I’m 74 years old. I take no medication. I rarely have a reason to see a doctor other than getting blood work done and keeping an eye on what’s going on inside me. My recent blood work tells me things are looking pretty darn good.
My mother is 104, and she has spent an even longer lifetime doing many of the same things I believe in—probably more consistently than I have, if I’m being truthful.
Does that prove we’ve discovered the secret to living a long life? Of course not. Genetics matter. Luck matters. Circumstances matter. Things happen to perfectly healthy people that they could never have predicted or prevented.
But there is one part of this equation that belongs to us: what we do every day.
And that’s what this website is really about.
Health Doesn’t Start When Something Goes Wrong
We have a strange tendency to think seriously about our health only after we lose some of it. The warning light comes on. The blood pressure climbs. The blood sugar changes. Something hurts. We can’t do something we used to do. Then suddenly health becomes important.
I’ve always looked at it somewhat differently. Why wait for the warning light?
If I owned a beautiful old car that I intended to drive for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t wait until smoke was pouring out from under the hood before I changed the oil. Yet sometimes we treat our bodies exactly that way.
We maintain our houses, our cars and our bank accounts. We maintain damn near everything we value. Why wouldn’t we maintain ourselves?
Prevention Isn’t Something You Do. It’s How You Live.
I don’t think prevention is a vitamin, a diet, a workout program or something you decide to do every January. It’s cumulative. It’s thousands upon thousands of ordinary decisions made over a lifetime.
Move your body. Eat reasonably well. Drink water. Sleep. Rest when you need rest. Challenge yourself. Use your muscles. Use your brain. Pay attention to what your body is telling you.
And when you push yourself hard—which I certainly have a tendency to do—recover properly too.
I’ve never exactly lived my life wrapped in bubble wrap. I like intensity. I like adventure. I’ve pushed myself physically and mentally, and I’ve probably done a few things over the years that wouldn’t appear in anybody’s official longevity handbook.
But I’ve also learned to respect recovery. There is a time to push and there is a time to rebuild. Knowing the difference becomes increasingly important as the years pile up.
What 104 Years Has Taught Me
You can’t spend years caring for somebody who reaches 104 without thinking about longevity.
My mother has lived a remarkably preventative life. Nothing fancy. Nothing fashionable. Certainly nothing invented by some social-media health guru last Tuesday.
Just habits. Consistency. Movement. Food. Routine. Resilience. Purpose. And an extraordinary ability to keep going.
Watching her has reinforced something I’ve believed for a long time: the things that protect us later in life are often the things we’ve been quietly doing for decades.
That’s the frustrating thing about prevention. There isn’t always an immediate reward. You take a walk today and nobody hands you a trophy. You choose a decent meal and there are no fireworks. You go to bed instead of running yourself into the ground and nobody congratulates you.
But those decisions accumulate.
Your body keeps the score.
Be Your Own Doctor
This phrase is important to me, so let me explain exactly what I mean by it.
Be Your Own Doctor does not mean don’t have a doctor.
Doctors are valuable. Testing is valuable. Diagnosis is valuable. Modern medicine can do extraordinary things, and there are times when you would be foolish not to use it.
What I reject is the idea that I can hand somebody else complete responsibility for my health. I can’t. Neither can you.
A doctor might see you for twenty minutes. You live inside your body 24 hours a day.
You decide what goes into it. You decide whether it moves. You know when something has changed. You can learn your numbers, ask questions, investigate, get another opinion and participate intelligently in decisions about your own health.
That’s what I mean by being your own doctor.
Not replacing medicine. Taking your rightful place in the process.
Prevention Is About Freedom
At 74, I’ve come to believe that health isn’t primarily about adding years to your life. I hope I get plenty more of those, but that’s not the whole game.
I want life in my years.
I want to think clearly. Move. Create. Laugh. Learn. Build this crazy website. Take care of the people I love. Wake up interested in something. And remain as independent as I possibly can for as long as I possibly can.
Every bit of strength you preserve matters. Every bit of mobility matters. Every bit of independence matters. Every year you can continue doing the things that make you you matters.
And you don’t start preparing for that at 74.
You start wherever you happen to be today.
You Don’t Have to Be Perfect
Thank God, because I certainly haven’t been.
This isn’t about living some joyless existence where every calorie is measured and every morning begins at 5:00 a.m. with an ice bath while somebody on the Internet tells you how disciplined they are.
Live your life. Have some fun. Screw up occasionally. Eat the dessert. Stay up too late once in a while. Be a little crazy.
But learn how to come home to yourself.
Recover. Reset. Pay attention. And don’t let a bad day turn into a bad decade.
Perfection isn’t the objective. Direction is.
Insure Your Health Yourself
And that brings me to the name of this website.
America has built an enormous healthcare system around health insurance. But insurance usually becomes important when something has already happened.
My idea is different.
What if, long before something goes wrong, we spend our lives insuring our health ourselves?
Not instead of doctors. Not instead of appropriate medical care. But before we need either one, doing what we reasonably can to protect the health we already have.
Your real health insurance policy is being written every day. It’s in your kitchen. It’s in your bedroom. It’s in your shoes. It’s in your muscles. It’s in your habits, your attitude and your willingness to learn.
There are no guarantees. My mother reaching 104 doesn’t guarantee I’ll reach 104. Nothing I write on this website can guarantee how long anybody else will live.
That’s not the promise.
The promise is much simpler:
Give yourself a fighting chance.
Stack whatever odds you can in your favor. Learn about your own body. Protect what you’ve got while you’ve still got it. And don’t wait for somebody else to become more interested in your health than you are.
Because ultimately, nobody lives in that body except you.
Take care of it. Use it. Challenge it. Let it recover. Learn from it.
Insure Your Health Yourself.