"Look, we're all aging," Maddy Dychtwald tells me. "That's a process that starts in the womb, and goes all the way to the day you die."

The 74 year-old co-founder of the consulting organization Age Wave and author (with Kate Hanley) of “Ageless Aging: A Woman's Guide to Increasing Healthspan, Brainspan, and Lifespan” knows that’s a reality our culture has difficulty reckoning with. She admits she was advised not to put the word “aging” in the title of her book, “because people don't like it.” But that was what drew me to it — that it wasn’t yet another guide to “anti-aging” or “fighting aging.” Yet what really piqued my interest was the Dychtwald’s frank, pragmatic inclusion of financial planning in her guidance.

A 2017 Groupon survey found that women spend up to $313 a month on their appearance — a habit that can cost $225,000 over an adult lifetime. And as someone who colors her hair and uses vitamin C serum, no judgment. But if we’re giving more of our paychecks to Sephora than our own savings and investments, it’s going to be a whole lot more challenging to keep feeling good in a few decades, when the doctor bills and prescriptions are adding up.

In acknowledging that while health is wealth, wealth is also health, Dychtwald gives realistic context to her other insights about fitness, food and connection. “When you have your financial house in order, it impacts your health in so many positive ways,” she writes.

I talked to Dychtwald recently about what women need to know about growing older as well as possible — and realistically, how much longer I keep eating cheese and bread.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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You say early on in the book that men die quicker and get sicker than women. What does that mean, in terms of how we need to be thinking strategically as we enter these next phases of our lives?

The good news is that we women have won the longevity lottery. We live an average of six years longer than men. But there is a dark side. The dark side is that our healthspans and our brainspans both don't match our lifespans as well as men’s do. The average woman spends somewhere between 12 and 14 years in a cascade of poor health at the end of her life. Who wants to live like that? That's the reality, but there's more to the reality. We have the power, we have the agency to change it. The most recent science tells us that up to 90% of our health and well-being is literally within our control. It has to do with our lifestyle, and our environment.

If you were to pick three things that would make the biggest difference, first, make sure you don't get diabetes. Of course, you have no control over type 1, but certainly type 2 diabetes and what many people call type 3 diabetes, which is cognitive........

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