What’s your health age?

Is age alone enough to indicate how well you are? More often than not 2 people of the same age look-and feel- many years apart.

A more interesting and personalised indicator of wellness is your health age, which may also be referred to as your "biological age", "fitness age", or "health and fitness age".

Your health age is calculated by taking into account many different aspects of your health and lifestyle, resulting in a number representing your “real” age. It could be many years less or more than your actual chronological age.

Feeling brave enough to find out your health age? The Queensland governments’ Healthier. Happier website has a great online calculator to help determine your health age.

It only takes a few 10 minutes to complete, and includes a series of questions based on lifestyle factors such as your alcohol intake, exercise habits, fruit and vegetable consumption, and portion sizes.

You'll also enter in details about height, weight, gender and current age.

At the time of writing, I am 43 years of age, and after completing the online questionnaire, I discovered my health age is 39. Not bad!

I also received personalised feedback on what areas I could improve upon to further boost my health and reduce my risk of disease.

It's really worth doing, even though it's obviously not intended to substitute for professional medical advice.

Not only will an assessment of your health age score your current path to wellness, it can offer specific targets for improvement.

Fortunately, many of the specific lifestyle factors that can influence your future wellness are within your control, including:

• Weight, or more importantly, body fat levels.
• Diet, including fruit and vegetable intake, sugary drinks and portion size.
• Exercise habits, with a focus on activities that elevate your heart rate for at least 30 minutes.
• Incidental behaviour, such as gardening or household chores instead of watching television.
• Shopping frequency, it turns out, may influence how much food you buy at the supermarket, including drinks and treats. So don't shop for groceries too often.
• Other ageing parameters include sleep, stress management, smoking status and the strength of your personal relationships.

Now, over to you. What is your health age compared to your actual age? Feel free to share your results in the comments section below, and let us know what lifestyle factors you could improve on.