Every year on the same day, we celebrate our birthdays. What changes, is the number of years we tell people when asked how old we have become. In our first 14–21 years, our chronological age plays a relevant role in our lives: the older we get, the more we are allowed to do, from staying away from home, drinking alcohol, driving cars or entering into contracts. After this initiation phase, most of us would prefer not having to add +1 each year — because most people want to get older. However, what people really don‘t want, is to age.

What Is Aging?

Aging can be described as the accumulative effect of diseases. The older we get, the worse our immune system functions. Bacteria and viruses our natural defence mechansism can easily fend off during our youth and early adulthood, become serious challengers of our health in our later years. The reason: during our cell division activities, more and more faulty information will be copied and used by our organism. That‘s why, for instance, the elderly can be seriously affected  having caught a simple cold. And that‘s why, nobody wants to get old — it seems to be a long process of continuosly decreasing health and loss of quality of life.

NOMIX & BIOCLOCK App

With our project NOMIX, we are analyzing genetic and epigenetic user data, to learn about our organism‘s way to cope with daily challenges, such as stress, viruses, bad food intake, sedentary lifestyles, etc.. We work with health data of our BIOCLOCK app users to provide each individual with a personalized recommemdation for a maximized healthspan; i.e. the part of her total lifespan the individual stays fit and healthy. Users who follow our advice stay fit and maximize their healthspan, in other words: they invest in their longevity. As a result, their bioage is significantly lower than their chronological age.

The official BIOCLOCK app will be launched in 2023, and the team has been working on longevity and its various componemts for quite a while. I myself have been interested in measuring my metabolic data since 2014 — and simce 2016, after having participated in the first Quantified Self Europe Conference, I knew the continuous collection and management of real-world health data of individuals would play a central role in the development of 4P medicine: the predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory approach that results in a paradigm shift within the health industry, as well as for each individual.

Longevity

I have changed my lifestyle, and I‘m still contantly finetuning, here and there. These changes have resulted in better overall fitness, greater endurance, higher concentration — and a significantly lower biological age than my calendar tells me. That‘s why I have decided not to celebrate my chronological, but my biological age, starting today! Alternatively, I could enjoy the additional healthy years I have added to my lifespan — but it‘s more pragmatic and easier to communicate that I‘m actually younger than my ID says.

We Can All Maximize Our Healthspan

What‘s right for me, is right for you! Longevity and a maximized healthspan is no magic, or limited to a happy few. Anybody can achieve more healthy years and live a much longer, happy life than the originally calculated lifespan suggests! If you want, you can also celebrate your bioage instead of your chronological age on your next birthday! If you‘re interested in longevity you might want to pre-register for the BIOCLOCK app.

The post Why I Use My Bioage To Celebrate My Birthday, And Why You Should, Too appeared first on MICHAEL REUTER.