I took the ‘Vitality Compass’ quiz that Healtbolt’s Liz and Liberty challenged me to!

Over at Bluezones, which I mentioned in a previous post: Longevity around the world, they have a Vitality Compass quiz that you can take. It asks various questions and then tells you your:

• Biological Age

- Your body’s age given your habits

• Life Expectancy

- The age you are expected to live to

• Healthy Life Expectancy

- The age you are expected to be healthy to

• Blue Zone Years

- years your life has accrued

So how did I do?

Biological Age - well, I’m always kind of shy about my age (although if a person cared to dig around a bit they could figure it out) so I’ll say this much, its 5.2 years less than my chronological age! I guess that’s not too bad.

Life Expectancy- 94. I was kind of hoping for 100. I noticed one thing they didn’t ask was how long close relatives lived. It seems most women in my family have made it to at least 80, so I figured I probably had that much anyway. Still, 94’s not bad.

Healthy Life Expectancy - 85. I wonder how they calculate that?

Blue Zone Years - 11.6

Some issues/concerns with the quiz:

- I don’t remember how much I weighed 2 years ago, I guessed.

- the part about how many days I felt sad or worried. That’s hard to answer, honestly most days I might feel a twinge of sadness or worry about something, but I don’t know if that really counts. I wish they were more specific.

- the angry thing too. How angry is angry? I hardly ever get so angry I yell. I was pretty upset last week when one of our cats broke my glasses. But I got over it.

- mild physical activities (they don’t give a choice of 1-3 days either) and rigorous exercise were hard to answer accurately. I try to use a treadmill 4 times a week though.

When I retook it and changed eating to 4 servings each of fruits and vegetables, 0 to sweets and fast food (I haven’t had fast food in ages, but I now and then eat something sweet), and increased my nut consumption to the maximum I gained a little more time. Not as much as I would have thought though.

I was told I should eat more fish. I can’t eat fish high in omega 3’s like salmon very often anymore, I feel kind of sick when I do. And to engage in more group social activities. I don’t really have time or people to do that with. Does online interaction count? Maybe they should have asked if we blogged - and knocked 10 years off our lives if we say ‘yes’!