One of the best predictors of aging is your own perception of just how healthy you truly are. How would you compare your health to other people of your own age?

- Excellent – Very Good – Good – Fair – Poor

If you happened to choose Fair or Poor, you’re statistically 30 times more likely to die in the next 2 years than other people. (Whoa! I don’t like those stats!) Frankly, the point here isn’t to scare you, but really only to point out that only you knows how well or how badly you feel. If you can be brutally honest with yourself, you may have to admit that your health isn’t headed in the right direction. Fortunately, there are some newly-discovered scientific principles affecting your longevity that you can use. This usually requires, though, a real change in the way we think about aging.

It has come to the realization of scientists that the fundamental function of each of the body’s systems (pulmonary, endocrine, respiratory, circulatory, etc.) is to protect and perpetuate the human genetic code. Rather, the processes that have shaped our genetic makeup over the millenniums put much more importance on perpetuating the species than they do on sustaining your individual body. Actually, they are primarily intended to protect the human species during their critical child-bearing years.

Unfortunately, these processes that work so well for reproduction don’t work so well for you after that, and in fact, can and usually do work against you. Viewing aging through the prism of the gene – rather than the prism of the individual – allows all of this to make sense. Aging, then, is more a byproduct of the master plan of life than it is a specifically designed process.

Our bodies are really no different than anything else – over time, they break down. Whether it’s just normal wear and tear (your sore back) or an acute injury (that nasty sprained ankle of yours), the real secret to living longer is not so much avoiding injury (although that’s important) as it is how well your body can recover from it. If we were unbreakable, we probably wouldn’t be able to move because we’d be so over-engineered. Rather, our bodies were designed to fix themselves when they break.

If you want to get the most mileage out of your car, you have to occasionally do some preventive maintenance on it. As our cells gradually lose their ability to repair themselves over time, we now know what we can do at the cellular level to help them. We can boost their resiliency and help keep them running for another hundred thousand miles or so if we choose to.

Aging is not only about genetics and internal cellular processes; it’s also about external factors like stress, slippery sidewalks, and nutrition. How you respond to, adapt to, and otherwise deal with those factors helps determine your rate of aging. A person’s rate of aging doubles, in effect, every 8 years. This is, in a nutshell, what we’re trying to manage – our rate of aging.

Conventional wisdom holds that aging is pretty much a given, and that we all should get accustomed to the idea of using a hearing aid, walker, and Depends(R) as we get older. What science is discovering, though, suggests that we can at least postpone, if not avoid, these outcomes if we’re willing to nudge our systems so that they work more in our favor, and that it’s never too late to begin making those adjustments. Fixing these weak links can be huge when it comes to increasing the span and quality of your life.

Life expectancy today for men is 75 years old and 80 for women. Knowing what we do right now, we have the ability to live a one-third longer life than what is expected. This means living one hundred years of a good quality life is possible if you follow these three bedrock principles – cut down on your calories, build some muscle, and get a good night’s sleep. Just paying attention to these three factors controls three-quarters of how well you age.

Looking at this differently, living longer is not about taking longer to die; rather, it’s more about giving ourselves more time to fully enjoy a longer, healthier life.

After having been the poster boy for eating too much and just generally bad health practices, author Chuck Viccente now researches and writes about numerous health and fitness topics such as getting older, prostate enlarged symptoms, and how to build muscle how the experts recommend.