Exploring Longevity
Insight into Health Returns to Vintage House Sonoma - January 15, 2026
I am honored and excited to be bringing Insight into Health back to Vintage House Sonoma in 2026. The reviews and feedback from my fall 2025 pilot series continue to inspire me to share my approach to health and wellness.
I will use this platform to provide a summary of each class for those who were able to attend in person and for anyone unable to make it.
In true Allison style, I proposed a bigger and better Insight into Health offering at Vintage House (read about my first go-round in November of last year here).
Here’s what I have in the works for 2026:
Each month will center around a theme
January: Longevity
February: Matters of the Heart
March: Navigating Nutrition
Each weekly session will explore the theme in different ways:
Lecture & discussion
Book club (reading the book not required!)
Cooking demos
More! (I would love to offer grocery store tours, field trips to the farmers market, and bring in guest lecturers)
Here’s the class synopsis for January 15, 2026:
What Longevity Means for You
Health is so much more than a number on the scale, a test result from your doctor, or any other objective data point.
Only you can define what health means for you, now and into the future.
First, I encourage you to think about different types of health:
Physical: How you feel and how well you take care of your body
Functional: Your body’s ability to do what you want it to do
Cognitive: Ease of thinking, focusing, and remembering
Emotional: Being able to experience and manage a range of emotions
Evaluating and addressing each of these areas is the first step to better understand where you are in this moment and to take the steps to get where you want to be.
Finding the motivation for making sustained changes is so much more difficult if we don’t understand the “why” behind them.
I call this the “so what” factor.
Here is an exercise we explored in class. I encourage you to take a moment to rate yourself on where you stand right now on each area of health. There are no wrong answers — if you find that you aren’t where you want to be, great! This is the first step to taking charge of your health, no matter where you are starting:
This activity brought up a lot of great questions and discussion. I heard many brave and vulnerable shares, such as…
I can’t do what I used to be able to do.
I’m in denial about aging.
I just had surgery so there is a lot I can’t do.
While I am still thinking about how to best respond to these comments, I hope that these two ideas came through during the class:
Experiencing a range of emotions is what emotional health is all about. It isn’t just about positive emotions. So feel the sadness, feel the grief. Your body will tell you when you are ready to take those feelings and use them as motivation for action.
There is some inevitability to a decline in most areas of health as you age. The rate of decline, however, is largely modifiable. How you take care of your body today can inform whether your physical health declines sharply or smoothly.
I’m curious what you all think. Please share by reaching out to me directly at allison.mckeanyrd@gmail.com or commenting below:
After inviting class participants to evaluate their health now, I then encouraged them to think about what is important to their health in the future.
While some ideas on the list below tend to be universal goals to remaining independent, others are very individualized and are (in my opinion) the most important and the most motivating.
Being able to do crosswords for the rest of my life, for example, is not on my longevity wish list. I don’t enjoy crosswords now, and I don’t have any desire to enjoy crosswords in the future.
But being able to play card games? That is definitely on my cognitive health wish list as it brings me joy, connection, and a dash of nostalgia.
What’s on your list? We will use these as jumping points to dig into the choices you make each day that can support your longevity wish list, no matter what it holds.
I look forward to the first Insight into Health book club, where I will review my highlights and “take-home messages” from Dr. Peter Attia’s book, Outlive. Remember, reading the book beforehand is not required!
Thanks for being here,
~Allison
A quick reminder that you will hear me live on air Mondays at 7 pm on Sonoma Valley’s KSVY radio, 91.3, or stream anywhere from ksvy.org. Can’t tune in live? No problem! I post show notes and the recordings every Tuesday at insightintohealth.substack.com.
If you are interested in working with me as a private patient, you can email me at allison.mckeanyrd@gmail.com, and we’ll see if I’m the right fit for you and your health goals.
The first class was absolutely wonderful, Allison, and I really appreciate these notes. I look forward to the other sessions.