And yet my culture tells me that I shouldn’t be. I’m over the hill, maybe even the whole mountain range, but I don’t see it that way even one little bit. One of my mentors on this issue is Cherie Soria, founder and director of the Living Light Culinary Institute, an academy for raw gourmet chefs in Fort Bragg, Calif. Cherie is a woman who defies chronological age, and people often comment on how well time treats her. “But that’s not it,” she says. “I’m aging normally: everybody else is aging too fast.”

She has a point. The lifestyle typical of most Americans couldn’t be more pro-aging. We’re stressed to the max and call that good — we’re going to succeed, by golly, and once we do, we’re going to stay on top! We don’t sleep nearly enough. We work at desks and entertain ourselves in front of computer and TV screens. We drink coffee and soda and dirty martinis, figuring our kidneys are stupid enough to accept these as water. Most of our food has been either literally slaughtered or simply processed to death, and yet we expect, either through good genes, good luck, vitamin supplements or cosmetic surgery, to get that full-of-life glow. It’s an illogical premise.

Enter the feel-great/look-amazing/age-later lifestyle encapsulated in the acronym M.E.N.D.: Meditation, Exercise, Nourishment, Detoxification. Anyone who incorporates these regularly into his or her life can make peace with the calendar. Here’s how it works.

Meditation

This can be interpreted broadly as quiet time. You can use it for journal writing, prayer or sitting with a cup of tea and pondering life. However, if you want it to slow the aging process, you’d be smart to invest some serious time in classic meditation — in other words, focusing on your breath or on a word, sound, phrase or image and gently bringing your mind back there each time it wanders. You can start slowly — 10 minutes in the morning — but have the intention of working up to 20 minutes upon awakening and another 20 in the late afternoon or early evening. That’s the routine that Transcendental Meditation practitioners use, and they’ve been the subjects of most of the clinical research on the benefits of meditation, such as the study that showed that people who’d meditated regularly for five years or more were a whopping 12 years younger physiologically than non-meditators.

Exercise

The complex machine you’re living in was designed to move. I was a fat kid who didn’t discover the joys of active play at the time of life when we’re supposed to be imprinted with a love of movement. That means that I’d rather be called for jury duty than go to the gym, but I go anyway. In “Younger Next Year,” Chris Crowley and Dr. Harry Lodge contend that, at a cellular level, only two states of being are recognized: growth and decay. If you’re moving, the cells sense growth and do their darndest to take care of you; if you’re sedentary, they sense decay and they help you “rot.”

Nourishment

We get hung up on “nutrition,” the clinical study of the chemical reactions of various properties in foods and supplements. Nourishment, however, is much more than this. We’re nourished by everything we take in — our immediate environment, the scenery, conversation, music, movies. A chronically messy room isn’t nourishing. Neither is a hostile encounter, murder or mayhem, even on the silver screen.

When it comes to literal nourishment, the food we eat, life begets life. Fresh, colorful foods from the plant kingdom, minimally processed so that their life force stays intact, keep us young, energetic and beautiful. Beauty at 70 years old isn’t the same as beauty at 20 years old, but t is stunning nonetheless. If you want that kind of beauty then, start now by eating real food, lots of colors but mostly green. If you’re willing to go vegan and 80-percent raw, you may well be dazzling us all when you’re 80 and beyond. If you can’t see yourself going all the way with this, go part-way. Every step is a step in the right direction.

Drink fresh juice with greens in it. Eat really big salads; toss in some beans or sauteed broccoli or a chopped, steamed sweet potato. Discover fruits and vegetables that are new to you, and whole grains like millet, faro and quinoa. Make desserts from fruits and nuts, and sweeten your treats with whole dates or “date sugar” (that’s just dehydrated dates) so that everything you eat — that includes the chocolate cake and blueberry pie — is rejuvenating you.

Detoxification

“Detox” is such a buzzword these days, but it simply refers to reducing the body’s toxic load. Start by removing from your diet and environment whatever toxins you can: processed foods with added chemicals; animal products that carry a “biointesified and biomagnified” load of agricultural toxins; conventional cosmetics and toiletries (you absorb those chemicals through your skin); and whatever electromagnetic radiation you can cut down on by, for example, having a land-line phone that attaches to the wall, and charging your cell phone and computer somewhere other than in the room where you sleep.

When your diet, home and lifestyle are as clean as you can get them, your body itself will initiate a detoxification process. To help out, consider a few days of juice fasting if you’re a good candidate for it (i.e., you don’t have diabetes, hypoglycemia or an eating disorder, and you’re not on prescription drugs). Or try these more elementary detox tactics: Pick up a tongue scraper in the toothpaste aisle of the pharmacy or health food store and remove the coating that forms on your tongue each morning. While you’re shopping, get a dry skin brush and give your body an invigorating brush-up, toes to neck, before your bath or shower. Bounce on a mini-tram or, seated, on a big exercise ball; this will help your lymphatic system with its detoxifying efforts. Sweat — with exercise, hot yoga, time in the sauna — and drink plenty of water (all those fruits and veggies give you lots of naturally distilled water, too).

The upshot of it all? You get to have happy birthdays, even when you need a second cake to hold all the candles.

There’ll be a dance class at noon, a lecture on natural skin care and more yoga later on. I’ll give an evening presentation each night that I’m here, and do some private consultations with guests, but in another way I am a guest, taking yoga and fitness classes throughout the day, sweating in the steam room and sauna, dining (or juicing) deliciously and getting one or two luxurious services — massage, facial, scrub or the unctuous delight of Shirodhara, an Ayurvedic oil treatment that beautifies the body as it calms the mind.

I count coming to the New Age on a regular basis among the major blessings of my life, but every bit as beneficial as experiencing this lovely spa is that I’ve learned to live in a rather spa-like fashion in between visits. It’s not so much about getting to go to a spa every now and then, but rather making “spa” into a verb, and spa-ing as a way of life. The result: feeling vital and energized and, in my experience, a whole lot younger than when I was chronologically young.

To spa at home without spending much money isn’t difficult if you set your mind to it. It starts with a little acronym I coined: ME — meditation and exercise. Taking care of ME with meditation and exercise first thing in the morning means you’ve acknowledged the needs of your body and soul before you take on the responsibilities of the day ahead. As a result, the day goes more smoothly. You’re calmer and more centered. You feel good about yourself. You have more energy. You make better choices about food and rest and whether or not to speak your mind or click the “send” button if you have any doubt about the wisdom of doing so.

These two activities alone — 10 to 20 minutes of quiet time, focusing on your breath or a mantra or a positive affirmation; and some sweating, lifting and stretching — can be absolutely free and worth more than winning the lottery. Why? Because there are some things that money can’t buy: peace of mind, for starters, and lean muscle mass. Neither the Queen of England nor the founder of Microsoft can put in an order for either one. You have to get these for yourself, through the spa activities of meditation and exercise.

Then you have to eat. What’ll it be? Well, when you’re spa-ing, the choices will be top-notch: plant-based, fresh and adhering what I call the “Christmas tree approach to human nutrition.” This means your plate looks like a Christmas tree: mostly green, with splashes of other bright colors. For example, you start with a large salad of romaine or arugula or mixed baby greens, and you top it with cherry tomatoes, grated purple cabbage, a sprinkling of sunflower or hemp seeds and a steamed sweet potato. It’s what you’d do at a spa. If you’re spa-ing, it’s what you do at home, as well.

Of course, part of the allure of going to a spa is the going — getting away to a different place, time away from the pressures of work and other responsibilities. But I’m a big believer in living life as an extended working vacation. Of course you have a job, and you’re raising a family, doing volunteer work and making the beds (yes, at a spa, somebody else takes care of that task), but in between all the effort, all the dashing here and there, you can, if you turn “spa” into a verb, treat yourself deliciously during and in between all these other activities.

And you know what happens after you’ve done this for a while? You feel incredible — alive and energized. You look rested, with brighter eyes and clearer skin. You get leaner and you move with ease that makes age less relevant than you ever thought it could be. Your attitude gets a boost, too. Problems seem more solvable and the future looks brighter.

So, to spa or not to spa? That, I believe, is no longer a question.