Apologies to Ponce de Leon

I have found the Fountain of Youth. The first thought was to put it into book form and sell it as the next health craze. But you might remember the failure of my one page diet book, whose title and only sentence was: BURN MORE CALORIES THAN YOU CONSUME, IDIOT! It didn't catch on. Sometimes a message is too compact and timely for the masses. The masses don't read this blog, so this is the perfect place to publish my discovery.

The F.o.Y. (as it shall come to be known) consists of three elements, which, when mixed together, will assure that you remain young, no matter how old you are. (You still have to die and everything. But you can leave a beautiful corpse.)

1) ACTIVITY. Get your heart pumping, your limbs flailing. Even the numerous and serious injuries you suffer will not derail the effects of the truth: Active people stay young. Sedentary people would do the world a favor by dying young and getting out of the way.

2) ADEQUATE HYDRATION. Drinking plenty of water not only makes the above-mentioned activity more effectual, it also keeps the skin supple. Having to pee all the time is a little inconvenient, and drinking more than 64 ounces a day is obsessive overkill, but nothing can replace the old Adam's Ale. You may have observed something like this yourself: at a recent training for work, refreshments were provided at the lunch break. On one side of the spread was a tub full of bottled water. On the other was the soda. Guess to which side the healthy, vibrant people flocked. By contrast, a friend sat next to a large woman who actually replaces the water in her bottle with tapioca pudding. Sad and disgusting as that is, you can be comforted by the fact that anyone who routinely substitutes pudding for water is not long for the earth.

3) ABUNDANT FIBER. Make no mistake: Death starts in the colon. In a last ditch effort to preserve his digestive tract, my curmudgeon father recently tried to achieve the FDA recommended daily allowance of fiber. He discovered that he had to eat a high fiber cereal in specially fiber enhanced soy milk for breakfast, enhanced fiber bread at lunch, and a fiber focused salad with dinner. What a chore, I know. But remember that happiness comes from the inside. (Specifically, the colon.) Happy innards make the whole soul smile.

There are other ingredients that people associate with the Fountain of Youth, (laughter, sex, etc.) but they are mostly philosophical seasoning. You wouldn't eat lemon pepper by itself, or eat sugar by the spoonful, would you? Wait, some of us might. Just remember that without the three fundamentals, "young at heart" means simply immature. And immaturity is not eternal youth, no matter how many sitcoms are based on that premise.