I fell down the health-maxxing rabbit hole—and crawled my way out

Piles of collection kits and instruction booklets surround my laptop in a manner that would make a lab technician weep. To my left, there’s a package containing a swab of my inner cheek, which will tell me my biological age, a reflection of cellular damage over time. To my right, there are two poop samples from the past few days, the small plastic vials discreetly tucked into envelopes, primed to reveal the state of my gut microbiome.Now, bleary-eyed on a weekday morning in June, I try to gather...