Radical Longevity: Practical Lessons on Sustaining Vitality

4 min readMay 6, 2021

The toxic bioaccumulation in our world has reached a fever pitch.

Ten years ago, I was worried. Twenty years ago, I was cautious.

Now? I’m frantic, and if you’re paying attention, you should be too.

Ann Louise Gittleman, who is 71 years young (though you’d never know it to hear about how she spends her days), fell into this world 40 years ago. The woman who became her mentor was 84 when they met; she lived to be 106.

She taught Ann everything she knew about longevity, and sparked in her a powerful urge to grow stronger as the years advance.

Now, her life is lived in the service of unearthing cutting edge resources that dismantle the myth of aging.

In other words, it doesn’t have to be like this. The face of aging has changed so drastically in the last century, two centuries, millennia even.

We’re living longer, but we’re not necessarily living healthier.

Society’s seniors are besieged by neurodegenerative disorders, chronic low energy, brittle bones, and a bioaccumulation of toxins that crash into each other and cast a wide net for health issues from diabetes to cancer.

That’s where the term radical longevity comes from — we don’t want to live longer in misery. We want to live longer in “fearless passion, resilience, pride, and the ability to regenerate yourself on a cellular level.”

The future is here, and Ann’s at the helm. That’s why I brought her onto The Urban Monk Podcast. I was dying to hear what she’s into these days.

Toxins Have Only Gotten Worse

There are four major classes of toxins you need to get rid of — heavy metals, fungus, parasites, and radiation.

If you don’t get rid of those, they’ll follow you around forever and cause mischief and pain all over your life.

That’s the idea behind detoxifying.

We don’t just want to offset disease and live in fear of what’s coming around the corner… We want to remove the obstacles standing between us and regenerative, constant, easy health.

Ann believes it’s not just about detoxifying from EMS, smart meters, cell towers, baby monitors — it’s vital to detoxify our emotional and mental level of consciousness as well.

To that end, her experience (and mine as well) has been that emotional trauma is not an island.

In fact, she almost nevers sees a client with an autoimmune disorder who doesn’t also have repressed childhood traumas. As we talk about all the time, those emotional resonances aren’t figurative — they’re real, they’re tangible, and they can get stuck all over your body from your nervous system to your fascia.

She usually recommends psychotherapy, meditation, daily deep breathing, and even flower remedies from the acclaimed Welsh homeopath Bosch who pioneered the modern use of flowers as well as herbal curing.

But that’s just the surface. She talked to me about neuromuscular massage, releasing adhesions and stuck energy, treating scar tissue, myofascial release, clearing passages, prolozone therapy, and so much more.

Against my experience in functional medicine, that stacks up completely.

We weren’t talking about fascia and meridians — but they coincide. That’s actually one of the proven benefits of acupuncture. When you activate those neuromuscular fibers that are bundled and spun, you get the fascia to release.

And then you’re really cooking with gas.

Where Do You Even Start?

Once you start learning about the interconnectedness of the body… the toxic load we’re all carrying… and how each of those systems poison each other when those toxins aren’t released…

You never look back.

Ann talked to me about where she’d send a beginner who had just learned about how dark our current situation is, especially the more connected you are to urban life and how far you are from the harmful toxins swimming in the air and the water and the food.

And it’s not the colon. It’s not the liver. It’s the mouth.

The oral biome is the gateway to the rest of the body. It’s where we breathe in the air, drink the water, eat the food, smoke, and the state of dental care in the U.S. is abominable.

But you’ll have to check out the episode to learn more.

You’ll find out: