After decades of red wine, no exercise and 15 cigarettes a day, these are the super-easy lifestyle tweaks that gave me a scientifically proven biological age of 20 - at 61: SANDRA PARSONS

For more than 25 years, I smoked 15 cigarettes a day. I loved smoking. It was the one thing in a busy, stressful life of work and motherhood that gave me a little ‘me time’. It wasn’t the only thing about my lifestyle that was unhealthy either.

Until I hit my 40s, my diet was poor: I’d shove a ready meal into the oven at least a couple of times a week. Most nights I drank a glass of wine or two to unwind. I craved sugar in the afternoons and ate a chocolate bar every day. I did no exercise. None at all.

A mother of two young children, I worked full-time in a high pressure job. I slept badly, had crippling migraines and shoulders like rocks. My diary was full but going out to social events took all the energy I could muster.

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

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

And yet today I am entering my 60s positively fizzing with it. I feel more alive, more enthusiastic, more energetic, than I ever have – and what’s more, with a body that, biologically speaking, is just 20 years old.

In February 2023, I took a blood test widely regarded as the most accurate measure of how well the body is ageing. The GlycanAge test measures compounds called glycans, which are powerful biomarkers of chronic inflammation and ageing. Each of us has literally billions of them – they are in every cell in our bodies – and by analysing the type and quantity, scientists are able to produce a ‘biological age’ for us, which shows how healthy we really are.

And mine was 20. When my actual chronological age was 61.

That’s right. Heading for my bus pass on the outside and barely out of my teens on the inside! Despite spending much of my adulthood smoking, drinking and sitting down, I have seemingly reversed any damage done to my body and turned the clock back by a full four decades.

What’s my secret? Well, it isn’t really a secret at all. It lies in the simple changes I made to my lifestyle when I hit midlife and then maintained – the result of reading dozens of books and papers from the world’s leading longevity scientists and adopting the best of their suggestions.

For the truth is, an ageing body isn’t inevitable.

I passionately believe that it is possible to age not just gracefully but with increased vitality and zest for life.

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. And it’s never too late to start dialling the clock back.

Imagine turning 80 and being in the same shape as a fit 50-year-old. That’s not some utopian dream, but according to many of the top longevity scientists, perfectly achievable right now, with no need for weird injections or expensive equipment.

Instead, it’s about changing habits, making tweaks to your lifestyle, getting serious about your health and letting the gains pile up. The trigger for my own radical lifestyle overhaul was a serious back injury, which happened – ironically – after a very uncharacteristic bout of exercise.

When my sister-in-law suggested I take up running in my early 40s to relieve the stress of juggling a big job with a young family, I told her I didn’t think I could run even to the end of the road. I tried it – a half mile jog – but even that was too much. 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, 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 it was not going to wear off; not only could I not sit down because of the pain, but I couldn’t stand, either. Indeed, it was so intense that occasionally – to the bemusement of other passengers – I couldn’t help groaning out loud.

By around 4pm, the pain – far exceeding anything I’d experienced in childbirth – 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 had happened to it.

I have had many reasons over the years to be 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, which at last dulled the agony. But I couldn’t keep taking it forever, and when I stopped, the excruciating pain returned.

A few days later, an MRI scan showed not only a severe prolapsed disc, but also a curvature, or scoliosis, on my spine that unbeknown to me had been there since birth. Without good core strength my back had been an accident waiting to happen. Several doctors advised an operation, but 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 a brilliant osteopath called Sarah Key – who also happens to have helped both King Charles and Queen Camilla.

I spent hours rocking gently on my back with my knees hugged into my chest, and then progressed to gently extending it by lying on a yoga block. As the weeks went by, I gradually regained more and more function (though it would take six or seven years to regain all movement in my toes) and, six months in, I started Pilates to strengthen my core. I found I enjoyed it.

A few months after that I finally gave up smoking.

I should say here that I didn’t give up smoking to feel better. I really enjoyed smoking and hated the thought of losing the few minutes to myself that cigarettes represented. But the law making it illegal to smoke indoors was about to come in, and I didn’t want to sit in a cafe or bar knowing I couldn’t have a longed-for cigarette with my coffee or glass of wine. I felt guilty about the terrible example I was setting my children, too, who at the time were five and ten.

Then, through my job, the opportunity came up to meet the hypnotist 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 hypnotism session 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 other changes – including time-restricted eating, one of the absolute keys to anti-ageing your body – and becoming fanatical about sleep.

I’ll explain in much more detail precisely what I mean in tomorrow’s Mail on Sunday.

It wasn’t always a smooth progression, however. In my early 50s, the menopause hit with brutal force. Despite then being very physically active, I suffered from drenching night sweats and debilitating daytime hot flushes that were so bad I had to consider carefully each day what to wear to work in case it ended up with huge sweat marks all over it.

Even though this was 2016, I didn’t discuss it with anyone. As recently as ten years ago, many women, especially those in the corporate world, just didn’t talk about it. They weren’t routinely prescribed HRT either, and it was only on the insistence of an American specialist called Dr Erika Schwartz, who I met through a colleague, that I started taking it. Once I did, my life transformed.

My prescription – estradiol, micronised progesterone and a small amount of testosterone – eradicated the flushes and night sweats like magic.

Now, it seems, I have even more reason to be grateful to Dr Schwartz because research by GlycanAge – the company that tested me for my biological age – shows that oestrogen plays a huge role in reducing women’s biological age.

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When researchers blocked oestrogen for six months in perimenopausal women, their biological age increased by nine years. Bringing oestrogen levels back to where they’d been also returned their biological age to what it had been before the experiment.

The straight-talking Dr Schwartz, by the way, doesn’t recommend stopping HRT ever – ‘unless you want to get old and sick; if you do want that, then by all means stop’.

Other life events will pull you up short too, of course. The older you get the more you understand the preciousness of time.

When your last surviving parent dies, it brings your own life, and death, into sharp focus. That certainly happened to me.

Combined with turning 60 – a bleaker, more ominous milestone than I’d anticipated; there was so much I hadn’t done and now perhaps never would – I felt something close to panic when my father died 18 months later.

I finally understood – viscerally, as opposed to intellectually – that time really was running out; that my life really would end one day, and there was nothing I could do to stop that happening. Yet the more I thought about it, the more I realised it needn’t generate such existential anxiety. As I’d proved, I could mitigate some of the worst effects of ageing or even eradicate them altogether.

There is so much we can do to make the intervening years, whatever the number, not just less bleak but actively enjoyable.

At an event in 2024 to mark her newly published memoir, Cher (then 78) told fans that some of her friends complain about turning 40. ‘And I say, “Listen, get over yourself. I’d give anything to be 60 again”. You’ve got to just keep living your life until you die. Keep going for it. You can never give up. Don’t let old age get in your way.’ Below I list the three core strategies helping me shove old age out of my way. Remember, I’m 61 but also 20! They revolutionised my life – and can do the same to yours.

Adapted from Age Less by Sandra Parsons (New River Books, £14.99), to be published 5th June. © Sandra Parsons 2025. Find Sandra Parsons on Instagram @AgelessTheMethod