Chip Conley tells the story of taking an online life expectancy assessment and discovering he was only halfway through his projected adult lifetime.
After reflecting on this yesterday, I decide to find one of those calculators to see what I might expect.
The top one on Google (which means it must be the best, right?) was developed by University of Pennsylvania professors and is part of a retirement financial planning website.
Based on a short quiz about my habits, height and weight I got this estimate of life expectancy:
That got me thinking: what if I hadn’t made the changes outlined in My Health Journey over the last four years?
What if I still weighed more than 260 pounds?
Answering the quiz questions based on that scenario provided a strikingly different result:
So four years ago my remaining life expectancy was 35 years.
Today it’s 38 years!
I’ve lived four years while increasing my life expectancy by seven.
And given how much better I feel, and my increased energy, I think it’s highly likely those additional seven years will be productive and enjoyable instead of being characterized by disease and decline.
What result= do you get when you take the quiz?
It’s not too late to change it!
Brother! We resonate again.
I found it useful (and sometimes chilling) to change some numbers. What if I drank more (or less)? What if I were black? What if I, too, had not lost that weight? What if I hadn’t reversed my pre-diabetes?
Funny thing, how knowledge and awareness can empower action. Thanks for sharing this!