Read the full transcript of Dr. Kim Boyd’s talk titled “Want to live long? Learn to live better” at TEDxBoulder 2025 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
Introduction: A Lifelong Focus on Health and Performance
KIM BOYD: I have been focusing on health and performance since I was a kid. I broke my first bone when I was four, and I was more interested in the x-ray than the lollipop. By 10, I had made the U.S. National Gymnastics Team for the first of many times. And by high school, I was training 40 hours a week in the gym with a life constructed around sport and optimizing what my body could do.
From there, I was top of my class at Stanford and in medical school, and I’ve spent the last 15 years leading innovative healthcare startups. So it may be surprising to hear that none of these experiences has taught me how to be healthy.
Whether it was short-term gains and bad science, like the national team nutritionist who said any fat we ate would stay on us for the rest of our lives, or accurate information just framed within too narrow of an aperture. In medical school, we spent a lot of time learning in Latin-heavy detail about disease, but very little about what makes and keeps us healthy. Or operating with a flawed belief system.
In startups, there’s this idea that if you’re doing good and important work, somehow it’s all worth it. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t just apply to bringing new ideas and technologies to the world. Often, bodies and psyches are part of that rubble.
The Importance of Being Healthy
But the problem is that being healthy matters to all of us. It informs how we feel and what we can do today, and it also sets the trajectory for our futures.
And that’s something we all have a vested interest in. We want energy. We want mental clarity. We want fortitude. We want a future that looks more like this, laughing and dancing at a hundred, rather than this, debilitated in a hospital bed several decades sooner.
To get to that vibrant future, we’re going to need a new perspective. Our healthcare system, and even the emerging longevity movement, are very focused on not dying, and that’s a good place to start. But it isn’t enough to just not die. We also need to live, because that’s the whole point. And if we’re aiming for that long and healthy life, it’s a critical part of the secret sauce.
So where are we now? Life expectancy in the U.S. is 78. That’s far shorter than most of us would like to be around. And what’s even more striking is that health span, the time spent in good health, ends 10 to 15 years before that, in our 60s.
Part of the problem here is that there’s a mismatch. The factors that matter most for longevity just aren’t the focus. It’s estimated that about 10 to 20% of life expectancy comes from medical care, 20 to 30% is genetic, and the rest, more than 60%, is due to lifestyle, how we live.
These are critical factors like socioeconomic status, but also nutrition, sleep, exercise, how we manage our emotional and our social relationships. But out of the more than 7,000 hours in medical school that are spent on disease, a very small portion is spent on these other factors.
For example, exercise. Four to 10 hours are spent on exercise. Four hours for an intervention that is more powerful than anything we can prescribe when it comes to both prevention of disease and ensuring an awesome quality of life.
The Emerging Perspective on Longevity
The good news is there’s an emerging perspective that’s trying to create longevity. For the last five years, I’ve worked with more than 60 scientists from around the world who are doing the cutting-edge research in metabolic health and longevity, and the promise is very real.
We have new tests. We can dive deeper into biomarkers than ever before. We have new treatments. There’s a category of medications called GLP-1s. These are things like Ozempic. You’ve probably heard about them whether you’ve read the Wall Street Journal or People magazine, and they have revolutionized how we’re treating obesity and metabolic health, and they have promised well beyond that. There are dozens of other molecules and technologies around the corner.
We’re also harnessing the power of lifestyle. We’ve taken nutrition and sleep and exercise, and we have dissected that science, and we’ve reassembled it into protocols and formulas designed to optimize every variable.
Potential Pitfalls in the Longevity Paradigm
And that’s all great, but this paradigm isn’t without potential pitfalls. It can be difficult to discern the substance from the snake oil. Not everything said on a podcast is truth with a capital T. Longevity is also often framed as a competition, a zero-sum game where you’re either doing everything right or you’re falling behind in a losing battle.
Lost is the nuance of diminishing returns or the fact that tradeoffs aren’t a failure. They’re unavoidable, and they can be leveraged as part of a successful strategy. We even miss out on opportunities for happy hacks, like if you’re out to eat with friends, it may be okay to skip the bread and eat the ice cream.
Within this paradigm, we run the risk that we try so hard not to die, we forget to live. And it turns out that matters, not just from a meta perspective, although that’s worth considering, but because the softer stuff, our emotions, our relationships, our purpose, these have a profound biochemical footprint, and the data are compelling.
The Importance of Relationships and Emotions
The Surgeon General has highlighted that loneliness confers a similar health risk to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. And I’m talking to all of us here, 60% of Americans are lonely, including the most successful among us, 50% of CEOs, up to 72% of entrepreneurs. If you aren’t lonely, you know someone who is.
We know that relationships can be protective. The adult development study out of Harvard has found that the most important factor for predicting health at age 80 isn’t cholesterol levels, it’s the quality of relationships at 50. Even how we handle our emotions matters.
So as we build into our longevity plan, it isn’t enough to just focus on what, we also need to prioritize the why. It brings joy for the journey, and the science is real.
What Should We Do?
So what should we do? First, pay attention. “My doctor says I’m fine,” probably isn’t good enough. We should go beyond the annual physical, we should evaluate the metrics that we know make a difference. These are things like ApoB and insulin, we should understand how our lifestyle is impacting our health, how our food, our sleep, our exercise, our emotional health, how are those making us feel now, and what path are they paving for our future?
But as we do these things, it’s worth realizing that health is a bit like music or dance, there’s an art to it. We can hit the notes and still fall flat, we can achieve the metrics and miss the magic.
So as we’re digging into our data, as we’re evaluating our routines, whether it’s an exercise routine, or a diet, or a job, or even a relationship, it’s worth considering what’s motivating us. Are we being driven by fear, by ambition, by a desire to control? Or are we coming from a place of curiosity, connection, and love? These carry different cellular signals, and can even shift the very expression of our genes.
Finally, don’t forget to live. It’s a privilege to grow older, and how we think about aging may influence how long we get to stick around. Work done by Becca Levy out of Yale shows that societies with positive associations of aging, on average, live seven and a half years longer.
So who are we going to become? Are we on track to be bitter and closed, or warm and witty and at peace? That is also worth optimizing for.
This is who I’d like to be. My grandmother lived to be 96. She had incredible joie de vivre. She loved people, and dogs, and painting. She also smoked for 50 years, and she drank a double scotch on the rocks for most nights of her adult life. It’s kind of what you did in the 50s.
So would she have lived longer if she hadn’t smoked, and if she had traded that scotch for a green tea? Yes, probably. I’m not advocating for that. Should she have been doing strength training? Absolutely. But I venture to say that if she had done everything right, and been so focused on perfecting every metric, that she had been too busy to strike up a conversation with random strangers, or to enjoy the occasional ice cream. She loved strawberry. She may not have lived as long, and even if she’d added a few extra years to her life, it wouldn’t have been as much fun, or carried the same impact for any of us.
So I’m no longer in the gym aggressively training 40 hours a week, and I’m also not laser focused on the next competition. But I am being intentional about what I’m training for, and it’s this. Cartwheels with my kids, and hikes with my husband, and I would like to tear up that dance floor when I’m 100. Thank you.
