For Serge, Isabella and Luke, with love always

Copyright

Disclaimer

The material in this book is for informational purposes only. As each individual situation is unique, you should use proper discretion, in consultation with a health care practitioner, before undertaking the diet and techniques described in this book. The author and publisher expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects that may result from the use or application of the information it contains.

Published in 2025 by New River Books

Unit 105, Leroy House, 436 Essex Road, London N1 3QP

www.newriverbooks.co.uk

Copyright © Sandra Parsons 2025

The author has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owners and the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-915780-32-4

Illustrations by Rob Brandt

Cover design by Emma Ewbank

Interior design by Smith & Gilmour

INTRODUCTION

The quest for longevity has been going for hundreds of years, since at least the Middle Ages. Back then, alchemists believed that if they could only find the Philosopher’s Stone – a mythical substance – they could use it to produce the elixir of life.

Today, not much has changed. The world’s most brilliant scientists have been hired by the world’s richest billionaires, from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (Altos Labs) to Google’s Larry Page (California Life Company – Calico) to Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel (Methuselah Foundation), to find out if not actually how to live for ever, at least how to live healthily for a very long time indeed.

Not forgetting, of course, the redoubtable – and in my view, admirable – billionaire Bryan Johnson, who is putting vast amounts of his money into cutting-edge longevity research using his own body (and with astonishing results so far).

Meanwhile, longevity clinics are opening in the world’s richest capital cities. London alone boasts several at the time of writing, from the Hooke in Mayfair, where the top-tier membership is currently £54,000 per year – entirely affordable by the financiers who live and work there – to the (slightly) more accessible Solice around the corner, where annual membership comes in at just under £10,000.

The average age of Hooke’s clientele is 49. A top-tier membership gives you twice-yearly medical, cognitive, nutritional, fitness and wellbeing reviews as well as a host of other appraisals, including blood tests, sleep assessments and your biological age score, plus personalised supplements.

For those wanting maximum access to longevity expertise while on holiday, there are premium retreats in some of the world’s most luxurious destinations. In 2024, Kate Moss was among the gilded few who flew to Thailand for a five-day retreat at RAKxa with Deepak Chopra – ‘For optimal wellness… where ancient wisdom combines with cutting edge medicine’.

For £17,000, guests enjoyed six treatments a day in addition to longevity talks from Chopra.(I should say here that I am a huge fan of Deepak Chopra. Asked by someone at that same retreat to give his tips for a better life, he replied: ‘There’s only one. Take it easy… disengage from the drama.’ You could argue there’s invaluable wisdom in that reply, because letting go is one of the most important longevity practices there is. If you can do that, you will massively reduce your anxiety and stress – one of the greatest obstacles to living a long and healthy life.)

Nevertheless, you would be forgiven for thinking that when it comes to longevity it’s a rich man’s (or woman’s) world.

Well, I have cheering news. It doesn’t matter if you can’t afford any of the above. Because the great thing about scientists is that most of them publish their research, and make it available, if not for free then for not much more than US$30 per paper.

And I am here to tell you that all of us can adopt their methods and their advice for very little money. Sure, it is great to do the tests. But you can achieve the same results for an awful lot less.

The alchemists of the Middle Ages speculated that if they ever did manage to identify that elusive Philosopher’s Stone, it would be a common substance, found everywhere but unappreciated.

Seven centuries on, it turns out that in that respect at least they may have been right. Because, while the elixir of youth has yet to materialise, what science is discovering in the meantime is that the human body has an almost infinite capacity to heal itself.

The secret to living a longer, healthier life is actually within each and every one of us. All we have to do is allow the body to do its work. And that’s where this book comes in.

Try following my Age Less reset plan for just three weeks, and watch a miracle begin.

* * *

Imagine being 100 and feeling like a lithe, energetic 60-year-old. Or turning 80 and being in the same shape as a fit 50-year-old.

Some of the world’s most brilliant and respected longevity scientists believe this is entirely achievable – not in some utopian future, but right now.

I happen to believe the scientists are right.

What’s more, achieving it doesn’t involve weird injections or expensive equipment, merely changing some simple habits.

How do I know this? Because after several years of changing my own habits, I took one of the most accurate tests available to find out my biological age.

My actual chronological age was 60. My biological age was 20.

That’s right. I was 60 on the outside and 20 on the inside.

The secret of how I got to be four decades younger isn’t really a secret at all. It’s just the result of having read dozens of books and papers from the world’s leading longevity scientists over the years and adopting the best of their suggestions.

I passionately believe that it is possible to age not just gracefully but with increased vitality and zest for life. Entering my 60s I feel more alive than I ever have, fizzing with enthusiasm and energy.

According to David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s leading experts on ageing, only 20 per cent of our longevity is down to our genes. The rest – a whopping 80 per cent – is down to our environment and our behaviour.

In other words, your future health is largely in your own hands.

As we age, most of us eventually come to a fork in the road. Something happens – an injury, a chronic disease or perhaps just a slow slippage into general frailty and fatigue – and we have to make a choice. We can either slide into gradual decline and ill health, in the fatalistic but misguided belief that this is the inevitable consequence of getting older. Or we can decide to take charge of our life, our health and our future and do something about it.

MY STORY

Until the age of 43 I smoked and did no exercise. I wasn’t overweight but my diet was poor – lots of ready meals, a chocolate bar a day. I drank a glass or two of wine most nights to unwind.

A mother of two young children, I also worked full-time in a very stressful job that involved lots of pressure. I slept badly, had crippling migraines and shoulders like rocks.

In short, I felt rubbish. And I remained in this state for a very long time – years. Not surprisingly, I was permanently exhausted.

If you’d said to me then that just by changing how I ate, moved and rested I could maintain the same workload while feeling incredible, I would have laughed in disbelief and said you were crazy.

I had absolutely no time or desire to think about changing any of those things – it was taking all my energy just to keep going.

If that’s how you feel now, take heart. Believe me, you can make those changes and you will feel so much better. You just have to have faith, and take it one step at a time.

Looking back, in my case it all began with an injury – one that could so easily have ended with my becoming immobile and even more unhealthy than I already was.

My sister-in-law had been talking about running, which she loved, and said it might be a good stress reliever for me. I told her I didn’t think I could run even to the end of the road. She suggested I try a short jog to the church and back, just to see. The total distance couldn’t have been more than half a mile. It turned out that even that was too much for me. I was gasping for breath after just a minute or two and had to stop. But I have a stubborn streak and tend to be competitive with myself, so I carried on for a few weeks, three mornings a week at 6.30am, until one morning I managed to get there and back again without collapsing.

And that’s when it happened. A deep, deep pain in my lower back. By the time I drove the children to school 90 minutes later I was in agony. On the Tube to work I realised very quickly that this was not going to wear off; not only could I not sit down because of the pain, but I couldn’t stand, either. It was a 45-minute journey which I endured by alternating between standing and sitting. The pain was so intense that occasionally – to the bemusement of other passengers who stared but, this being London public transport, said not a word – I couldn’t help groaning out loud.

By around 4pm, the pain had spread all over my back and down the whole of my right leg. A kind colleague drove me to her osteopath, who told me my entire back had gone into spasm to protect itself from whatever it was that had happened. The pain was extreme, far exceeding anything I’d experienced in childbirth (and I say that as someone who gave birth the second time with no pain relief at all).

I have had many reasons over the years to be beyond thankful I am married to a doctor. I phoned him to tell him what was happening and that evening he came home with some extremely strong medication. For the first time in 14 hours, the agony faded away. It felt like a miracle.

But when I didn’t take the medication, the pain remained excruciating. My leg stayed numb for a week; I struggled to walk at anything faster than a snail’s pace. An MRI scan showed a curvature, or scoliosis, on my spine that unbeknownst to me had been there since birth (meaning that without good core strength my back was simply an accident waiting to happen) and a severe prolapsed disc.

Several doctors advised an operation. I didn’t like the idea and my husband’s view was to avoid surgery if possible. So I began my long, slow recovery by following the advice of Sara Key¹ – a brilliant osteopath who also happens to have helped both King Charles and Queen Camilla – to rock gently on my back with my knees hugged into my chest, and then to progress to gently extending it by lying on a yoga block.

As the weeks turned into months, I gradually regained more and more function, although the outside edge of my right foot remained stubbornly numb and it was six or seven years before I recovered full movement in all my toes.

About six months after that agonising injury, I started Pilates, to strengthen my core. I found I enjoyed it. And a few months after that I finally gave up smoking.

I should say here that I didn’t give up smoking in order to feel better. In fact, I LOVED smoking. I smoked for almost 30 years! It was the one thing that gave me a tiny bit of ‘me time’ – a little treat, just a few minutes to myself.

But the British government was about to introduce a new law making it illegal to smoke indoors. I didn’t want to sit in a café or bar knowing I couldn’t have a longed-for cigarette with my coffee or glass of wine. And for years I’d felt guilty about the terrible example I was setting my children, who at the time were five and 10.

Then, through my job, the opportunity came up to meet Paul McKenna, who offered to help me stop. You can call it fate, or the universe sending help, or simple serendipity.

Either way, even though I found the idea of giving up terrifying, and in any case didn’t believe I could properly stop (I’d quit each time I was pregnant – easily, thanks to acute morning sickness – but each time started again several months after the birth), I decided to try. And no one was more surprised than me to discover when I left the session with Paul McKenna that I simply didn’t want a cigarette. I’d imagined I would want one straight away, or at least with my next coffee. Instead, I felt amazing – joyously alive – with no desire to smoke at all.

Although I didn’t realise it at the time, I was now firmly on the path of transformation.

I continued with Pilates, and eventually gained enough confidence to start running again. I also took up yoga. After just a few years, I found I was exercising almost every day and feeling astonishingly good on it. From there it was just a short step to time-restricted eating and a myriad other changes, including becoming fanatical about sleep and learning how to give myself deep rest and relaxation whenever I need it.

We are all different, so for you that first step on the path to transformation could be something else. It could be weaning yourself off your morning croissant, or getting off the train or bus a stop or two early to walk, or learning to play padel or eating more vegetables every day or starting yoga… it doesn’t really matter what it is, to be honest. What matters is that you start the process of change, in whatever way you can manage.

Had I not decided to start taking responsibility for my own health by doing everything I could to heal my back injury, I could easily have ended up with permanent crippling pain. I might well have become dependent on medication. I wouldn’t have felt able to walk much, let alone started to experience the fantastic benefits that regular exercise brings. I could have given up, but instead I decided to bite the bullet. Or, to use another expression that I find helpful, I chose my hard.

And I encourage you to choose your hard too. Yes, it’s hard to make a change – whether that’s to quit smoking or to stop eating crisps and biscuits or to start going to the gym.

But the alternative is also hard. In fact, it’s harder.

It’s hard to be unfit. It’s hard to be overweight. It’s hard to have crippling migraines. It’s hard to have shoulders that ache. It’s hard to wake up every morning feeling you can barely lift your head off the pillow, let alone summon the energy to climb out of bed.

It’s hard feeling tired all the time.

So – choose your hard. Because you’ll find that choosing the hard that makes you fitter, leaner, stronger, younger is the hard that, over time, becomes the easy.

OK, maybe not easy. But easier. A lot, lot easier.

And that’s how it came about that a few years ago, still working long hours in a full-time stressful office job, and with an elderly widowed father to look after to boot, I opened the email with the result of the test for my biological age.

Good news, Sandra, it read. Your biological age is 20.

Just to remind you, my actual – chronological – age was 60.

And if I can do it, you can too. I’m going to show you how.

THE RESET PLAN

As I said before, a longer, healthier life comes down to changing simple habits that will keep you younger.

None of the three changes I list below require complicated calculations or planning. The very opposite. Rather, they are about doing what comes naturally to us – returning to behaviours that humans have evolved over thousands of years.

1. Eat 10 per cent less. That’s right, just 10 per cent. It doesn’t sound like much – because it isn’t. It’s the equivalent of a small portion of McDonald’s fries, or three small chocolate chip cookies. Believe it or not, science now shows that’s all it takes to set in train incredible health and longevity gains, from improving your cardiovascular health to decreasing your risk of type 2 diabetes and dementia, while also reducing your biological age and losing weight. I will show you two easy but powerfully effective ways of doing this.

2. Move more. This idea may make you groan, but it is crucial for your mental and cognitive health as well as your physical fitness. Exercise is as vital for your brain as it is for your heart. Plus it makes you feel GREAT. Honestly. Please try my plan and see for yourself. You don’t have to be remotely fit or sporty to start (as I’ve already explained, I certainly wasn’t) and anyone can do it.

3. Rest more deeply. This is mainly about achieving quality sleep, but it’s also about being able to get deep rest during the day when you need it. You may think you can’t. You may protest that you don’t have time, or that you’ve tried everything and nothing works. Trust me – you can rest more, and longer. You will not only sleep better, you will find it easier to get back to sleep too. And I will also show you an amazing and incredibly easy way to completely re-energise during the day whenever you need to, in as little as 15 minutes.

These three changes revolutionised my life, and they will revolutionise yours.

My simple, three-step plan takes just three weeks to complete. And it is easy to follow and can be done by anyone. It doesn’t matter how overweight you are, how unfit, how sleepless, how old. It is never too late – although, as with all new health regimes, I suggest that before you begin you check first with your doctor if you have any concerns.

Why three weeks? Because that’s all it takes to feel a hugely transformational effect – and that’s what will give you the incentive and the momentum to keep going. Three weeks is enough time to reset your body so that it starts to adapt to new ways of eating, moving and resting. It will then be much easier for you to continue on the path to a longer, healthier life. Your body will start to lose old cravings and begin to recognise that this new way feels better.

The changes may only be small at first, but they will be tangible. You will find that you want fewer sugary snacks. You will notice how good it feels to move more. And you will wake up feeling more rested.

And my bet is that, after completing the plan, you will feel so well and full of energy that you will want to continue. You may not stick to it utterly consistently, but you will have sown a seed of change that you will want to nurture.

Remember, the results are cumulative: a bit like compound interest on savings, if you consistently make small lifestyle adjustments day after day, you will see improvements every week and month, amounting to a huge change after a year. You will have more vitality, you will move with more ease and flexibility, feel and look better – firmer, leaner, stronger. And afterwards, even if you decide to follow the plan for just one week every month, you will still see extraordinary changes and improvements to your health and wellbeing.

Of course, there will be days when, despite your best intentions, things go wrong. Maybe you skip a workout, or you eat rubbish food, or have a really bad night’s sleep. Maybe all three. Don’t worry. It doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It’s what happens from time to time: a blip. And it’s not just you, either: we all have them.

What matters is not the blip, but how you choose to react to it. You can decide that the blip is proof that this was all a terrible idea, that you don’t want to live longer and be healthier anyway. Or you can tell yourself that it’s just a temporary setback, nothing to panic about – and get right back to the plan wherever you left off.

Just keep going. In a few weeks you will not only start to see and feel improvements in yourself, but most importantly of all, you will have more confidence and self-belief. You can do this – one step at a time.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

First, I will introduce you to the world’s leading longevity scientists, whose groundbreaking research, dogged hard work and brilliant thinking has informed and underpinned every change I have made.

Then we will get straight on with the plan. Each step starts with a brief questionnaire, designed to help you see where you are now. Being clear about exactly what you’re eating, how you’re moving and what kind of sleep you are currently having is important if you are to change and get better. There are no right or wrong answers – but the more honest you are with yourself, the easier it will be for you to chart your progress and see some real improvements in every aspect of your life, not just physically but mentally and emotionally too.

Once you’ve identified your current patterns of eating, moving and sleeping, you will be ready to start. There is a three-week reset plan for each step. You can do all the plans together, taking three weeks to change your eating, moving and sleeping all at the same time. Or you can start with just one step – for example, food – and do that reset plan, before moving on to the next. It’s completely up to you – just choose what feels right for you.

Scattered throughout the reset plan are ‘lifelines’ – quick hits designed to give you a boost when you’re struggling and need an easy win. Towards the end of the book, there are some short but useful chapters on how to combat stress, how to make a habit stick, and tweaks you can make to optimise your health according to your particular needs, whether that’s with vitamins, minerals or other supplements, including hormones (such as HRT). Of course, you can also choose to do without any of those things.