My Latest Health and Fitness Update
- © Nils Osmar 2025. March 28, 2025
- This post is not intended as, and should not be taken as, medical advice.
- See full Medical Disclaimer
Some of my key anti-aging goals include:
Staying mentally sharp and clear.
- This is really my first priority. I don’t want to decline mentally as the years go by, and I certainly don’t want to get Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia.
- Things I’m doing to improve my odds include exercising (resistance training and aerobics); eating a very low sugar diet; avoiding AGEs (advanced glycation end products) by doing low-heat cooking; avoiding processed food (I prepare my meals from scratch); eating a high nutrient mostly-organic diet that includes lots of sardines and salmon (fish really is a brain food); and taking supplements such as PS (phosphatidyl serine) and sunflower lecithin. (I’ll be posting an updated list of all the supplements I’m taking soon.)
- I went through a period about ten years ago when my short term memory was going downhill; I was able to reverse this by taking PS along with vitamin B12 for a few months.
- I’m also mentally active; I make movies (sometimes also writing and filming and acting in them), and run a school where I teach acting and filmmaking and screenwriting classes.
- Stress reduction is of course also important to mental health, so I try to take time to process feelings when I need to.
Having Strong Muscles.
- This is second on my list, also very important. As we age, we lose muscle mass; this can set us up for serious health problems if we don’t do something about it.
- In my case, I noticed a few years ago that I was drifting into sarcopenia; my muscles were getting flabby, small and weak. That’s not only bad for the ego, it’s dangerous, particularly at my age. (I was 67 when I started working out, back in the fall of 2020; I’m now 72.)
- I increased naturally high protein foods like fish and meat and eggs and poultry in my diet and started working out. I’ve been able to build larger and stronger muscles.
- I do a full body work out in my home gym a couple of times a week, for about an hour each time.
- I usually opt for light weights with more reps, instead of the heaviest weights I can move (with fewer reps), to minimize the risk of causing damage, which is perhaps more of a concern at my age than it would be if I was younger.
- I have a relative who is just 2 years older than me who was hospitalized for pneumonia a few years ago, then spent several months on his back in a nursing home; as a result his leg muscles atrophied, he is bedridden and has lost his mobility. He is not expected to be able to walk again.
- Partly as a result of seeing what happened to him, I realized that we need to put some extra muscles reserves in the bank to draw on (and prevent muscle wasting) in case we’re ever in his situation. I’m motivated to work out regularly to build a surplus of muscle to “withdraw” in the future if need be.
Me, Then and Now
- The little video below is from 2020; I had just bought my tower and was planning to start working out. I was 67 at the time. I hoped I’d be able to gain some muscle.
Me in 2025
- For comparison, this is what I look like now. I have not taken any testosterone or growth hormone, I’ve just switched to eating a bit more meat and fish and taken the supplements I mentioned (and of course worked out.)
- I know that lighting is very different; I often wish i could go back and redo the lighting in the 2020 video; but hopefully people can still see that I’ve made progress.
- I’m not making any claims about my physique, there are guys out there who are much more muscular than I am. I’m just saying that I’ve found that it is possible at my age to have added some muscle and lost some excess belly fat. Whatever age you are, you might want to consider working out if you’re not doing so.
About My Workouts
- I have a home gym with a Marcy stack machine and some other equipment. Here’ me using it yesterday, grunting and groaning and pushing myself to the limit; I sometimes joke that I’d be rich if I could ever find a way to be paid for each grunt or groan. 🙂
About My Workout Equipment
- To do a variety of workouts, I also have a Weider slant board; and a tower. This helps me mix up my exercises if I’m getting routine. I suspect no one wants to see some random 72 year old dude working out, but if you do, here are a few clips. If you’re around my age and looking for a safe and affordable machine to buy, I really recommend starting with a tower.
- In the exercise in which I’m using the tower (in the video below), I’m bracing my feet on a bar about a foot off the floor so that that I can do assisted pull-ups and chin-ups; this lets me do far more than I could do if I had to lift my entire weight unassisted on every rep.
- I’m not exaggerating the grunts and groans 🙂, I’ve found that I can get a really good workout with light weights by doing enough reps and set and taking myself to exhaustion.
- This isn’t my whole workout, just a few exercises I enjoy doing.
Other goals
Some other health-related goals include:
Having good skin elasticity with minimal wrinkles.
- Wrinkles aren’t just cosmetic, they’re a sign of aging occurring on a cellular level.
- To minimize and reverse them, in addition to exercising and the high nutrient diet, I take hyaluronic acid, and take astaxanthin to block UV damage before going out in the sun. When we’re young, we have lots of HA; levels decrease as we age.
- My wrinkles become less visible due to skin plumping (so you could say I become less wrinkled) when I take HA.
Having low inflammation.
- Another anti-aging goal of mine is to have a healthy level of inflammation.
- Inflammation isn’t “bad”; it helps us fight infections and heal wounds.
- But chronic, ongoing inflammation can contribute to the aging process and the development of age-related diseases through inflammaging. My CRP is 0.54, not too bad, but I’d like to lower it to 0.1.
- One thing I’m trying currently is taking a supplement called Zyflamend which contains several anti-inflammatory herbs, and eating a half cup of wild blueberries a day. Wild blueberries are low in sugar and high in anthocyanins, associated with lower inflammation.
Having good energy.
- A a rule, I do.
- I feel pretty much like I did when I was 30. I have noticed in the last few years that I get more knocked out when I do marathon projects (like film competitions, in which the participants may end up sleeping just a few hours over 2 or 3 days time.
- I used to do competitions like that a lot, but have concluded that skipping sleep for days on end isn’t good for us at any age, so I’m phasing out projects like these.
Having a healthy level of body fat.
- Body fat is great; but too much can be pro-aging. I started gaining weight about 20 years ago; several years later, I had become obese, with my weight was approaching 250 pounds.
- I used fasting and eating a ketogenic diet to lose the excess weight, then settled in at my current weight (185 pounds).
- This is an improvement, but I’d be better off, I think, if I weighed 175, and am working on losing the excess pounds.
- I’m currently cycling in an out of a ketogenic diet, and have added apple cider vinegar to my regimen to see if it assists with fat loss.
Having good joint mobility.
- This one’s going well. I have no joint issues and no age-related aches or pains.
Getting enough high quality sleep.
- For a number of reasons, we can end up sleeping more poorly as the years go by.
- To support better sleep, I take hot baths most nights, and take supplements I’ve found to be helpful, including magnesium, tryptophan, and low dose (100 mg) niacin.
Having youthful hormones.
- When I was fat, my testosterone levels sank; they went up when I lost the excess body fat.
- Taking hormone precursors such as DHEA and pregnenolone along with herbal supplements such as tongkat Ali and fadogia agrestis and cistanche (and others) works for me to keep my levels high.
Slowing and/0r reversing aging.
- Like a lot of people in our community, I think it could be fun to have the option of living forever. A key part of that is just still being in the world when better anti-aging interventions come along.
- This is multifaceted of course, and includes, among other things, supporting the health of my internal organs, stem cells, telomeres and mitochondria.
- Things I’m doing along those lines include taking hot baths and saunas to increase heat shock protein, and increase hGH (which declines as we age); taking fish oil and krill oil for heart health, eating sea buckthorn berries, eating dark chocolate, and drinking inner leaf aloe vera juice for stem cells; taking CoQ10 and PQQ for mitochondria; taking NAD+ boosters (NR and NMN) to increase NAD; taking taurine, which has been fount to reverse many of the hallmarks of aging; taking GlyNAC (glycine with NAC) to increase glutathione, which declines as we age; and taking astragalus and ashwagandha to increase telomerase (and prevent telomere shrinking).
Frequent Testing
- One thing I’ll be doing in 2025 is more frequent blood tests…. I get several key tests every 45 days through LifeExtension and Labcorps. I plan to keep entering the results in the Longevity Worldcup Leaderboard.
- I was in position 10 for a while (fun!), but am now in position 18, not because my test results are slipping == they’re the same as they were when I was in position 10 — but because more people have joined the contest, and some of them are amazing anti-agers. See this page.
Not medical advice
This article is not intended as, and should not be taken as, medical advice. I’m not advising that people eat any particular diet or take any particular supplement(s), just reporting on what I’m doing. Supplements, like medications and other interventions, can have side effects; I would encourage people to research both possible benefits and side effects before starting on any supplementation regimen, and consult with a medical professional about any issues which might have a medical component. See full Medical Disclaimer
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Other resources
- My Youtube channel Pathways to Longevity
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