Taking Care of Your Brain While Increasing Your HealthSpan by Counting Your Steps ... for Linda and Roy

Health span.  Increasing the span of healthy/active living.

Step #1

An excellent way to keep your brain healthy for 120 And Beyond is daily exercise and the Mind Diet as described HERE by the Mayo Clinic.  The human brain makes up 2% of body's weight but consumes 20% of the body's oxygen supply.  Our brains high oxygen demand is so important that it employs drastic measures like fainting to restore circulation and proper oxygen delivery to the brain.

My cardiologist has ordered me to 5-6 days of cardio per week [includes walking]. Cardio vascular activity, like walking or cycling stimulates the heart to increase blood flow and 20% of that increased oxygen supply is gobbled up by your brain!  I'm up to about 5 days of cardio per week.

My wearable device tracks my daily steps then sends them to the Activity App on my phone. This works for androids too.  From there, I enter the daily total on the custom spreadsheet below.  This spreadsheet tallies my steps by the week month and year.  I've been tracking my steps since September 17, 2015.

Why bother?  Beginning in 2015 my step count averaged between 103,000 to 124,000 steps per month. Along the way I noticed a tendency to want to increase my monthly step count and I'm betting that will extend my health span further into the future.  

In June of 2021, I challenged my family to track steps with me by posting our steps onto a spreadsheet. That month my total was 224,056 steps. 

June: 224,056

July: 308,973  

August: 351,486    

September: 334,383

Once other family members were part of the process, my numbers jumped an additional 100,000 steps per month. 

It takes three months to change a new behavior into a habit.  I’m testing this hypothesis. I wonder if these new numbers are sustainable.  If so I expect an accompanying increase in health span.

Now I have more of an incentive to go out and walk or spin ... even when I'm feeling a little lazy. I frame it this way:  each day I exercise for an hour adds an additional healthy and active day onto my health span lifespan.  I've been called an optimist but hey... that's not a bad way to conduct business.

I've created a Steps Counter Spreadsheet Template for public use...

I'll post the link here.  Stay tuned.

Health Span Research

HealthSpan: 120 and Beyond

a life well lived, a life worth living.

Science will be able to extend life beyond 120

Click HERE for the Guardian Article 

Extending health span is the journey, negligible senescence and enjoying life along the way is the quest.  So make a list of all the things you want to do.  Click HERE.   

Enjoyable living beyond 120 is afloat on a rising tide of research bent on repairing the damage that builds up in our bodies during our life time.  This enjoyable journey is made possible by pharmacological longevity research, by examining the roots of aging in our DNA, by reducing frailty and disability, by minimizing age-related disease risks and by combining this building body of knowledge with the proactive practice of taking care of what we have along the way.

In September 2013 Google announced the creation of Calico, short for the California Life Company. Its mission is to reverse engineer the biology that controls lifespan and “devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives”.

Here are links to 5 research institutes paving the way.

1. Google Calico

2  The Ellison Medical Foundation,

3. The Paul F Glenn Foundation for Medical Research

4. The Buck Institute for Research on Ageing

5. Negligible Senescence

At the cellular level, the molecular phenotypes of aging are being characterized.

What if neuro precursor cells could be injected directly into the human brain? Would these cells now do what they did in our earliest embryonic development? Would they migrate to their proper place in the brain? Would these new cells effectively replace older, less efficient brain cells that contribute to neurodegeneration? Could this be the breakthrough enabling people to continue to get smarter as we get older?

Have a relative who has lived beyond 90 or 100? How inheritable is longevity? Calico researcher Graham Ruby answers this question.  7%  Click HERE for details.  He concluded that heritability of lifespan appears to be much lower than previously reported -- as low as seven percent.