  I don’t jog anymore or do anything else that overly stresses my joints. Even downhill skiing is out. But I’ve gotten into snowshoeing, and this slower, more meditative, but equally aerobic sport is, for me, perfectly suited to the Third Act.

  Since I’m not in the snow very often, what I do to burn calories and stay aerobically fit is walk briskly (anywhere) or hike (when I’m in the country and the weather’s nice) for an hour, five or six days a week. When the weather is too hot or too cold, I go to a gym and get on a recumbent bike or an elliptical trainer (the kind that works the arms as well as the legs). I’ll go for thirty minutes, switching every ten minutes from one machine to the other to ease the boredom.

  Occasionally I replace walking with swimming for thirty minutes, and when I do, I protect my neck by wearing a well-fitted mask and snorkel, which eliminates the need to turn my head every few strokes to catch a breath. It also makes it easier for me to go into a meditative state without worrying about bumping into the ends of the pool.

  Me, hiking a steep hill.

  Snorkeling in the Galapagos.

  Too many people—men, especially—will stop physical activity altogether if they are no longer able to do things the way they did when they were younger. This is a real mistake. It’s far better to keep active, but at a lower level. And if, for some reason, you have been unable to work out for a time, be careful when you start up again. I always make sure to cut back a notch rather than trying to pick up where I left off. Older people hurt themselves trying to go from inactivity to sudden, challenging activity, like deciding to play basketball with the grandchildren one weekend. Instead, you want to try to establish a regular routine of a minimum of twenty minutes of some sort of aerobic activity at least three times a week.

  The Exercise Imperative

  I have realized over the last decade that the difference between a younger person who is physically active and one who isn’t is not particularly dramatic. But the difference between an older person who is active and one who isn’t is enormous. “Fitness for the young person is an option,” says expert on aging Dr. Walter Bortz, “but for the older person it is an imperative.”1 Younger people’s bodies are more resilient and forgiving, whereas older bodies are weakening; unless we deliberately intervene to slow this process down (or, yes, even reverse it), we risk sliding into early decrepitude. It is largely up to us. The human body is fully capable of vigorous use well into the nineties and even longer.

  ANNA-MAREE HARMAN, AMHPHOTOGRAPHY@YAHOO.COM.AU

  A group of seniors, all part of Tewantin-Noosa R&SL club, made a calendar and sent it to me. This was the cover!

  ANNA-MAREE HARMAN, AMHPHOTOGRAPHY@YAHOO.COM.AU

  In his book The Blue Zone: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, Dan Buettner visits places in the world where large numbers of people live past one hundred: Sardinia, Okinawa, Costa Rica, and Loma Linda, California. One of the things all of them have in common is daily, low-intensity physical activity such as walking, hiking, and farming. Activity strengthens the heart and bones, improves the circulation, reduces obesity, thicke
ns the skin, and can help with depression because of the endorphins released into the system. I learned from years of watching exercise change women’s bodies and minds that it is also empowering: It gives you a sense of being in charge of yourself and your well-being, which is particularly important for older people, who often feel they aren’t in charge of much of anything anymore.

  “Use it or lose it” is a truism, but what it leaves out is that if it’s lost, we can get it back. Not only can we recover lost functions but, as Dr. Bortz notes, “in some cases we can actually increase function beyond our prior level.”2

  How Active Does “Being Active” Mean?

  Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be scary. In fact, “Easy does it” is the appropriate mantra. I never thought I would say this, old go-for-the-burn me. But I’ve learned the hard way to respect that I am no longer the Jane Fonda who created the original Workout. My body will make me suffer if I don’t slow down. This is why I created the new Jane Fonda’s Prime Time line of exercise DVDs for boomers (people born during the demographic birth boom between 1946 and 1964) and seniors (those born prior to the end of World War II) who, like me, need to take it a little easier.