I’m a competitive sort so when I don’t manage to expel air for the 10 or so seconds required to get a reading, I blame it on Dr Barry.

After all, he’s banned me from my morning coffee until I’ve undergone these metabolic measures, part of an extensive suite of tests, scans and consults to determine my likely longevity.

Having finally blown sufficient air, I’m popped under a strange plastic hood and connected to a machine which will measure my resting energy expenditure. It’ll tell me how many calories I should be eating a day and my respiratory quotient (RQ) which measures metabolic flexibility or the ability to switch between fat and carbohydrate burning.

If my fasting RQ is chronically high, I’m more likely to have higher inflammation, poor mitochondrial health, worse insulin sensitivity and a risk of greater disease and a decreased lifespan.

To be honest, Barry seems a little tense.

Perhaps it’s because I’m the first journalist to try out Bespoke Longevity and Aesthetic Medicine, a groundbreaking new $20m longevity clinic on the Gold Coast which boasts the field’s top technology under one roof. Or perhaps he hasn’t had his coffee either.

I’m wrong on both counts. As we return to his office, it turns out he has concerning news.

The previous day I’d undergone a suite of tests including a full-body MRI, a bone mineral density scan, a CT calcium score scan and a PET scan which can flag cancer, heart disease and brain disorders.

Alarmingly the latter had come back showing a bright red flare in my uterus and a lymph node in my groin. A Positron Emission Tomography or PET scan works by injecting a radioactive tracer into the body, which is then taken up by various tissues. Any areas with high metabolic activity appear as bright red “hot spots”. These can often detect diseases before they show up on other imaging tests.

Best case scenario, Barry says, is that it’s inflammation. And the worst case? Cancer.

“It’s a possibility,” he says, “but hopefully there’s another explanation.”

I’m not prone to catastrophising but I was hoping that, at 57, this comprehensive longevity assessment would show I’m good for another half century.

After all, I’m an enthusiastic exerciser, minimal drinker and I eat a healthy and varied diet – well, apart from the time I devoured half a tin of condensed milk sitting at my desk. Stress makes me turn to sugar – which is what I need when faced with my PET scan results. Bespoke offers apples or plain popcorn.

Incidentally, Barry takes my blood pressure – the first of three readings throughout the day. Not surprisingly, it’s slightly raised.

Until recently, longevity was just a sterile statistic – a line on a graph or a dusty metric buried in a public health report. It was something you achieved if you were lucky, genetically blessed and avoided the deep-fried bits of life.

Now it’s something we chase, a full-blown cultural movement with everyone from scientists, celebrities and tech bros pumping millions – and in one eyebrow-raising case his son’s blood – into staying young.

Yet at the heart of this obsession is a key paradox: while modern medicine has stretched our lifespan, our healthspan – the years we live without chronic disease or disability – has lagged woefully behind.

Australia has one of the greatest healthspan-lifespan gaps of 12.1 years, second only to the US with a gap of 12.4 years, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Current generations may enjoy longer lives but a greater proportion of our years are spent suffering with disease.

Further, fewer than one in 10 people reach their 70s without at least one of the 11 major diseases or impairments, according to a new study in Nature Magazine.

Intriguingly only 9.3 per cent of the 100,000 Americans who were studied over 30 years achieved “healthy ageing” and this select group shared a similar diet rich in vegetables, whole grains, fruits, unsaturated fats, nuts legumes and low-fat dairy.

The data has prompted an explosion of interest in Blue Zones, places with exceptional longevity, while age-reversing pills, fasting and biohacking (using self-experimentation and tech to optimise health and lifespan) are suddenly a huge topic of conversation in swim squads and cycling groups around the country.

Maybe you’ve spotted “wearables” such as glucose monitors lodged in friends’ arms or aura rings, worn by Prince Harry, downloading sleep, exercise and heart rate data to their phones.

Whereas MAMILS – middle-aged men in Lycra – once captured the zeitgeist, now it’s the “ruckers” (walking uphill with a weighted backpack), calorie restrictors and tech entrepreneurs like Bryan Johnson – who rises at 4.30am, monitors his nightly erections and once transfused blood plasma from his son – who’ve ushered in this fascination with the ultra-optimised lifestyle.

Johnson currently leads competitors in a self-styled Rejuvenation Olympics where the challenge is reversing your biological age. As the website quips: “You win by never crossing the finish line.”

But this lifestyle is divisive, an observation archly captured in Emma Jane Unsworth’s new novel Slags, which features a character obsessed with ice plunges and Andrew Huberman podcasts (IYKYK). “Longevity seemed pointless,” one character reflects, “when you are as tedious as Johnny.”

What’s fascinating is that while the centenarians featured inNetflix series Live to 100: Secrets of theBlue Zonesare, in the words of the show’s creator Dan Buettner, enjoying good health “without thinking” thanks to gardening and walking up the hill to church, the new band of “longevity maximalists” are more into spreadsheets and biomarkers.

Chief among them is Peter Attia, a former surgeon whose best-selling book Outlive champions the concept of Medicine 3.0 – a proactive, data-driven approach to preventing chronic disease before it strikes. As he argues, we’ve become too good at managing sickness and not nearly good enough at preventing it.

His book opens with a quote from Bishop Desmond Tutu: “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

It’s an approach which inspired Bespoke Longevity and Aesthetic Medicine where founders, Dr Kee Jiet Ong and Dr Donna Tanchev, say they are challenging the “reactive, one-size fits all” model of traditional medicine and replacing it with a proactive approach which uses extensive testing and consultation to encourage patients to take a preventive approach.

By targeting the “four horsemen of chronic disease” – dementia, cardiovascular disease, cancer and metabolic diseases such as Type 2 diabetes – they sell this as medicine that “adds life to your years, not just years to your life”.

Whether you regard the cost of Bespoke’s services, which range from $630 for the cardiac package to $5998 for the signature package, as an investment or an indulgence might depend on your results.

When real estate principal Scott Darwon saw the clinic mentioned in a friend’s Instagram post, he liked the idea of having a thorough health check as he approached his 40th birthday. After all, since marrying wife Holly and having two young children, Walter, three, and Dottie, two, he had a family relying on him.

Privately, he was also concerned about some minor memory lapses but put them down to long hours and having young kids.

As he says: “The medical industry can seem a bit confusing whereas with Bespoke you just get on their website and they have a really digestible menu of items and it’s a one-stop shop.”

Darwon, who lives in Brisbane, opted for the men’s health and healthy brain packages which together cost $2200 and include, among other things, a brain MRI, brain volumetrics, cognitive screening, dementia genetics, a CT calcium score, DEXA and body composition testing, blood hormone and gene tests.

“When Dr Barry called me I thought he was chasing up my urine sample but I could tell something was up,” Darwon says. “He told me I had a sinister looking brain tumour and referred me to a neurosurgeon.”

For the next 48 hours as Cyclone Alfred ripped through Australia’s east coast and the young family was locked down at home, Darwon says his wife was strong and calm and he put on a brave face.

“But inside I was terrified,” he confides.

“After everyone went to sleep, I had some quiet tears and the feeling that my world had been turned upside down.”

Further scans revealed he had a low-grade glioma and within the week he had surgery leaving him with a 15cm scar. While he hasn’t needed further treatment, his oncologist has told him there’s a chance the tumour may grow back but he’s well-placed for ongoing monitoring. As he says, preventing chronic disease is a lot cheaper than treating it.

“I’m very fortunate that I can afford this though I realise not everyone can. For me, pardon the pun, but it’s a bit of a no-brainer. Early detection literally saved my life.”

Testing also revealed Darwon carries a gene which can increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

He has one APOE4 gene which is estimated to double or triple the risk of developing the disease whereas those such as actor Chris Hemsworth, who discovered he has two APOE4 genes while filming his longevity series Limitless, are eight to 12 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s.

For Darwon it’s meant a change to his diet, particularly cutting back on sugar and alcohol.

“It’s things we know but when you discover you have these risk factors it helps you stick to it,” he says.

Of course, Darwon’s experience raises questions about equity in an age of personalised medicine.

We know socio-economic disadvantage correlates strongly with poor health outcomes and shorter healthspans.

So are we looking ahead to a two-speed health economy where 102-year-old tech bros are consulting concierge doctors and doing push-ups in their cryotherapy pods while others are stuck with an overburdened public health system?

Professor Luigi Fontana, a leader in the field of healthy longevity at the University of Sydney, advocates for a change to the health model nationally. He says the diseases which contribute to unhealthy ageing are preventable and the goal of medicine should be to minimise this unhealthy window.

“Less than 25 per cent of longevity is due to genes and the other 75 per cent is due to environmental factors and lifestyle including diet, exercise, sleep, smoking, alcohol, pollution and mental stress,” he says.

It’s a view backed by Dr Eric Topol, author of newly published Super Agers, who says we’ll all get older but we don’t have to become more frail. As he says: “A lot of people feel they are doomed because they have bad genes but so much of this is our lifestyle that can override or, independent of any genes we have, be associated with a healthy ageing process.”

Chief among Fontana’s concerns is obesity.

“If you look at photos taken on Bondi Beach 30 years ago you rarely saw someone who was overweight and now 82.9 per cent of men aged 45 to 54 are overweight or obese.” Jump to the 65 to 74-year-olds and he says nearly 90 per cent of men and women have a waist circumference indicating increased risk of all metabolic complications that lead to disease.

According to the World Health Organisation more than 40 per cent of cancers and 75 per cent of cardiovascular diseases are preventable.

New research shows becoming obese before 30 nearly doubles the risk of dying young because of the “cumulative” damage to vital organs that can cause a range of diseases.

There is unquestionably a growing public appetite for practical, research-based methods to age well though, as Fontana points out, the information can be conflicting and confusing due to corporate interests and social media.

The popularity of intermittent fasting, strength training and drugs such as resveratrol and nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN), which has boosted lifespan in mice by 20 per cent, all point to growing mainstream interest.

Fontana, who is interested in how calorie restriction extends lifespan, acknowledges that weight loss drugs improve metabolic health but he’s concerned about the muscle and bone mass loss and the malnutrition that can result.

If we want to achieve what he calls chronic health, or living to 80 or 85 without medication or disease and still enjoying activities, relationships and independence, he says we need to view our lives like a chess game.

“Nutrition is the king, exercise is queen, the rook is sleep and the knight is mental and emotional health.”

Which is why it’s ironic to find myself at a longevity clinic, designed to improve my health span, yet wracked with stress at my PET scan results.

I take a bathroom break for some deep breaths and momentarily lose concentration during my cognitive testing. Irritatingly, I score 29 out of 30 after messing up a question but show excellent delayed recall when remembering the five animals shown to me at the start of the test.

As the day proceeds, I learn from dietitian Jen Hoult that while I don’t have breakfast until 11am, my intermittent fasting is ruined by my morning coffee.

Honestly, I’d rather create a fasting window by having dinner at 4pm than delay my flat white though I do try having green tea first thing instead.

There’s more bad news when the impressive Dr Alexandra Curran uses VISIA to analyse my skin for UV damage, pigmentation and lines.

The left side of my face is aged 56 (phew) while the right is a disheartening 59. That’s the side I sleep on and it cops the sun when driving. I want to sign up for every injectable and laser available and book a permanent spot in the clinic’s hyperbaric oxygen chamber to get the collagen pumping in my wizened face. Instead, I buy more SPF50.

Fortunately, my session with an exercise physiologist reveals that one of the strongest predictors of longevity is VO2 Max and after a gruelling 16 minutes on an exercise bike with a mask strapped over my mouth, I’m in the 95th percentile or “elite” category.

My grip strength, stability – tested by landing on one leg – and bone density are excellent but disc degeneration in my spine means I should work to increase muscle strength and flexibility. I also have low vitamin D.

But my real “rock star result”, according to Barry, is my hippocampal occupancy score, or brain volume.

The high occupancy score combined with low ventricle volume puts me in the 95th percentile, which is apparently optimal.

“You’re obviously very cognitive in your work, and combined with your lifestyle which shows good vascular health, blood pressure, cholesterol and metabolic health, it’s all part of the puzzle in terms of trying to prevent dementia,” he says.

“It’s a case of use it or lose it.”

When the data is crunched I have a biological age of 48.13, nearly nine years younger than my chronological age.

But there’s the PET scan hanging over it all.

Fortunately, Barry has me booked in for an ultrasound on my uterus within 24 hours. The radiologist also skips his lunch break to do an impromptu biopsy on my lymph node. Both results are encouraging but last week I underwent a hysteroscopy.

Cancer was ruled out and it seems the flare on the PET scan was due to adenomyosis, a condition where endometrial tissue grows into the uterine wall.

My gynaecologist is confident I’ll be fine but will ultimately need a hysterectomy.

There’s an argument that this extensive and expensive testing can be alarmist but if we’re spending $1000 a year to get our cars serviced, arguably it’s also worth investing in ourselves.

My experience has revealed how agile and responsive our doctors can be but also how we might benefit by moving to a more preventive health system.

More than anything, I now know there is so much each of us can do to enjoy not just a long life, but a healthy one.

Angela Mollard experienced the Signature Package courtesy of the Bespoke Longevity and Aesthetic Medicine on the Gold Coast