Expert Q&A: Rethinking what health looks like after 60, with Allison McCune Davis

The following interview is a transcript excerpt from The Heallist Podcast episode. Listen to the full audio version or watch the video below and subscribe to get notified of new episodes.

In this episode of the Heallist Podcast, we explore health in the second half of life with Allison McCune Davis, an author, traditional naturopath, and mother of five who has built a business in the world of natural health for the last 14 years while raising her family. In her new book, 60 Is a Good Start: A Powerful Body, a Purposeful Life, and a Plan to Make It Happen, Allison invites women to reimagine life after 60 and embrace aging as a time of opportunity, vitality, and purpose.

Drawing from her own turning point at 55 and stories from the women she works with, Allison shares why movement must become non-negotiable, how daily routines shape who we become, and why finding a new sense of purpose is as vital to well-being as nutrition or exercise. She introduces her self-perpetuating circle of purpose and the 60-Day Dare, explains how naturopathy looks for root causes rather than chasing symptoms, and highlights two tests she believes women in midlife and beyond should pay attention to: hormones and neurotransmitters.

This episode is offered for educational and reflective purposes only. It does not provide medical advice or recommend specific treatments. Its goal is to add context to complex health decisions and highlight the value of informed, personalized care across medical and integrative paradigms.

Reframing Aging For Women

Allison McCune Davis: Think about all those different cultures in the world that revere their older people and older women for the wisdom that they have. But America is America. I love our country. It's amazing. And at the same time, it is a modern, give-me-everything-fast, I-want-it-now mentality, and it just seems to be speeding more toward that with technology and all the things.

It is important to feel good. And I mean physically feel good, to be able to have a good decade of your 60s or your 50s or wherever you are. When I think back to being in my 20s and looking at women in their 60s, they seemed so old. And I don't remember them pursuing health. Maybe that was just in my little world, but it is critical.

That's what I'm really all about, and what I try to teach people and wrote about in my book: the fundamentals, and trying to simplify it into a plan. I was a TV producer before I got married, in my 20s and 30s in Los Angeles, and that job required serious planning. One series I produced for PBS was 26 shows, and we were producing all 26 at the same time. Then I homeschooled my kids for about 20 years, and it's the same thing. There has to be organization and a plan. Not that you always follow it, but at least there has to be a plan that you hopefully are going to be guided by. I love to have a plan, whether it's for the year, the month, the week, or the day. That is part of the fundamentals of having a good life. The book I wrote is really for women in midlife and beyond, but the truth is, it's just good basic fundamentals for anybody.

Making Exercise Non-Negotiable

Allison McCune Davis: I'm 65 right now, and 10 years ago, when I turned 55, I had a real threshold experience. I had my first child at 37, so at 55, with five kids, I had a house full. And I had not exercised regularly. In my 20s and early 30s I did, but once I was in the thick of it, I was not. I'd say, "Okay, I'm going to exercise," do it for a couple of weeks, and then it would drop off because things would happen.

When I hit 55, I thought, is it too late? Have I waited too long to start something regular? I remember reading a book by some older people who said, no, it's not too late. That inspired me to get with it. I had to decide in my mind that nothing was going to get in the way of me exercising. Nothing from my husband, nothing from my kids. If my kids have dirty clothes and are eating cereal for breakfast, I don't care. That's not really what happened, but I had to go extreme in my mind, because I knew that if I did not get into this, I was potentially not going to be here to be the mother.

So I started going to a gym. I had an appointment and went to a class twice a week. Then I added the third time, the fourth time, and the fifth time. My life centered around those little 45-minute appointments. There's always an excuse. There's always something that comes up. But you can decide that that is the priority.

By then, I had already been on the natural health bandwagon since about age 30, using herbs and exploring natural health as an alternative to prescription or over-the-counter medicines, and bringing healthy food into my house. But the exercise piece I had not gotten a hold of in the way I really wanted to, because it's important.

Ultimately, what do we want when we're 80, 85, 90? We want to be mobile. We want to be able to pick up a grandchild, carry a suitcase, go on a hike, or go on a trip and be able to walk around and do things. It's move it or lose it. Use it or lose it.

Daily Routines And Finding Purpose

Allison McCune Davis: The movement piece is big for everybody, and it's hard for everybody. So what I'm trying to do is solve the problem of inconsistency. There's a line I love: your future is hidden in your daily routine. What are you doing each day? Who do you want to be a year from now, five years from now, or 10 years from now? Is your daily routine getting you there? Because whatever you're doing each day, that's what you're going to be.

But a huge thing I hear from many women in their 50s and 60s is about purpose. About 85% of women have children, so that's a lot of women spending a large part of their life being a parent, being the hub of a family, constantly thinking about how they're going to launch this child into the world. Once the kids leave the nest, your whole life shifts. That's really what started me writing the book. I see so many women looking for that new purpose, or not even realizing they need one, just floundering in that space. Or maybe they've spent 30 years in a career and are sick of it. They're in this limbo, needing change and not even sure that's okay, wondering if their best years are behind them. And that's so not true.

The beautiful thing now is that we have some mental space, some margin, some white space in our brain where we can think about what kind of purpose we could have now. I think we have purpose till we die. It just may look different now.

I love to ask people: what were you thinking when you were a teenager, or even younger, or in your early 20s? What did you want to do with your life? It may or may not have turned out that way, but we have to pull on these threads to identify what you would really love to do now. We want to wake up in the morning and be excited about the day. If we're not, then we need to go in search of what that thing is going to be. I think we all have something, and it may be that we're affecting one other person or many other people.

My theory of working on all this I call the self-perpetuating circle of purpose. It has three pillars: body work, brain work, and world work. Body work is the physical. Brain work is the mental, emotional, and spiritual. World work is your outer world, which includes your purpose but also your relationships. I have the "big five" under each of those, and the idea is to engage in those regularly, maybe alternating things over time. Some you might already do every day, and others you might need to start doing a little bit of. If you're working on those, I think you're going to end up with a life without regrets at the end, which is the goal.

The 60-Day Dare That Works

Allison McCune Davis: One woman who comes to mind was about 60, and she was a vet. She was at that point of not knowing what her future was going to look like, with her kids raised and 30 years of doing what she'd been doing. We went through a process I call the 60-Day Dare, where you look at these three pillars and choose several things from each that you're going to do for 60 days. Because remember, your future is hidden in your daily routine.

In the world work area, there's a section called Dream, with 60 questions for the person who is in that space of not knowing what their purpose is anymore. Everything's changed. I want to do something, but I don't know what. That person journals their answer to one question per day, and I really think those questions get you to a point of saying, "I think this is the direction I can go in." At the end of it, she decided she was going to write a book from the point of view of a veterinarian. It had been in the back of her mind for quite a while.

We're creative beings. One of the big five in brain work I call Create. It's really for the purpose of de-stressing. Forty-five minutes of creative work, like needlework, gardening, or other things you do with your hands, lowers cortisol. And it can help get other creative juices going for something bigger, like writing a book, which could be more in the world of world work.

Another woman I worked with decided to go more into the natural health world and started doing Raindrop, a technique done on a massage table with very pure essential oils. It starts along your feet, from the big toe down to the heel, which represents the spine, similar to reflexology, and then it's done along your spine. It's for the purpose of supporting your immune system. So she's serving one person at a time that way, and she loves it.

Naturopathy Versus Symptom Chasing

Allison McCune Davis: The world of natural health just makes sense. The naturopath thinks in terms of toxins and deficiencies. What are we deficient in, like vitamins and minerals? We can figure that out with different tests: blood work, urine, saliva. What do our hormones look like? And then there are toxins in the world, usually in your laundry room, under your kitchen sink, and in your bathroom. All the things we put on our bodies and clean our house with can be so toxic. So one thing I try to help people do is get rid of all that, because there are wonderful alternatives that are not toxic. The older we get, the more we realize we have to focus on our health, and health takes a little bit of time.

My first experience was at 30, living in LA. I kept getting yeast infections. I'd use the over-the-counter treatment, and they'd come back. A friend told me to go to her TCM doctor, a traditional Chinese medicine doctor. My father was a surgeon, so I was very much in the medical world, and I thought, my dad would flip, but let's do it, because this is not working. It took six weeks to get in. He did muscle testing with all these different substances, environmental substances and foods, and finally said I had to stop dairy for about a year. He gave me some herbs, and it worked. I never got another one. Something natural solved a problem that the thing that was not natural did not. Then I really got interested in it and studied it.

There are all kinds of naturopaths. Naturopath, naturopathic doctor, functional health doctor, integrative medical doctor: those terms are kind of interchangeable. My advice is always to find somebody like that. If you still want to go to your regular doctor, fine. They'll probably have different opinions on certain things, and you'll have to decide which direction you want to go.

A natural health doctor is going to do a lot more kinds of tests and ask for a lot more biomarkers. A lab report gives you the range of what's normal. These doctors not only want you in that range, they want to optimize you within an even narrower range. It may look like you're in the normal range, but it may not be good enough. And there are so many modalities that each practitioner may focus on differently, whether that's muscle testing and herbs, iridology, or a certain brand of supplements.

The real thing is they're looking for the root cause. They're also looking at the body holistically, meaning everything works together as one unit. Modern medicine really compartmentalizes. One of my favorite books is Good Energy by Dr. Casey Means. She describes going to medical school, specializing in ear, nose, and throat surgery, and then being told to specialize even more in one tiny area. After doing surgeries and seeing patients not get better, she left that field to study cell metabolism, which is a very holistic thing to study. You have to look at the whole body and try to get to the root cause, versus cutting the thing out or masking the symptoms with medicine. Sometimes that is necessary, and I understand that. My father was a surgeon, and I 100% respect that profession. But when you start getting into it, there's a lot to think about.

Hormones And Mood Chemistry Checks

Allison McCune Davis: There's a line in the world of natural health: if your hormones aren't right, nothing else really works. So that's one of the number one critical things to look at and address, and to check every six months or every year, for sure every year. Where are your estrogen, your testosterone, your progesterone? And what are you using to move the needle on those? As we go through our 50s and even 60s, it's still changing, so we need to be constantly looking at that. A lot of people check with a blood test, but it can also be done with a saliva test, which many naturopathic doctors prefer. You could even do both and compare.

Another important one is the neurohormone test, which a lot of regular medical doctors don't do at all. It's a urine test that looks at dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and some other things. If you're feeling kind of down, those levels might be off. It does not mean you have to get on any kind of SSRI, because there are supplements for that. Those are two areas I would definitely want to look at to see where you are.

There's so much out there. You just have to find somebody you trust and go that route.

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