InBound SA Volume 4 I Issue 9 | Page 45

THE LONGEVITY INSTITUTE

Three things a routine medical does not measure

The first is cardiorespiratory fitness— how much oxygen your body can actually use under load, expressed as

VO 2 max. It is among the more heavily studied markers in preventive medicine, and low fitness is consistently associated with worse long-term outcomes across large populations. It is also one of the few things on this list you can meaningfully change. Very few South Africans over forty have ever had it measured once.

The second is body composition. Your scale weighs everything at once and tells you almost nothing. Muscle declines from the mid-thirties onward, and it is entirely possible to lose five kilograms of muscle, gain five of fat, and watch the number on the scale hold steady while your body

So what would you actually do about it quietly becomes a different body. A DEXA scan separates muscle, fat and bone, and shows where the fat has settled— which matters, because fat around your organs behaves very differently from the fat you can pinch.

The third is recovery. Not the feeling of it, the physiology of it: how your heart rate behaves overnight, how quickly you return to baseline after effort, how your sleep is structured rather than how long you were lying down. If you fly often you are running an uncontrolled experiment on all three. Dry cabin air, fragmented sleep at the wrong hours, meals on someone else’ s schedule, and alcohol that feels like it helps and reliably makes it worse. No single week does much. A decade of them does.

Start by finding out where you stand, which is duller than it sounds and more useful than almost anything else available to you. Vivari Wellness sits in the Featherbrooke valley outside Johannesburg— close enough to the city to be inconvenient to no one, far enough out that the phone stops. There is a hotel and a spa, and there is a clinical institute with a licensed healthcare facility on site.

The order in which you meet them is the point. Nothing is booked before the consultation. A doctor takes your history, reads your results, and decides what is appropriate for you

— and when a programme is not right for you, says so, at the consultation rather than after you have paid. Screening comes before any clinical procedure. What follows is prescribed rather than sold. It is a duller promise than most wellness advertising makes, and a considerably more useful one.

None of this buys you a guarantee, and anyone offering one is selling something. What it buys you is a number to argue with in ten years’ time.

WHERE TO START PROGRAMMES DURATION FOR FROM

Start with the consultation. Nothing is booked before it.

Telephone + 27 11 958 2261 | WhatsApp + 27 64 947 9633 info @ vivariwellness. co. za | vivariwellness. co. za