BY YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM Make time for your health and get outside for a walk

OUTLIVE: THE SCIENCE AND ART OF LONGEVITY by Dr Peter Attia

(Vermilion £22, 496pp) HERE’S American doctor Peter Attia’s menu of what we should aim to be able to do when and if we reach our tenth decade: go for a hilly twomile hike; get up off the floor with just one arm for support; carry two heavy bags of groceries for half a mile; put a suitcase into an overhead locker; balance on one leg; have sex; pick up a small child; climb four flights of stairs; skip with a skipping rope; open an unopened jar.

He calls this the Centenarian Decathlon. Though this book celebrates longevity and the ‘outliving’ of our expected age of death, Attia stresses there’s not much point in being old if you’re miserable and decrepit; ‘ longevity is meaningless if your life sucks’.

Instead of a final ‘marginal decade’, when life is all diminishment, he wants us to have a ‘bonus decade’.

So, get yourself screened for as many kinds of cancer as possible, from your early 40s onwards. Look after your liver, and that means limiting Coca-Cola as well as alcohol (seven glasses per week should be our maximum alcohol allowance). Spend 80 minutes per week in the sauna. Exercise with weights. Eat loads of protein. ‘When did Noah build the ark? Long before it began to rain.’ We must be more Noah.

WALK YOURSELF HAPPY by Julia Bradbury

(Piatkus £20, 272pp)

‘WHEN I left hospital, having been separated from my left breast, I promised myself I would get outside every single day of my life from then onwards.’ Fresh air and exercise fill the pages of this inspiring memoir and self-help book by television presenter and mother of three Julia Bradbury, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2021.

After that scare, she appreciates every day, sticking her head out of her bathroom window each morning to admire and thank the London planetree, which replaces its own bark, a symbol of self-healing. This book, she writes, ‘is my manifesto for achievable and sustainable change’. She quotes Theodore Roosevelt: ‘Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.’

‘If you don’t make time for your health,’ she warns us, ‘you’ll be forced to make time for your illness.’

Not only does she recommend a daily walk as a hotline to wellbeing, she also advises us to breathe through our nose, not our mouth, as this boosts our immune system as well as perking up our mind.

BUILT TO MOVE: THE 10 ESSENTIAL HABITS TO HELP YOU MOVE FREELY AND LIVE FULLY by Kelly and Juliet Starrett

(Orion Spring £18.99, 336pp) ‘10 tests + 10 physical practices = 10 ways to make your body work better.’ Thus promises the follow-up to the Starretts’ previous best- seller Becoming A Supple Leopard. Their chief message is that ‘mobilisations’, not stretching, are our ticket to success. Mobilisations are rhythmic movements that massage our muscles and