The time machine has not yet been invented so there is no way to reverse chronological age but there is a concept known as "health age". Basically, health age measures the state of your physical health as compared to the general population and tells you how old you really are.
My Story
Twelve years ago I was in very bad shape. I won't show you a real picture of me from back in those days but I looked a lot like the guy below.
Source: Eduardo RS from Pixabay
I weighed 255 lbs and I was a smoker. I had a very high-stress job and equally high blood pressure. I was seriously depressed. I also had stage three liver disease from Hepatitis C. I probably didn't have long to live.
Something had to give.
I went through a year-long successful treatment for the hep C and I continued to work for a few more years but eventually, I had to take early retirement. Flash forward to today... I quit smoking, changed my diet and started to exercise. I lost weight and slowly my blood pressure came down and I was able to reduce the meds I took.
Today I weigh 157 lbs. That's 98 pounds of weight loss. I no longer require blood pressure medication... in fact, my BP is now a little on the low side. I walk for a couple of hours every day and take long bike rides about four days per week. I live as stress-free a lifestyle as possible and I'm very happy in my retirement.
My wife took this picture of me this morning as I was leaving for my bike ride.
Today I feel a lot younger than the guy I told you about at the beginning of this post. I wondered if there was a way to actually measure this so I looked for a website that could calculate my health age.
Here are the results:
- At age 55 my health age was 70 and my life expectancy was 65 years.
- At age 66 my health age is 50 and my life expectancy is 99 years.
Now I doubt those figures can be taken completely seriously but I do feel something very good has happened to me. How about you? Are you as young as you could be? Want to find out what your own health age is?
You can check it out here: https://exrx.net/Calculators/HealthAge
I'd be interested to hear your results and comments. Thanks for reading!