How old are you?

How old are you? If you answered based on the year you were born, you’re probably wrong.  Why?

Because chronological age is meaningless.

It’s the age of the body that’s important.

That’s what just about everyone who studies human aging now believes.  The Baltimore Longitudinal Study, a massive effort that tracked 3000 people from their twenties to their nineties, concluded that people age at such vastly different rates that by the time they reach 80 or 90 the differences are so marked as to make birthdates entirely irrelevant.  But you don’t have to wait to age 80 to see this. There’s widespread agreement that after age 35 or 40, the date on your birth certificate is one of the least accurate indications of how old you are.

Yes:  Every day we get older.  But the pace at which we grow older varies enormously.  We don’t have control of the former.  We do have far more control than we think of the latter.

The old way of looking at aging is that the body just progressively falls apart, and the best way to stay healthy and live a long life is to…remember this great piece of advice?… choose your parents wisely.  Gee, thanks a lot.  Now several decades of re-focused research on aging is telling us something different.  And more helpful!

It seems that we age – that is, our bodies age – in a way and at a rate that is greatly affected by the everyday choices we make.  The way we live our lives.

That means physical activity (or lack thereof), healthy eating (or not), stress-reducing behavior (or freak-outs), satisfying (or stultifying) work, agreeable (or disagreeable) relationships.  Do we challenge ourselves or go on auto-pilot?  Make an effort to rebound from life’s vicissitudes or wallow?  Experts now believe that the accumulation of choices we make in how we live account for – hold onto your hat — close to 70 percent of how and how quickly (or slowly) we age.