A colleague passed by my desk in Business Day’s newsroom yesterday and hurled a question at me:  What’s the real secret to longevity?

Since I am editor of Business Day’s Health News publication – and I really like the colleague –  I felt obliged to take his question seriously, and give him a thoughtful answer. So I did the only decent thing: whipped out the crystal ball I keep stashed in my drawer, peered into it, and saw an answer immediately spring to life: chocolate.

Forget calorie restriction. Life’s too short for deprivation, despite all the science that appears to prove the benefits of deliberately starving yourself. I’ve been there, done that, got the tiny t shirt, don’t see a need to do it ever again.

Ditto for the most extreme form of calorie restriction – fasting.

However, if I was ever to become seriously ill, I would consider some form of fasting. I take my cue from animals: they don’t eat when they are sick. And I subscribe to the advice of one of my forebears – the ancient Greek sage Aristotle, known as the Father of modern medicine, who said: Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food.

Chocolate is food. No, but seriously.  I only half jest.

Life is much more than just a numbers game. It’s not how long you live on this planet that counts, but how well you live those years – at least in my humble opinion.

As my martial arts teacher keeps telling me, a short life can be a long life, if it is lived wisely and well. The converse applies: a long life can be very short on happiness and health, if lived unwisely and unwell – which really means against the natural flow.

Living wisely and well requires living “in the moment”. Not an easy thing to do, for most of us, but really, the present moment is all we have, so we might as well enjoy it.

And remember what the Kung Fu Panda said: The present is called the present because it’s a gift.

If you don’t know how to focus your mind on the present, learn Buddhist meditation. It’s all about focusing on the present.

Or eat chocolate. One of the properties of chocolate is that it focuses the mind on the present – and the palate.

Not dark chocolate – for me. It’s far too healthy for my liking. It has a bitter after taste, a little too medicinal. It doesn’t  soothe my fevered brow after a hard day at the office or focus my mind on anything other than how much I dislike it.

Nor do I like chocolate cake, or chocolate pudding. I was raised on the milk of milk chocolate, Swiss or Belgian best of all.

So, along with a daily dose of exercise, and eating according to the 80-20 rule (eating well 80% of the time, pigging out 20%, and chocolate falls into that 20%), I make sure to live and eat in ways that get life-extending, mood-enhancing endorphins moving swiftly through my veins. That’s the best way to sweep out the stale energy, and make room for the new to boost health in body and mind.

That’s the story of my life extension plan, and I’m sticking to it.

Tags: #chocolate, #crystal ball, #Longevity