Why Your Body Feels So Old

When I was in my 30s, I felt like I was trapped in the body of a 70 year old. My knees ached. In fact, I had arthritis when I was 14. My back hurt all the time. I couldn't sleep. And to make it worse, I was kind of fat, like 300 pounds fat. You can see the stretch mark there if you look really closely. But I'm not 300 pounds anymore. I tried working out six days a week for 18 months straight. I went on a vegan diet, a vegetarian diet, a low calorie diet, a low fat diet. I tried all of it. No matter what I did, my body felt old. And then I got chronic fatigue syndrome and my brain just wouldn't work. I bought disability insurance when I was 26. I was that jacked up. And you fast forward to where I am today. I've reversed from my biological age by up to 20 years. I have the visceral fat of an 18 year old. I have the youngest liver they've ever seen in liver scans and all sorts of other biomarkers are a decade or more younger than my actual age. And I could run circles around the 30 year old me or the 40 year old me, and for sure the 20 year old me. And I discovered what doctors call normal symptoms of aging are actually solvable problems that you can reduce or eliminate. In other words, they're not normal. They're just common things like sore joints, getting crappy sleep no matter what you do. Being on antibiotics for 15 years like I did, poor digestion, absolutely topped out energy, brain fog, losing memories, feeling like you're in the car and you're pushing on the accelerator and it's slowing down and it's already to the floor. You can push harder, but there's no more pushing left and you just do it anyway. That was my whole life. You can reverse all of that. You just need to know the right levers to pull for your biology. Because you're not the same as me. You're not the same as the person sitting next to you. It's personalized. Here are the top five reasons why your body feels old, even if you're young, and how you can fix them. And if you've always felt that way the way I did, you would never even know that it was abnormal. I am 100% sure that there is a level of energy and power beyond what you've ever felt or what you can even comprehend until you feel it. One time. Time. Your energy levels have nothing to do with your age. It's about your mitochondria if you've ever taken a biology class, you probably heard the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Well, that's not really true. They're the powerhouse of everything your body does. You can't move, eat, think, digest, sleep, or even breathe without trillions of mitochondria in your body working. And they don't just work or not work. They either work really well or they work really crappily. Crappily is a word, right? And as you age, they become less and less effective. In fact, in my longevity book, I published some research. 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial deficiency. In other words, you make energy just not enough. Oh, and that was before COVID It's probably worse now. And everyone over age 40 has mitochondrial insufficiency. They call it aging. But you can control how your mitochondria perform. So you might think that feeling crappy or feeling like you're getting old before your time is you actually getting old. But what's really happening, you're just getting weaker in your mitochondria. Since they do make energy in your cells. When they lose strength, your body literally feels older. It looks older. But worst of all, before you start looking old or even getting fat, you lose your vibe and you just wake up and you just don't care. And that's the worst thing. That's what happened to me, where my career's taken off and I just. I just don't have it anymore. I'm like, what is wrong with me? There's nothing wrong with me. I had a hardware problem. And it's something that is hackable. There are simple hacks that can turn them back on. The things that cause mitochondrial decline, even in your teens are stress, bad diet, lack of movement, bad sleep, disruption of your circadian biology. These things don't just take away your energy. They take away your ability to self repair. If you can take care of that decline or even just slow it a little bit, you don't feel old and slow, and you start feeling like you've got this. You can handle whatever life brings your way. There was a time in my early 30s where if I climbed a few flights of stairs, played basketball for five minutes, I felt like I just run half a marathon and I would literally be out of it for a couple days because my mitochondria could not bring it. I was already blown out. And pushing harder only made it worse. If you've ever had a time where you realized, you know what your body doesn't have, what it takes, and you've got to do something. Tell me about it in the comments below. Because the first time you feel that it's not a good feeling, you might be surprised to see how common the problem is. One of the things I learned as a regenerative farmer is that some kinds of animals, like cats, if a cat gets sick, it'll run away into the forest so it doesn't get the other cats sick. But with my sheep, if a sheep is sick, it'll hide it because it doesn't want to get kicked out of the herd. Humans are like sheep. What that means is if we're sick, we don't want to show the people around us we're sick. So then we pretend like we're okay. So when you go to work or you go to class, you look around. I promise you that there's someone just like me. In fact, even when I was kicking ass in my career, I was right on the edge of failure and exhaustion the whole time. And I hit it like a boss. There are people around you doing it, and you might be doing it, too. It's common. We just don't talk about it. And when you upgrade your mitochondria, use techniques like cold exposure a few times a week, maybe three, five minutes max, or maybe red light therapy, or get the toxins out of your diet, or learn how to sleep again, you will have more energy than you ever had before, and you feel younger, too. These methods, these biohacks, support mitochondrial repair, and they increase energy production. And they're some of the many things that restored my energy and things that I teach in my books and in my work. The worst thing of all, though, is chronic stress, because that ages you faster than you ever could. It puts stress on your mitochondrial network. And we like to think chronic stress comes from my environment, because my teacher was mean to me, my mom was mean to me, my partner was mean to me, or because I beat myself up with the thoughts in my head. Some of that's probably real. But a lot of that comes because your environment made you weak. And then your mind looked for an excuse. So chronic stress can be biological, it can be toxins, it can be diet. It doesn't have to be emotional stress. And scientists all over the world are proving that stress is aging. In other words, what you call aging is just metabolic reaction to stress. Chronically elevated stress speeds up your biological clock. And if you have brief periods of stress followed by recovery, it reverses the biological clock. So most people think their birthdays are the reason they have wrinkles. But it's chronic stress, and it's bad diet that accelerates aging at the cellular level, because mitochondria even worse when stress becomes chronic, it triggers inflammation, and that damages your body's repair systems. You get visible signs of aging, and it depletes your energy reserves. There's a study from 2012 from the National Academy of sciences. They found that stress actually shortens telomeres. And telomeres are the protective caps on your DNA that determine how quickly your cells age. Short telomeres means your cells divide less efficiently, which speeds up everything from wrinkles to fatigue. That study confirmed what biohackers have known for years. Stress is the real silent cause of aging. That means you have to figure out what is the cause of stress. If you soothe your stress response with meditation, with breathwork biofeedback, you can stop feeling old regardless of your age. And if you set up your environment on top of that to have less toxins, less biological stress, you change everything about your life. Something as simple as a five minute breathing exercise can make a big difference. Calming your stress gives you more energy, which gives you more willpower to make better choices about food and sleep and lifestyle. You can even stack these therapies to get a synergistic effect. For example, you could meditate outside, and you could use binaural beats on headphones, which boost the effectiveness of the meditation about tenfold. And it gets you outside, where you're getting some sun and you're grounding to the earth. All of those reduce stress. You might as well do them all at once. Your body's adaptable, and in prehistoric time, you could survive by eating anything that had calories in it. But it's not about trying to just survive. Who wants that? Do you want to just be enough? No, you want to do more than survive. You want to be more than enough. You want your body and brain to feel the best that you can imagine and even more for as long as you choose, your body functions best on some types of foods. And you've got to find out what they are. And they aren't the same for every person. So it's not just junk food that slows you down. A lot of the healthy foods don't really work for your biology, and they can sabotage your energy. Your body will react differently to those foods, and even the superfoods can totally wreck your biology if they're not compatible with it. So finding the right diet for your biology is key to unlocking more energy. For example, I discovered gluten is a serious problem for me, but I didn't know that till I was 34. Eliminating it transformed my energy levels and it made me act like a jerk a lot less and it cleared up some brain fog. I also noticed an improvement in my digestion and sleep quality almost immediately. There are some people, though, who, who handle gluten pretty well. And they can eat it. Or maybe they can eat it in Europe, but not in the US. The reality is every food is a suspect food and some are much less likely to be guilty than others. But until a food is proven innocent, if you're eating it every day, it may be the cause of huge numbers of problems. And plants are more likely to be guilty than animal foods. When you understand what your body actually thrives on, you'll stop dragging through the day. You won't have the 2pm slump, and you just feel unstoppable. At the end of the day, you have as much energy as you did at the beginning. Suddenly you have more than enough. Which is the goal? Start with a two week elimination diet or a food sensitivity test to pinpoint what's going to work for you. You can get a copy of the bulletproof diet roadmap. This has helped millions of people lose millions of pounds. And what you do there is you just eat foods that are less likely to be guilty. Go to daveasprey.com roadmap it is a gift. It is free. And it gives you a list of foods that most people don't react to that give you the most energy. And if you do that for a week or two, you're going to fuel your body with the right foods. Your skin will change, your eyes will change, and your brain, most importantly, will change. And you'll know what energy and clarity actually feels like. I spent more than 20 years and two and a half million dollars learning how to reverse my age and feel young and improve my intelligence and be more conscious. Eating is just one of the many ways you can do this. I will share everything I know about this with you. Just tap the subscribe button and you're set. This is tens of thousands of research papers, my whole library, and working with hundreds of thousands of people. It is yours. Because I don't want you to go through what I went through. And one of the things you need to understand is that toxins in your environment are tricking your body into thinking it's older than it is. Imagine this. You have two water filters. The first one you add tap water. The second one you add sewage, which filter is Going to wear out faster. Your body filters the toxins, but you're probably unknowingly exposing yourself to more of them than you think. The more toxins your body has to deal with, the more your cup is filled, and eventually it will overflow. Since your body is constantly exposed to things like environmental mold or mold in your food, or heavy metals or microplastics or these estrogens that are in the environment from plastics, they disrupt your hormones, and they disrupt your mitochondrial function by influencing the mitochondrial membrane. There are thousands of studies supporting that this is the case. Those toxins are invisible stressors. They force your body to work long, really hard just to maintain balance. That increases stress. Over time, it wears out your energy, and it accelerates your aging process, and it makes you feel like crap. And when you feel like crap, you're actually mean to other people. You snap at them, you cut them off in traffic, and you're not the person you want to be. And I learned this firsthand when I moved out of a home I was in that had a lot of toxic mold. Within weeks, my brain fog and fatigue started, Started to disappear. My focus returned, My sleep improved, and I felt like someone turned the lights back on. That experience showed me how powerful it is to address hidden toxins, and there's a lot of them. Detoxing your home and your body Is one of the fastest ways you can reverse the effects of aging. It's not about pushing harder. It's about removing the things that are holding you back. You can start small with changes like using a high cold quality water filter or avoiding plastics for food storage. Removing those little stressors lets your body focus on repair and renewal. If you want to go all the way, you, can even get your entire home tested for mold. And then there are people who say, like I did, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Well, that's what will happen if you don't learn how to sleep like a boss. If I could make a new longevity drug that was massively effective, it would simply be the effects of sleep in a pill. No one makes that we probably won't. But sleep is central to mental performance, physical performance, Showing up spiritually and not aging. An elite crossfit athlete named Matt fraser said, if sleep wasn't required to live, it would be banned as a performance enhancing drug. So it's no wonder that people who don't know how to sleep Tend to feel older than they are. And if you're skimping on sleep so you can work more or maybe just doom Scroll. You're telling your body to speed up the aging process. And you're telling your body that you want to be tired and dumber and not have the ability to process blood sugar the next day. Because that's what happens. Sleep is not about rest. It's the time when your body repairs cellular damage, removes toxins from your brain, and regenerates. Missing even one night of deep sleep means you're skipping the most critical repair cycle for your cells and for every part of your body. Research from Harvard shows deep sleep is when your body does the most to restore itself. Without deep sleep, your body won't recover from the daily wear and tear. And if you're a high performer, you're a biohacker. You're building your tribe. You have a family, you have a career, you, you have a job, you have a community. You need to restore yourself every single night. If you don't, you feel older, slower, and just tired all the time, the way I did in my 20s. When you design your sleep environment using things like blackout curtains or glasses that block more than just blue light, like the truedarks or dimmer switches, or taking supplements that help you sleep, like magnesium, you'll wake up feeling younger in the morning. But it's not just about youth. It's about power. These tools give you the ideal conditions for your body to get high quality restorative sleep. When you prioritize sleep, you make it more important than eating perfectly, more important than exercising. You will effectively slow down the aging process overnight. It's important to eat healthy food, it's important to move enough. But if you sacrifice sleep to do those things, you'll. You're doing it wrong. Aging is really just a cluster of symptoms that you can slow down. It's kind of death by a thousand cuts. Take less cuts, recover more quickly, and you can extend your life, not just live better until you die at the same age. We're talking about living a decade or two or three or 10 longer than people think you will. Doctors will tell you to just get used to it. When your body starts to break down the first time, you have a sore back and knees and you just feel like, I don't have it today. That is not natural, it is not normal, and you do not have to do it. So I'm proof that your body doesn't have to feel old. Because if a 300 pound computer hacker me with all the diseases of aging can look and feel like I do now, it's going to be a lot easier for you.