I used to work in an office in Kensington, and whenever I nipped out for a mid-morning coffee, I'd see them. Immaculately dressed and usually leaning on a walking stick, the little old ladies of the Royal Borough would be going slowly about their business. They looked so frail, so fragile and limited in their movements, that they were terrifying to watch.
I'm not surprised to see that in this ICM survey, the biggest worry about ageing, for 45% of the women who were asked, is of physical deterioration. None of us wants to end up like that, or confined to a wheelchair, or an armchair in a care home. And I'm glad to see that it's a bigger worry than wrinkles (the main worry for one third of respondents), or just "looking old", which bothered 30% of the sample most. If women are still able to discern that it's far more important to stay mobile and mentally alert than to be wrinkle free, then we haven't entirely lost our heads in the pursuit of youth.
Talking of youth, is it worse for your health to chase that dream than to give in and grow old gracefully? I wish the question had been put on the questionnaire. There's nothing wrong with trying to stay young in body and mind – and face – as long as you do it with a pinch of realism. If it becomes an obsession, well, clearly, you're doomed to disappointment since age will, in the end, get the better of us all.
There are plenty of preventative measures that you can take which are just plain sensible. Exercise, for example, which not only keeps you fit and helps weight in check, but by encouraging the production of serotonin in the brain, helps you feel better, too. Swimming and cycling are great exercise, and easy enough to do.
Walking or jogging, which are weight-bearing, help maintain bone density and thus ward off the spectre of osteoporosis. Yoga will encourage better posture and greater mobility of joints and is wonderful at calming down over-busy brains. Learning to relax on a daily basis, whether through meditation, yoga, or learning breathing techniques, may not sound like an obvious anti-ageing strategy but is an excellent way to bring down stress levels and lower blood pressure into the bargain.
Working out with weights, which is too often anaethema to women in "middle youth", is actually a brilliant choice. Our bodies lose muscle as they age, and pushing weights, even quite gently, will halt this decline (otherwise, even if you're staying the same weight over the years, a greater proportion of that will be composed of fat).
The use-it-or-lose-it strategy applies to the brain, too. Mental exercise – crosswords, brain training, playing chess – help keep it nimble. Eating well (wholegrains, vegetables and avoiding refined carbohydrates) and not drinking too much alcohol is always a good idea, as is taking plenty of omega-3 essential fatty acids (they're a vital component of the membrane in every cell in body, so will help your brain stay well oiled as well as helping your skin stay smooth).
As for your face, a bit of TLC will be rewarded. If wrinkles are your big worry – and there are few brave women out there in the 30-49 age bracket who can honestly say that the prospect of more, deeper wrinkles simply doesn't bother them – the first thing to do is to use a moisturiser with an SPF15 sunscreen in it, every day, all year round.
It is exposure to ultraviolet light (daylight) that adds up over a lifetime to give us 80% of the wrinkles that we end up with, and preventing wrinkles is a lot simpler than trying to cure them. Well, let's be honest, there is no "cure" as such, though there's a wide range of measures that you can take, from investing in the more powerful, hi-tech creams and serums that promise remarkable results, to experimenting with injectible wrinkle-freezers and face-fillers to replace the volume that drops off the face in mid-life, to skin-resurfacing lasers, or going the whole hog and having a facelift.
Actually, whole facelifts are far less common these days. What the cunning age-avoiders do is start early with the odd tweak – a little brow-lift here, a nip and tuck on the saggy bits of the upper eyelid, a tautening of the muscles in the mid-face – to prevent the need for a full-blown slicing and re-draping of the skin later. As for the vexed question of whether anti-ageing creams work.
The one ingredient that works beyond doubt is Tretinoin (sold as Retin-A), which is only available on a dermatologist's prescription, and which will irritate the skin, so which needs to be used cautiously and under supervision. On the mass market, whenever creams make claims about their effects, these will have been substantiated in clinical trials, though whether you too will get the results they claim is debatable.
So there's your plan of action. If you feel you can't be bothered, then think, as I often do, of those little old ladies. They might be all the motivation you need.
