Grow old like Okinawans

3 months ago, I watched a reality show on Netflix about people who lives over 100 in few spots across continents. These spots are called the “Blue Zones” and they share similar themes of healthy lifestyle to keep them living over 100. Fascinating! Dan Buettner, the journalist who’s now the blue zones expert. He made years of research on finding out the secrets of the people who lives in these spots has share great lessons he learned from the interviews with these elderly.

There are about 5 spots of blue zones (refer the map below). Okinawa, has the highest number of people who lives over 100 and I am so interested to adopt the way they live.

5 places of Blue Zones

Here’s some of key points I took. There’s nothing really surprising as it is all come down to simplicity and the basic of life that we hear many life Gurus talk about:

#1 Plant-based diet

It’s no news to us whilst the plant-based trend is on the rise today. But specifically in Okinawa, people have a high intake of sweet potatoes (specifically the purple one!) and also at least a cup of green beans daily! Most people in the blue zone areas has a low consumptions of animal based food. Research shows having this in your diet could increase your longevity by 40% than those who don’t take them. In an interview Dan Buettner had with Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, he also mentioned that 7 cups of green tea a day has a tremendous benefits to our health.

#2 Create social circle

Laugh with friends! Engage with your loved ones and healthy relationships. Ditch toxic people/job and create a thick wall of boundaries from connecting with them again. This might take a lot of effort to make a shift especially in current stirring economy but it is something that we can continue to work on. According to Dan Buettner, having close friends can brings a measurable influence to our health in a way that diet never can. People in blue zones usually spend their after dinner having drinks together and chat about life; they’ll avoid talking about politics and stressful issues.

#3 Move daily

It’s in their routine and it’s truly their lifestyle. They wake up early everyday either to walk up the hill to go to morning church, meet up friends to have morning coffee together, do gardening or even meet up to prepare meals together. Whatever they do it’s either involve connecting with others purposefully or making something that will be useful for them later (ie. gardening, carpentry etc). Look at us, some of us could have the luxury to work from home but we are glued down to the desk 8 hours a day or maybe sometimes more, end the day scrolling our phone draining our last few energy with the luxury of ordering processed food sent to our door. What kind of life we are living in?

#4 Ikigai

Chasing purpose is better than chasing happiness. When you have a sense of purpose, you will be passionate at what you do and truly believe what you do has and can give positive impacts on others. And that’s a happiness!

#5 Don’t stress it and be living

This require a high quality mindset, essentially comes from high quality sleeps and rests, high quality foods supplies, high quality of work and life and high quality time with friends and family. If you are a millenial, remember how we grew up without gadgets, remember how we sits together for dinner without anyone go insane taking pictures of food for the Gram, remember how our mom read us bedtime stories till we fall asleep without ipad in our palms and remember how we engage with our friends exploring the world outside when we play? Those are the kind of environment that these blue zones people still living in after all these years!

Grow old like Okinawans. This is a luxury life my husband and I. Well for me, living over 100 will get me to read more books too!

On seriousness, it’s a life long goals that we both aiming for and maybe some of us out there who have smilar mindset too.

All these facts are not new and I really appreciate how Buettner put this together to bring awareness to replicate more blue zones across the world. I’ve attached a short conversation he had at Jay Shetty’s ‘On Purpose’ podcast.