290 Traditional Chinese Medicine meets AI: What My Smartwatch is Really Tracking with Dr. Gillian Lockitch MBChB,MD,FRCPC
Growing Older Living Younger: About longevity, wellness, healthspan,
Release Date: 10/19/2026
290 Traditional Chinese Medicine meets AI: What My Smartwatch is Really Tracking with Dr. Gillian Lockitch MBChB,MD,FRCPC
Growing Older Living Younger: About longevity, wellness, healthspan,
What happens when a medical tradition thousands of years old meets 21st-century wearable technology? In this solo episode of Growing Older Living Younger, Dr. Gillian Lockitch explores that question through her personal experience with the Watch2Care smartwatch, a wearable that tracks contemporary physiological data while presenting its findings through a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) framework. As a Western-trained physician and medical biochemist, Dr. Gillian was intrigued—but also skeptical—when her watch displayed unfamiliar scores associated with the TCM concepts of...
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289 Ageless Brain, Ageless Body, Ageless Living: Introducing The New Ageless Series with Dr. Gillian Lockitch MBChB,MD, FRCPC
Growing Older Living Younger: About longevity, wellness, healthspan,
Welcome to Season 5 of Growing Older Living Younger, and a new way of exploring what it means to grow older while continuing to live younger. In this solo episode, Dr. Gillian Lockitch introduces a new themed format designed to move beyond individual topics and create a clearer pathway from information to action. Season 5 will explore healthy aging through three interconnected themes: Ageless Brain, Ageless Body and Ageless Living. Each series will look more deeply at one major dimension of healthy aging, bringing together different experts, perspectives and areas of science while asking...
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288 Rethinking Memory Loss-Hidden Factors that May Affect Cognitive Health with Brad Montagne
Growing Older Living Younger: About longevity, wellness, healthspan,
oes an increase in forgetfulness or increasing "senior moments" imply developing dementia? One of the greatest fears associated with growing older is losing memory, cognitive ability and ultimately independence. But dementia is not a single disease, and not every change in memory or thinking represents irreversible neurodegeneration. In this episode of Growing Older Living Younger, Dr. Gillian Lockitch welcomes Dr. Brad Montagne, a functional medicine practitioner, educator, author and host of the podcast Your Health Reclaimed. Brad begins by describing a personal...
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287 Cut Grocery Costs and Food Waste While Eating Well with Carol Ann Kates
Growing Older Living Younger: About longevity, wellness, healthspan,
Is it possible to eat nourishing whole foods without letting grocery costs overwhelm your budget? Grocery industry insider and author Carol Ann Kates joins Dr. Gillian Lockitch to share practical ways to plan meals, shop sales, select produce, understand labels, and store food so less goes to waste. Their conversation offers useful ideas for smaller households as well as families. Rising prices and confusing product claims can make a healthy grocery trip feel expensive and complicated. A thoughtful plan can help you bring home only food you will enjoy and use. For people who want to stay...
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286 Cook, Eat and Age Well: How Herbs and Plants Support Healthy, Joyful Longevity with Natasha MacAller
Growing Older Living Younger: About longevity, wellness, healthspan,
What if ingredients that can enrich a healthy lifestyle are already growing in your garden, waiting at the farmers’ market, or sitting in your spice cupboard? Too often, eating for longevity is framed as a list of restrictions, a mindset that can drain pleasure from food and make healthy choices feel difficult to sustain. or healthy longevity, nourishment must be practical enough for daily life and enjoyable enough to continue. Fresh ingredients, seasonal variety, herbs, plants, and mindful attention to what works for your own body can help make the kitchen a place of creativity...
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285 Hearing Loss and Brain Health - Why Better Hearing May Aid in Supporting Healthy Longevity with Robert C Keefer PhD
Growing Older Living Younger: About longevity, wellness, healthspan,
Could difficulty hearing conversations today affect your brain health, independence and quality of life in the years ahead? Hearing loss is often treated as a minor inconvenience of growing older, yet it can affect communication, relationships, social connection, confidence and independence. In this episode, Dr. Gillian Lockitch speaks with hearing-health advocate and author Robert “Bob” Keefer, MD, about the association between hearing loss and cognitive decline, why so many people delay seeking help for hearing deficits and what questions to ask before choosing a hearing-care provider....
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284 Light, Sleep and Movement: Upstream Signals That Shape Healthy Aging with Dr. Sean Fletch
Growing Older Living Younger: About longevity, wellness, healthspan,
Health care professionals emphasize optimizing cholesterol, blood sugar and hormone levels and from that assessing biological age. These measurements can provide useful information, but do they tell us whether the body is still resilient, adaptable and capable of recovering from illness, injury or stress? In this episode, Dr. Gillian Lockitch and Dr. Sean Fletch explore the difference between moving a laboratory number into the desired range, and addressing the upstream conditions that caused it to change. Dr. Fletch reframes healthspan as more than the number of years lived...
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283 Seven Pillars for Healthy Longevity. How I Built my Healthspan Routine and How You can Build Your Own
Growing Older Living Younger: About longevity, wellness, healthspan,
What does a physician-scientist actually do each day to support her own healthy aging? This is a question Dr. Gillian Lockitch hears often. Her answer is not a prescription, a shopping list or a collection of fashionable biohacks. Healthy longevity is personal: our genetics, health histories, medications, priorities and goals differ, so the most useful routine is one designed for the individual. In this solo episode, Dr. Gillian organizes her approach around the seven pillars of healthy longevity described in her book, Growing Older, Living Younger. She explains how epigenetics offers a more...
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282 From Employee to First-time Entrepreneur at 70: Challenging Life After Retirement with Dr. Gillian Lockitch
Growing Older Living Younger: About longevity, wellness, healthspan,
Could retirement actually become the beginning of your most meaningful work? In this personal solo episode, Dr. Gillian Lockitch shares how spinal surgery, ballroom dancing, entrepreneurship and podcasting transformed her understanding of healthy longevity. You’ll discover why curiosity, consistency and a renewed sense of purpose can help you remain mentally sharp, physically engaged and excited about the future at any age. For most of her professional life, Dr. Gillian Lockitch was a physician, medical biochemist, researcher, university professor and department head. She expected...
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281 Healthy Longevity Starts Now. Fitness, Nutrition, and Aging Well with Carl Daikeler
Growing Older Living Younger: About longevity, wellness, healthspan,
What helps people stay active, strong, and independent as they age—luck, genetics, or habits built years earlier? In this episode of Growing Older Living Younger, Dr. Gillian Lockitch speaks with Carl Daikeler, co-founder and CEO of BODi, about why healthy longevity is rooted in consistency: regular movement, supportive nutrition, and the discipline to care for your body before a health crisis forces the issue. Carl shares his personal story of discovering a congenital heart block at age 59, receiving a pacemaker, and using that experience to deepen his commitment to healthspan...
info_outlineWhat happens when a medical tradition thousands of years old meets 21st-century wearable technology?
In this solo episode of Growing Older Living Younger, Dr. Gillian Lockitch explores that question through her personal experience with the Watch2Care smartwatch, a wearable that tracks contemporary physiological data while presenting its findings through a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) framework.
As a Western-trained physician and medical biochemist, Dr. Gillian was intrigued—but also skeptical—when her watch displayed unfamiliar scores associated with the TCM concepts of heart, liver, spleen, lungs and kidneys. Studying her scores led to an important distinction: the watch is not directly measuring these organs or diagnosing organ function. It tracks 38 physiological metrics and uses an AI-based platform to transform those data into functional indicators interpreted through a TCM-derived framework. It looks at scores in 5 system concepts - heart, lung, liver, spleen and lung.These do not equate to anatomical organs but to TCM functional systems that add to an overall wellness score.
This episode explores the difference between what a wearable actually measures and what an algorithm subsequently infers, why trends may be more useful than isolated numbers, and how curiosity and critical thinking can help us use increasingly sophisticated health technology intelligently.
The central question: Can wearable technologies help us understand our bodies better without allowing algorithms, scores and increasingly abundant health data to confuse—or control—us?
Episode Timestamps
00:30 — When ancient Traditional Chinese Medicine meets modern wearable technology
06:05 — Understanding TCM functional systems and the five elements
08:00 — Western medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine: two different interpretive frameworks
10:00 — Tracking patterns rather than relying on a single measurement
11:56 — When more health data creates confusion rather than clarity
14:00 — Why wearable wellness scores should not be treated as medical diagnoses
17:01 — Your Ageless Action: choose one meaningful metric and follow the trend
20:00 — Curiosity, critical thinking and what is coming next for healthy aging.
Your Ageless Call to Action:
Choose one metric from a smartwatch, fitness tracker, sleep tracker, scale or other health-monitoring device and follow its trend to see what improves or makes things worse. It might be your resting heart rate, sleep duration, number of steps or another measurement meaningful to your healthy aging.
Then ask yourself -Is there one small behavior I could change?
Your Longer-Term Healthy Aging Objective: Over the coming months, learn to recognize patterns in your own health data and relate them to changes in sleep, activity, nutrition, stress, illness, travel and daily routines.
The objective isn't to achieve perfect numbers. It is to know yourself better and use information intelligently to support the larger goals of protecting your brain, body, resilience, independence and quality of life.
About Dr. Gillian Lockitch: Email her at [email protected] to schedule your personal conversation about aging youthfully.
Dr. Gillian Lockitch is a physician, medical biochemist, professor emerita, researcher, author, international speaker, entrepreneur and host of Growing Older Living Younger. She translates the science of healthy aging into practical strategies designed to help people protect their brain, body and independence as they grow older. She is the author of Growing Older Living Younger: The Science of Aging Gracefully and the Art of Retiring Comfortably and an independent Brand Affiliate with Nu Skin, a global integrated beauty and wellness company. Her entrepreneurship complements her longstanding interest in healthy aging, wellness, lifelong learning and helping people take an active role in how they age.
All information provided in the Growing Older Living Younger podcast and project is for education and entertainment purposes only, and must not be construed as medical advice. Discuss any changes that you plan with your appropriate health care professional.