Posts by Sara Szal MD
Viva Las Vagus: How Vagal Tone Impacts Your Health (and 10 Ways to Improve It)
Sometimes I wonder how long I’ve had a problem with my vagus nerve. Years? Decades? Vagus means “wanderer.” This nerve—the longest one in your body—wanders all over your body to important organs such as the brain, neck, ears, tongue, heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, liver, pancreas, gallbladder, kidney, spleen, and reproductive organs in women. The vagus…
Read More5 Secrets to Turn Back the Clock
Jennifer was a forty-four-year-old patient who arrived in my office feeling defeated, worn out, and “older than her years” as she put it. As a third-shift nurse who worked grueling twelve-hour nights – frequently picking up overtime – the stressful struggle to balance sleep, two kids, and an unemployed husband drained her sanity, and took…
Read MoreHow Stress Harms Your Health and Aging
Mary was a thirty-nine-year-old patient who visited me complaining she felt burned out. Her sixty-hour workweeks left her beyond fatigued, with frequent headaches, miserable colds, and raging tension that cut into her sleep. On top of that, she confessed that lately life had become meaningless, which she attributed to an early midlife crisis, and her…
Read More7 Anti-Aging Benefits You Gain from Consistent Exercise
In a previous blog, I wrote about my fifty-year-old patient Gigi who complained about feeling “doughy” and stiff. Like many middle-aged female patients, Gigi found that maintaining lean muscle mass was increasingly difficult as she got older. I get it: I find it hard too. And sometimes I need a pithy list of why I…
Read More7 Strategies to Increase Lean Body Mass as You Age
Gigi was a fifty-year-old patient who visited me, lamenting that her muscles felt increasingly flabby – or “doughy,” as she put it. When I measured her body fat proportions, she had a healthy body mass index (BMI) of 24.5, yet she had nearly thirty-two percent body fat, and no longer felt lean. That loss (and,…
Read More5 Secrets to Turn Back the Clock
“I don’t mind talking about just about anything,” forty-three-year-old Melanie confessed, “but here’s something I hate bringing up because it feels so uncontrollable: wrinkles. I’ve been getting…” She paused – lowering her tone to a whisper as if confessing to a priest – “chemical peels.” I’d been treating Melanie for almost a year when she made…
Read MoreTop 8 Aging Hacks I Prescribe for Anyone
You can’t avoid it. You can’t hide it. Wrinkles are inevitable, and sagging will happen, eventually. Yet you have more control over how fast you age than you may realize. The answer lies not in expensive products or injections, but in everyday lifestyle choices. These choices affect what occurs inside your body – at the cellular level…
Read MoreThe Disciplined Pursuit of Less and How It Applies to Hormones and Aging
The beginning of 2017 is almost over, so by now you can know where you stand on your New Year’s resolutions. For most people, the energy of resolutions has already waned by end of January. Personally, I get tired of resolutions as a tasked goal. Sometimes they work, but usually they don’t. Instead, I prefer what my friend Jo…
Read MoreExcerpt from My Book, Younger
Exciting news – my publisher agreed to provide an excerpt from my new book, Younger! I hope you enjoy it, and even more importantly, that by reading it, you’ll begin to understand that we have more control over the way we age than we ever thought possible. It’s a simple matter of turning the good…
Read MoreThe Tell-All About Your Aging Skin (Part 1)
Forty-nine-year old Amy arrived in my office and plunked down a grocery bag filled with skincare products, everything from anti-wrinkle creams to anti-aging serums. She’d even tried injections of various kinds. “I fork over half my paycheck for a herculean ritual – and it’s getting me nowhere,” she complained. Her main lament was that skincare was…
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