The Moventus Manifesto

Hypochondriacs really had their "told you so" moment when COVID-19 hit. Suddenly, we all became hypochondriacs — the paranoia about health, well-being, germs. For the first time, we saw in real life how healthier bodies were less impacted by a life-threatening epidemic that struck us, and we were reminded just how fragile health can be.

We are inherently lazy beings. I am too. I have had many instances where I've made poor decisions when it has come to my health. The truth is, I never understood what the consequences were of months of inactivity or eating a low-protein diet were. Even now, very few people are able to articulate it.

We still hear the words "he's into fitness" and "she's really fit" when someone actively runs or lifts weights. We have made active participation in movement an anomaly, a hobby — these people are viewed as edge cases. Isn't that crazy?

Our modern health infrastructure reflects this same thinking. It is heavily focused on urgent and reactive care. We have been able to see successful outcomes with problem statements that required immediate medical intervention, but our population's long-term health outcomes are shocking. We have one of the highest rates of CVD, diabetes, and osteoporosis globally — and that is in spite of almost 70% of the population being covered by health insurance. The core issue is that we rely on a health infrastructure that tries to correct things when it is often simply too late.

My dad has had a very strong role in how my views on this space have been shaped. He's a leading orthopedic surgeon in Delhi. I remember years back, the principal of my school (whom I was really trying to sweeten up for a good Letter of Recommendation) went to my dad with lower back pain. He told her off the bat that she'd simply gained too much weight, was not exercising, and was sitting on her butt far longer than she should be. I was so annoyed at my dad. She hated me afterwards. But he was right. The understanding that, especially when we talk about something as sacrosanct as health, there are often no shortcuts and things can turn very quickly without you realizing it, has always sat deep with me.

The most inspirational character I know today is a 80 year old woman (Pinky aunty) who lives 4 houses away from me and is dealing with an advanced case of Parkinson's. Over the past 10 years, I've seen her play with her grandchildren, show up for my own grandparents and travel the world. Her secret? She doesn't miss a day of squats.

The unfortunate truth is that longevity (I will call it preventative care) has gotten a bit of a bad rep. We've confused it as biohacking — obsessing over tiny optimizations in random biomarkers while ignoring the far greater consequences of our day-to-day habits on the healthspan of our bodies. We are treating longevity as a way to leapfrog our way to living forever. It has become a gimmick, and I predict that this is going to delay our mass adoption of preventative care.

A core reason why we have not been able to progress in terms of our modern health outcomes is that people just don't know who to trust. We live in a new world where everyone has a voice and everyone has an opinion, and we are incentivized by algorithms and social surroundings to perpetuate 'wacky' quick fixes that sound fun and interesting, without actually providing any logical clinical reasoning.

All of this is to say that while urgent and reactive health have logic, preventative health has historically been pure conjecture, and, until very recently, has often been confused with aesthetic problem statements.

We are now entering an era where, for the first time ever, we can start to apply logic to preventative care. This is simply because we now have the ability to collect data from multiple disconnected systems, leverage decades of research and apply intelligent analytics to predict outcomes. And we are now willing to invest in it. It's a thrilling time to be here.

The change that needs to happen for us to see outcomes with preventative care is to shift our focus from seeing the body as a bunch of parts and systems that happen to be housed in a singular skeletal structure and skin, to realizing that it is one machine.

Preventative care is tackled through 3 main prongs:

1. Fitness (I will refer to this as Functional Capacity)
2. Nutrition
3. Habits (smoking, stress, sleep, environmental factors etc.)

The way I see it is that Functional Capacity creates the baseline layer. In 10, 20, 30 years, if you are unable to get up, sit down, move, and walk by yourself, the rest of all your "biohacking" efforts are frankly a moot point.

Your Nutrition and Habits play a strong role on how well you are able to reach peak performance across functional capacity (think how efficiently your cardiovascular system functions, how much weight you are able to lift etc.)

Through my research and speaking with experts, I am personally convinced of the following —

• We have confused Functional Capacity as an aesthetic problem to be solved. It is a vital part of our wellbeing and needs to be proactively worked upon because we are increasingly more sedentary.
• Not much research on the foundations of Functional Capacity have changed. We know that we need to do cardio, strength, and mobility (in fact, there is an existing golden ratio for how much time you should spend on each).
• There is a bi-directional relationship between the Four Horsemen (cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease and metabolic disease — 4 natural causes of death) and Functional Capacity.

  • We can see changes in Functional Capacity typically before discernible signs of disease and, simultaneously,
  • there is enough evidence to suggest that improving Functional Capacity can delay the onset and reduce the severity of symptoms of the Four Horsemen (think Pinky aunty)
• Functional Capacity is understandable to the average Joe — terms like mobility, strength, cardio are well understood. One of the core issues with outcome in modern health infra is that there is no incentive to educate the patient. A consequence of that is a typical loop where a patient will go to see a clinician who will prescribe to them a bunch of medicines that sound Greek and ask them to arrive for a follow up consultation. The patient follows the advice for a short period of time, after which they will either drop off or go to another doctor in hopes for a quicker solution. Follow up consults are very rarely executed because the individual doesn't understand the jargon and advice.
• You can't treat what you don't measure.
• Opening the loop with assessments is simply 30% of the game. Running the assess → intervene → reassess loop continuously is what will help us actually create a tangible preventative health structure.

In my experience, tying interventions and next steps to a current pain or future goal in a logical, easy-to-understand way has a profound impact on adherence.

To execute on preventative health, it needs to be measurable. Everything needs to be data-driven and run on a continuous lifecycle of assess, intervene, and reassess. Instead of treating health as a series of isolated medical events, it needs to function as an ongoing system that continuously evaluates how the body is performing and adjusts accordingly.

The exciting part is that the data required to build this system already exists. We now have diagnostics, wearables, movement assessments, and decades of scientific research on human physiology. What has been missing is the infrastructure and intelligent analytical capabilities that connects these signals and translates them into something actionable.

Realizing that fragmented data needs to be connected is not a new problem. In a previous job, we were willing to spend lakhs to work with a diagnostic report analytics vendor who had figured out how to "normalize" blood test reports from different labs (bet you didn't know that different labs use different benchmarks for the same biomarkers). Today, I can plug the same reports into ChatGPT and voila.

The same principle now applies at a much larger scale. We are entering a moment where disconnected health signals (from diagnostics, wearables, and movement data) can finally be stitched together into something coherent. A system that continuously collects information, interprets it intelligently, and translates it into clear recommendations that improve how the body functions over time.

The solution I am describing — linked modern infrastructure combined with a hyper-personalized intelligent approach to human health — is, frankly, inevitable. The real question is not whether we get there, but how quickly we do.

So what am I doing here?

I am building a system that connects these pieces and operationalizes preventative health in a way that is measurable, repeatable, and personalized.

The future of health, in my opinion, exists in three well-defined layers where people are continuously engaged and being measured.

At the base, we have preventative health; that is the layer I am trying to build over here. Next, we go to proactive health. A simple example of proactive health is diabetes care and dialysis. The last layer is urgent reactive care, where emergencies are dealt with.

The way this system works is that people remain in the preventative health layer until they are diagnosed with a medical condition, upon which they spend time in the proactive health layer while continuously working on preventative health. In the situation or instance where there is a requirement for reactive health, they progress to that layer.

Healthcare isn't and never will be a zero-sum game. There are many operators, validators, and diagnoses who work together to create an ecosystem that benefits from more research, more inputs, and more depth. The infrastructure I am describing does not replace them. It helps coordinate them.

My personal goal with this is to help people. There is a better life to be lived, and there is a requirement to understand that the realities we saw with our previous generations need not be ours. In fact, there is a way to live better for longer.

My mission is not to create the next generation of centennials. It is to help people maintain their best years for as long as possible.