A blog to help you optimize your full-body and life performance

Did you know the most common risk factors for health, disease, and mortality worldwide actually has nothing to do with lifestyle or genetics? It has to do with chronological age. (So, don't blame the family tree just yet) Chronological aging, the number on your birth certificate, is inevitable. But healthy aging, or biological aging, is within your control. The good news is that there are many ways to modify how your body ages biologically.

We often associate a lower BMI with ideal weight and good overall health. In many instances, this is true. However, overall health does not continue to improve as BMI continues to decrease. Instead, BMI is associated with overall health in a U-shaped curve, where BMIs that are either too high or too low are associated with decreased longevity.

When we think about healthy aging, most people picture going to the doctor once a year to get a clean bill of health, maybe minimizing age-related illness or any disabilities that might arise as the years start to add up. Entering your golden years healthy and happy are all that most people can ask for. Well, not if you’re the three-time defending CrossFit Games Champion in the 60+ age group. Dave Hippensteel is just that, and his goal is to crush anything in his path looking to slow him down. To Dave, age is just a number, a number he’s aiming to lower year after year.

Growing older is often met with acceptance, however, what if we took aging as an opportunity to continue to create our best self? In a fast-paced world, we tend to overlook the small things that will have a significant impact on our future self, especially when it comes to our health and wellness.

I sat down with someone who not only always seems to juggle what life throws at her, but surpasses her expectations. Meet my mom, Lisa Beaser, who has been using InsideTracker to help improve her training and to optimize her overall health.

That’s not clickbait. It’s fact. So far as InsideTracker’s InnerAge algorithm is concerned, five days of revelry in the inhospitable Black Rock Desert has aged my body by 21 years. I tested my blood the day before I departed for Burning Man (an annual week-long gathering celebrating music, art and individuality), and again six days after my return...

My InnerAge went from an impressive 26 years young to a horrifying 47 years old. And as we like to say around here, “Blood don’t lie!”

Sometimes, you really are talking to the smartest person in the room. David Sinclair, Ph.D. is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. He’s the co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging and has been a member of our scientific advisory board here at InsideTracker since the early days of the company. David is a world-class expert on aging; a quick Google search will produce an impressive dossier of additional accomplishments that alone would warrant a separate blog post. David's recent claim to fame is that he was selected by Time Magazine as one of their 100 Most Influential People In The World — along with Beyoncé. Not bad company to be in.

But, as I recently learned in a fascinating Q&A with this brilliant scientist, there are always new discoveries to be made... and sometimes, what we discover is that a simple answer has been sitting right in front of us all along. Such is the case in David's own quest to unlock a younger biological age. His acclaimed scientific studies have proven age reversal is possible, but it's InsideTracker that really turned back his clock.

How old are you?

Yes, that title is accurate. 

No, it’s not part of a cheap marketing gimmick or get-young-and-skinny scheme. I won’t be asking you to fork over cash for a bottle of dubious pills or useless bags of tea.

But it did make you stop and look, right?