Tiburon resident looks to assess well-being with ‘vitality index’

When Tiburon resident Jim Lavelle thinks about living well, he remembers his grandmother Mary.

She built a home in Belvedere in 1951 and lived to be 99 years old. As health-conscious eater and keen fitness practitioner, she worked out to videos made by fitness pioneer Jack LaLanne and swam at her local YWCA well into her 80s.

She inspired Lavelle, now 74, to pursue health — something he says has become easier with advances in modern science.

“But, on the other hand, there’s a difference between living a long time and living your best life for as long as you can — because you can be healthy and still be miserable,” the Tiburon resident says.

That distinction led Lavelle to create the Vitality Index and Rating, a 100-point scale on which people can determine their vitality score by identifying the 10 most important traits or factors in their life and scoring each from one to 10. Those scores are added up for an overall rating.

Factors can be anything from how a person perceives their relationships with others and how healthy they feel to their environmental stewardship or creative pursuits, Lavelle says.

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