Mastering Your Body

You can be fabulous and fitter than ever after 40 — really!

- Lara McGlashan

With ever-improving knowledge of nutrition, exercise and skin care (ahem, Botox), you have the potential to be healthier, live longer and look better than ever. But there’s one über-important factor preventing you from cannonballing gleefully into the fountain of youth: your hormones.

After age 30, a woman’s estrogen/ progesterone balance falters, her already low (in comparison to men) testosterone declines and her growth-hormone levels begin their steady march south. Weight gain, decreased muscle mass, insomnia and low libido are a few of the symptoms that accompany this internal disruption. Hormone-replacement therapy can help some effects, but there’s not much a woman can do to reverse this natural and inevitable decline. 

Or is there? 

According to research you can prevent and even reverse some effects of aging just by being active, eating healthy and being smart. Here are some science-backed strategies to help you turn back the clock a tick or two, or at least hit the pause button on Father Time.

HIIT It — Hard