If you have any sort of health and wellness goal this year, living longer should definitely be it—and Valter Longo is here to help. Longo is not only the director of the Longevity Institute at USC in Los Angeles and of the Program on Longevity and Cancer at IFOM (Molecular Oncology FIRC Institute) in Milan, but is the founder of Amazon.com bestseller The Longevity Diet, a program to help live a longer, healthier life. Among the longevity factors within your control, what you eat is the primary choice you can make that will affect whether you live to 60, 80, 100, or 110—and more important, whether you will get there in good health.The culmination of 25 years of research on aging, nutrition, and disease across the globe, this unique fasting-mimicking diet (FMD) lays out a simple solution to living long through nutrition. FMD does away with the misery and starvation most of us experience while fasting and helps you reap all the beneficial health effects of a restrictive diet while avoiding the negative stressors, like low energy and sleeplessness.

Longo, who is from a town in Italy that is home to some of the longest-lived people in the world, has one very sage piece of advice to share. “Start in your mid 20s since prescriptions of drugs to treat hypertension, high cholesterol and autoimmunities often start in the late 20s/early 30s,” he tells us. Here, this health expert shares five ways to prolong your life this year.

VALTER LONGO SHARES 5 EASY WAYS TO PROLONG YOUR LIFE

1. Eat a low but sufficient protein (0.35 grams per pound per day) pescatarian diet.
2. Eat within 12 hours a day (8 am-8 pm, 7 am- 7 pm)
3. If you are overweight or obese eat breakfast plus one meal a day plus a 100 Calorie low sugar snack.
4. Be nourished by eating sufficient vegetables, legumes and fish to get all vitamins, essential fatty acids and minerals.
5. Do between 2 and 12, 5 day fasting mimicking diets per year (www.prolonFMD.com)