Are You On Track To Live 20% Of Your Life With Disease?

Are you on track to live 20% of your life with disease? While life expectancy makes all the headlines, the more important term to learn about is healthspan.

What is healthspan?

Healthspan is typically defined as how long you live without serious disease.

A better definition comes from Dr. Peter Attia:

“My clinical interest is longevity, which is a function of lifespan and healthspan; In math parlance, longevity = f (lifespan, healthspan). Lifespan is pretty easy to define. It’s the number of years you live. Healthspan is intuitively obvious, but a bit harder to define. For simplicity, let’s agree that healthspan is a measure of how well, not necessarily long, you live. Further, let’s agree that one without the other—long lifespan with poor healthspan or short lifespan with rich healthspan—isn’t what most people want. This has the makings of a complex, nonlinear, multivariate optimization problem.”

Living Well

So how do we define “living well?”

Attia’s goal is to help his patients extend the x-axis (lifespan; how long you live) and keep healthspan high on the y-axis. The result: pushing “your curve” up and out which results in living well, longer.

Attia then deconstructs healthspan:

"Healthspan, in its most distilled form, is about preserving three elements of life as long as possible:

1. Brain—namely, how long can you preserve cognition (i.e., executive function, processing speed, short-term memory)

2. Body—specifically, how long can you maintain muscle mass, functional movement and strength, flexibility, and freedom from pain

3. Spirit—how robust is your social support network and your sense of purpose"

The perfect scenario: your healthspan and lifespan are the same. You live to be 100 (or more), disease free, fully functional and independent and die peacefully in your sleep.

In the U.S. the gap between healthspan and lifespan is 16 years. In round numbers, this means we live 20% of our lives in an unhealthy state.

The average healthspan is 63 and the average lifespan is 79. This means the average American will spend the last 16 years of his or her life in declining health dealing with some kind of serious disease along with decreased cognitive abilities, reduced physical function and a diminished spirit.

So now what?

If you are a Man over 50, it’s time to make a decision.

Are you going to be average and slip into your last segment of life in declining health?

Or, are you willing to make changes to your health to improve your brain, body and spirit?

At Argent Alpha, we focus on improving all 3 areas of healthspan:

1. Brain

2. Body

3. Spirit

We start by focusing on body composition. If you are overweight or obese, you cannot maximize your healthspan. Our target is 15% body fat. We emphasize building muscle mass, decreasing fat, and increasing mobility, flexibility, stability and strength. These all directly improve the "body" part of healthspan.

Our approach to improving physical health and function also directly contributes to improved cognition and brain health. Our 5 foundational pillars, "The Alpha 5" all contribute to improved cognition and mental clarity. They are Mindset, Sleep, Nutrition, Fitness and Hydration.

The nature of our community (“band of brothers”) contributes to your sense of purpose and belonging to a group of like-minded Men who are focused on living the 2nd half of life at an optimal level. Iron sharpens iron. This helps develop the spirit part of healthspan.

Take Action

By focusing on improving your brain, body and spirit, you'll have a positive impact on your healthspan. And by doing so, you'll avoid joining the average person who spends 20% of his or her life in a state of physical and mental decline.One place to start: Go back and read through previous Harder To Kill newsletters. Success leaves clues.

A specific place to start is with last week's edition where we lay out a week by week plan.

If you are a man over 50, complete this form and I'll follow up with you in 24 hours. Our program delivers the structure, accountability, community and results Men over 50 need to stay out of the 20% decline group.

The deadline is January 30 and we have spots open for up to 15 men; 5 of these spots are filled as of the date of this newsletter so act now.