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Youthfulness an American Obsession - At What Cost?

At 5 foot 11, he admits he’s “scrawny,” which he calls the main drawback.

Hunger and wearing extra clothes to stay warm — because of little body fat or, he claims, an effect of slowed aging — are barely annoyances for Delaney.

He says he eats sensibly, replacing junk food with lots of fruits and vegetables, no meat, and two meals daily — no lunch. Breakfast is often “a hearty bowl” of granola, with fruit, nuts and soy milk; while dinner could be fish, rice, beans, a large salad and red wine.

Other than “tons of fine wrinkles” he blames on too much sun as a kid, Delaney says in most respects, “I look much younger” than 45.

It is a bragging right many strive for.

Dr. Jeffry Life when he was 67, after being on the Cenegenics program for about two years. Life, the chief medical officer at Cenegenics, will be 70 this Christmas day. (Source: AP)

“When we were younger, we’d talk about someone who was 60 and that was old. And now my gym is full of women over 60 and they look phenomenal,” says Renee Young, a 48-year-old businesswoman in New Rochelle, N.Y. “They don’t want to be categorized as old.”

But there’s more to it than that. Youthfulness, she says frankly, is also a means of survival in the business world, including in her line of work, public relations.

“It feels like you’re put out to pasture. No one wants to feel that how they look means that their ability to do anything is decreased,” Young says. “If you have a younger look, you feel healthier. You feel that you’re still in the game.”

In the back of her mind is the fact that her own mother died when she was only 56.

So five or six mornings a week, even when she’d rather pull the covers over her head, Young gets up and puts in two hours at the gym.

That’s more than double the hour or so a day generally recommended for optimal health. And still, for her, that wasn’t enough. She recently spent nearly $20,000 on a tummy tuck because, as she puts it, no number of abdominal crunches was going to make her as trim as she wanted to be.

The result has been a makeover for her entire sense of self, she says.

“I made a commitment this summer. If I was going to go through all this surgery, then it was going to have to be part of a complete program,” says Young, who’s also getting more rest and eating healthier.

“I can definitely see the result.” She, too, says she has not felt this good in years.

Using a cosmetic procedure as a motivator is worthwhile, and lucrative, to say the least, says Dr. Jonathan Lippitz. He’s an emergency room physician in suburban Chicago who does cosmetic procedures, such as Botox and skin fillers, in a separate practice.

But it’s also a “very slippery slope,” with patients sometimes willing to take more risk than they should and some doctors who’ll accommodate.

“They’ll always find somebody willing to do it,” he says.

In his own practice, he says he finds himself continually walking a fine line in deciding which procedures he’ll do — and which ones he won’t.

“We all say, ‘I want my hair different. I want my eyes different,’” Lippitz says. "This idea of being perfect is a problem, though, because it’s not reality.

“I have people coming in and saying ‘I want these lips.’ I say, ‘You can’t have these lips.’

“I say, ’We’ll work with what you have.’”

But what if what they have is just fine? These are the sorts of questions that trouble Dr. Michael Morgan, a dentist who does cosmetic work in another Chicago suburb.

He’s been seeing more young, female clients walking through his doors. And even his own 13-year-old daughter asked if he would whiten her teeth, something he didn’t think she needed. Nor did he consider it safe for her young teeth or “age appropriate.”

“There’s a consciousness about it. They are much more concerned with the appearance of their face. But there’s also a social pressure,” he says of the younger generation for whom he’ll do the most conservative procedures, but no more.