Packed with wit and wisdom, the book Love Your Age: The Small-Step Solution to a Better, Longer, Happier Life will help you live your best life
“I realized that my former grumpy, frump, lumpy state of being wasn’t the inevitable result go getting older,” writes Barbara Hannah Grufferman in the first chapter of Love Your Age: The Small-Step Solution to a Better, Longer, Happier Life. “It was the inevitable result of continuing to make the same unhealthy choices I’d been making for years … I’m living proof that the little steps we take every day don’t stand alone: They all combine to determine how good we’ll feel today, tomorrow, and in five years. In other words, we need to invest in ourselves now to have the life we want later. While it’s never too early — or too late! — to let healthy habits into your life, you have to choose them over and over again every single day. That’s how the small steps add up.”
Grufferman’s small steps range from specific guidelines for scheduling regular medical checkups to beauty and makeup tips. For example, she recommends getting your hearing tested every three years after the age of 50 because “hearing loss can lead to frustration, stress, poor memory, cognitive impairment, feelings of isolation and depression, diminished relationships and social skills.” Invisible hearing aids, she says, “can usually reverse these problems … and the sooner problems are addressed, the more effective treatment will be.” She also advises that, as you age, you should keep your makeup light and bright: “Too much makeup can age you faster than none at all,” she says, adding that “as we age our natural coloring becomes a bit muted, so lighter and brighter shades may be more flattering.”
Featuring more than a hundred of these easy-to-adopt small steps — and making them ingrained habits — will yield longer, happier and healthier years, says Grufferman. She begins with her own account of how she started a modest walking/running program and then developed into a passionate marathoner.
While not everyone will launch their marathon career after reading this book, it is inspirational and motivating. Want to lose weight? Start a new career? Take better care of your health? Grufferman’s book is chock-full of tips, myth busters, checklists and real-life anecdotes, from checking in with your doctors to changing your fitness routine, cooling hot flashes, tackling social media and updating your wardrobe.
Transformation, she says, really does begin with one small step.
To order: ISBN: 9781426218323. Available from Amazon and other book sellers.