Your body speaks to you all the time. But do you listen to what it’s saying? Most people don’t. Life is much easier if we ignore those little pains, that bad week of sleep, the occasional stomach ache, the recurrent colds. Most of the time the problem just goes away on its own, doesn’t it?

And the truth is, a lot of people seem to get by just fine ignoring their symptoms and health problems. But that doesn’t change this important fact: your body has told you that something is wrong, and you chose to ignore it. Perhaps your stomach pain was merely a reaction to a bad piece of fruit, or may be it means that your stomach is beginning to have serious troubles. You just don’t know.

Is this how you would treat a car that suddenly made odd noises, or what you would do if a wet spot started to appear on a ceiling at home? We hope not.

One of the great truisms of life is that a problems ignored is a problems that will soon grow worse. This holds true in relationships, the workplace, the government, your home and with your own body. Perhaps it’s time to turn your ear inwards.

Listening and Reacting
It’s easy to categorise health into two parts. The first part is healthy everyday living and covers issues such as food, exercise, sleep, stress control and energy. Up until this point, we’ve focused entirely on just this how to live every moment in a way that will extend and enrich your health and happiness for decades to come.

The second part of health is what you could call ‘capital letter’ diseases: formally named health issues such as diabetes, arthritis, asthma, cancer and hundreds of other diagnosable chronic conditions. These are the agerobbers, the killers, the conditions that researchers focus on, the ones all of us fear and each of us wants to avoid. These conditions are the focus of part 4 of this book, ‘Preventing the diseases of ageing’; there we’ll show you all the best ways to prevent these health traps of the future from catching you.

But there’s third part to health, and that’s the focus of the next pages. It’s the small health problems, the symptoms, the nagging little health issues that mean you fall between being healthy and having a serious chronic disease.

Starting from around the age of 45, most adults begin to experience more nagging symptoms than when they were younger. The main reason is simple after four decades of life, natural wear-and-tear is beginning to catch up with you. Suddenly, your joints hurt more, your digestion isn’t so reliable, your hearing is less sharp and your alertness is in decline come midafternoon.

More often than not, these health issues are small. But our message is big: by taking positive steps to remedy small health issues now, you are taking positive steps to lengthen your life and stay vibrant when you’re older.

Why? Because symptoms are exactly that: the way an emerging problems reveals itself to you. The pain isn’t the real problem, for example; it’s the cause of the pain that often matters more. Or take a cold. You may be focused on stopping your runny nose, but that’s not the most important task to consider it’s stopping the underlying virus from spreading. One doesn’s have much to do with the other.

In the pages ahead, you’ll discover clever ways to remedy several of the most common symptoms and simple health problems of people aged 40 and above. More importantly, you’ll find these remedies also address the underlying health issues.

You’ll probably recognise many of these problems from sore gums to aching leg veins, common colds to after dinner indigestion, these are the most regular everyday health complaints of adults. We also address a few more specialised issues, such as a decreasing sense of balance and skin problems, which if you handle them now, should have minimal impact on you later.

The big message : long life living is more than just eating well, exercising and maintaining a great attitude. It also includes listening to your body, and responding quickly and thoughtfully to what it’s telling you. With the quick-healing advice in the pages ahead, you’ll find out what you need to get the healthy long life you want.