10x Return on Investment - GUARANTEED

Invest in yourself - then check out the 100% Guaranteed Returns

Who wants to live healthier for 10 extra years? Simple: Invest your time wisely in 5 simple tasks and your healthspan could look like this:

According to a recent study published in the BMJ *, follow these 5 tasks and you will increase your healthspan by 8 years for men and 10 years for women:

1. Eat a highly plant-based diet, which is also low in “bad” fats

2. Maintain a healthy body weight (i.e. recommended BMI and body fat levels)

3. Don’t smoke

4. Consume little or no alcohol. Apologies to the drinkers in the house but one glass a day maximum, but preferably zero.

5. Exercise at a moderate to vigorous level for approximately 3.5 hours per week or 15 hours per month**

Being an accountant by trade, when I read this study and related articles, I pondered if it was worth my valuable time to follow these 5 tasks. Would I get a fair Return on Investment (ROI) by spending my limited time on the planet following these 5 health indicators?

Let’s quickly break down the 5 tasks. Tasks #1 through #4 - eating healthy, maintaining the proper body weight, and not smoking or drinking - would likely SAVE most non-compliant individuals time and money on food bills, healthcare costs, doctor visits, and downtime due to unpleasant hangovers or smoking “sessions”. However, for the sake of this analysis, let’s say they are a break-even proposition on time vs. your current lifestyle. That leaves only #5, exercise, to determine if it’s worth your time investment.

By focusing on exercise, the analytics are quite easy to decipher using a simple illustration. So, let’s say this is one month:

Then a month in days looks like this:

1 month in hours, with exercise in blue, would be:

Now, smash it all back together and it looks like this:

It is actually laughable how small a sliver of commitment we need to make to physical exercise to increase our healthspan by up to 10 years.

So, let’s make an outlandish assumption and say that we need to exercise for 40 years to gain the benefits of an 8 to 10-year extended healthspan. It would translate to this!

Ready for one last insane thought; there is more upside gain potential! Gaze again at the charts above and think outside your realm of belief for a moment! This 10x ROI does not consider the potential of modern technology and the acceleration of medical development envisaged over the next 20 to 30 years. By staying healthy now, those of us currently in our 50s and 60s will surely have a potential healthspan well into our 90s and 100s. For those in their 40s, past 110, and those of you younger than 30, the potential is endless.

Here is what our healthspan may look like in the not so distant future:

I am not telling you where to invest your time, but the data is very compelling. A mere 2% investment of your available time can deliver a guaranteed return of 10x or more on your healthspan. These returns significantly expand if modern technology and medicine can continue to accelerate at their current pace. With those kinds of returns and possibilities, why not make the time investment in yourself now?

* Previously named British Medical Journal

** Based on BMJ Study referenced in paragraph 2 of the article. However, based on my personal research and recommended HIIT methods, I believe the actual amount of exercise required could be closer to 10 to 12 hours per month or < 1.7% of your overall available time.