Younger Next Year, 2nd Edition

different voices and in very different ways. That doesn't sound very promising, but apparently it had a certain charm. Finally, the message, that you had an unimagined degree of control of your own aging, health, and quality of life, was plenty seductive. Everyone wants that, especially the Type A execs and professionals to whom we seem to appeal. As of this writing, we have sold well over two million copies in some twenty languages, and, if our mail is a reliable indicator, we have changed an awful lot of lives. The book became, and has remained, a cult book for a lot of people, especially those over forty. The book came out in January 2005. We were on all kinds of national TV shows and so on, and it quickly became a New York Times bestseller. Everyone seemed to like it, and I confess, we liked it too. Harry is the least vain man I've known, but once, when I was trying to persuade him to do a follow-on book, he said, "'No, we've written one perfect book. That's enough.' Wow! One perfect book, huh? Even I, the vain one, might not have said that, but it wasn't totally ridiculous. We did about what we had set out to do. We took what we both believed to be a truly important and deeply underappreciated concept, the notion that behavioral change can have a more profound impact on wellness, quality of life, and aging than anything else, and told it in such a way that a lot of people took it in. It is still the only book on the subject. Interestingly, considering that it went against the grain of traditional medicine, which mostly ignores behavior, no one disagreed. No one in the medical field, no one in other sciences, no one at all, and the popular response could not have been warmer. Here's another nice thing. Despite the fact that the original book was novel and cutting-edge, it has stood up remarkably well. Nothing we wrote, nothing Harry predicted or we both recommended, has turned out to be wrong or needed to be amended. In fact, as more research has gone on, the book's conclusions just get stronger, and more important. New studies come out all the time, and the reports on them breathlessly point out that it makes a ton of sense to do this or that, and it's the same exact stuff we wrote fifteen years ago. That is a treat, believe me, and all that credit, let us be clear, goes straight to Harry. Harry had written at one point that some of the minor stuff we wrote might turn out to be wrong, but that the major themes would stand up. Well, it was wrong about that. None of it turned out to be wrong. That's downright eerie. At this point, you may reasonably ask, perhaps with a touch of irritation, if the book is so amazing, and you two are such great guys, how come you're writing this new version or revision or whatever it is? Fair question, and the answer is that this is not a revision or re-edit. No changes have been made to the old text, including our ages at the time we wrote it, and nothing's been deleted. There are only additions. Instead of a revision, this is a completion of the original story. Looking back, it's clear there were a couple of glaring omissions in the original book. They're glaring now, but they weren't then, because back then there was no science on the subject of cognition and how exercise and emotional connections affected. Not even a level of speculation ripe enough to include. So some stuff had to be omitted, but today the omissions are driving us crazy. That's why we did this edition, to put in a little new and incredibly important material. But before we turn to that, it's time to strike a dark note, a terribly dark note. As many of you will have heard, Harry Lodge died three years ago at the age of fifty-eight of a fast-moving prostate cancer. Most prostate cancer is not lethal. This version was very lethal indeed. He had taken good care of himself. He was a passionate follower of the Younger Next Year regimen, and he followed all the regular medical steps for a man his age. When the cancer was discovered, he had superb medical care, obviously, and everything possible was done. He lived longer than he might have, but the end came shockingly fast. His doctors and closest friends knew it was probably coming, but it was still all but impossible to accept. Still is. He was so alive, and he had so very much more to do, both in his amazing career and in his private life. It was hard to conceive of his being taken away at that absurdly early stage, but it happened, and a lot of people were absolutely heartbroken. This edition of the book is dedicated to Harry Lodge.