Most conversations about staying young turn into a list of treatments and jars. Meanwhile the women who look and feel different from their peers at fifty are usually running on small daily things repeated for years. The habits her own youth is built from were described by Peruquois, a top World Music performer in Australia, musician, composer, author and facilitator of self-development trainings for women.
Cold water
“I love swimming in mountain rivers where the water is 2 to 4 degrees. I have swum in Lake Baikal when the water was 4 degrees. Cold? But it stimulates collagen production, and that gives you healthy young skin,” says Peruquois.
Mountain rivers are not available to everyone, and she names the city substitute right away: a few minutes of cryotherapy will wake you and your system up.
Between those two sits what every woman already has: finishing a shower cold, washing your face in icy water, a couple of minutes of cool water on your arms and neck. What works here is regularity. One heroic plunge leaves the body nothing.
Singing
“Since the beginning of time, in every culture, in every country, women sang,” says Peruquois. Now, in her words, we have put a gag in our own mouths, we walk around silent, we endure, we pretend everything is under control. And stress levels in women today are higher than they have ever been.
The link to aging is direct. Stress breaks the body down, which means it ages it, and singing clears stress faster than most available methods. The voice works on the exhale, the exhale lengthens on its own, and the body steps out of permanent readiness.
Singing should tune you toward harmony. Volume alone does not do the job. You feel the difference within two minutes: one kind of singing leaves tired vocal cords, the other leaves warmth in the chest and an even breath.
Bone broth
“Bone broth is the ideal source of collagen and elastin,” says Peruquois. She calls it our grandmothers' secret, unfairly knocked off its pedestal by the wellness industry.
It has almost no taste of its own, which is convenient. You add it to grains, soups and purees and it changes nothing about the dish. The collagen women buy in jars, the body takes from ordinary food.
Sleep
“Healthy sleep is the foundation of everything for anyone who wants to stay young and well for a long time,” says Peruquois. And she names the reason almost no one sleeps deeply and happily: our systems are overloaded with adrenaline.
She went through roughly ten kinds of pillow herself, from ordinary to orthopedic, and even slept on a sheepskin, before she found what gave her the deepest sleep. What matters is the approach. A woman who wants to be rested investigates her sleep as carefully as she investigates her food.
Blue light in the evening
Blue light from phone and computer screens slows melatonin production, disrupts circadian rhythms and damages sleep. Peruquois calls this one of the main invisible reasons a woman goes to bed on time and still does not rest.
Her rule is simple: switch the devices off around eight in the evening. If that is impossible, there are glasses sold everywhere now that filter it.
Meditation and sound
“Stress destroys telomeres,” says Peruquois. Those are the caps on our DNA, in her comparison much like the plastic tips on a shoelace. As telomeres break down, the strand behind them starts to break down too, and a woman ages.
Hence her attention to deep meditation and to sound. Fifteen minutes a day is enough for the body to leave the state of anxious readiness, and it is that state that works against youth around the clock.
Love
“A woman lives on love,” says Peruquois. Regular intimacy does extend youth, but only when it is intimacy out of love. A woman's body does not open where there is no love, that is how we are built.
The point is wider than sex. “A woman ages and dries out when she does not allow herself to open in love,” says Peruquois. That includes accepting herself and her own body, and without it the rest of the list runs at half strength.
Movement and food
“Not all fitness is equally useful,” says Peruquois. With the years the body slows its production of growth hormone, the one that tells the system we are still young. You can stimulate it with short interval work: thirty seconds at the limit of your capacity and ninety seconds of rest, eight rounds.
Her second point is food. With a break of about twelve hours without eating, the body starts drawing energy by burning its own debris, a natural cellular cleanup with no punishing regimen. Here she adds a warning specifically for women: she does not advise programs with fasting windows longer than fourteen hours, because that can affect hormonal balance. Her own gap between dinner and breakfast is about thirteen hours.
What it adds up to
Not one item on this list is impressive by itself. Cold water on your arms, a bowl of broth, a phone switched off at eight, fifteen minutes of quiet, a song in the shower. Youth is assembled out of exactly this kind of repeated action, the kind the body receives every day and has time to adapt to.
A woman looking for the one decisive treatment keeps cycling through procedures and stays where she started. A woman who has built eight small things into her day is living in a different body a year later, without doing anything remarkable.
If you want to start with the simplest daily thing you can do for your body, take the Peruquois course Special Women's Morning Dance Practice, available on her website under Courses.
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