Fit on the Outside, 20 Years Older on the Inside: Mark Dini’s Inside-Out Transformation

Our health is more than what the mirror can show us - sometimes, it’s even the complete opposite. Mark Dini, a fitness instructor and a biohacker enthusiast, who looked strong and disciplined on the outside, spent years pushing harder, training more, and ignoring recovery. When GlycanAge showed him that his body was aging far faster than expected, it changed how he understood health entirely. This is a story of rebuilding from the inside out - and of learning that “when the body says no”, we have no choice but to listen.

You were one of the very first GlycanAge clients. How did you first hear about the test, and what was it like to try it back when it was still in its early days? 

It was back in 2020. I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw a post from a company called GlycanAge offering the chance to win a biological age test. I thought, why not? and entered my name. I ended up being one of the winners, and that’s how I took my first test.

The kit arrived by post, and the process itself felt very straightforward - pretty much the same as it is today. A few weeks later, I got a message from Nikolina [CEO of GlycanAge], asking if I could jump on a call. 

I remember her saying they’d never seen anything quite like this before. Not in those exact words - I’m paraphrasing - but the message basically was that the score was extremely high, and they felt it was important to talk through it properly. So I agreed to the call straight away.

Oh, wow that sounds quite a worrying thing to hear. What did the result end up being and did you have an explanation as to why this might be the case?

It was really bad. My chronological age was 38, and my biological age came back at 58 - almost the same as my mum’s.

I jumped on a call with Nikolina and Zorrie, and the first thing they asked was, “What are you doing, man? What does your lifestyle actually look like?” 

At the time, I genuinely thought I was doing everything right. I’d been into biohacking since around 2016. I was taking supplements, experimenting with peptides, doing breathwork, cold exposure - all the things that, on paper, are meant to support health. But my lifestyle was actually terrible.

I come from a personal training background and had been working extreme hours for years. I was coaching clients from early morning until early afternoon, training intensely every day as a semi-competitive CrossFit athlete, and then coaching again in the evenings. Most days were 10-15 hours long.

I’d get home late, eat a huge meal, go to bed around midnight, and be back up again at 4:30am. I did that seven days a week for almost five years. I was exhausted, overstimulated, and constantly inflamed, even though on the outside I looked lean and strong. I thought that if I just added more supplements or more biohacking tools, I could offset the damage.

Looking back, I was majoring in the minors. I was focusing on things that might make a 1% difference, while completely neglecting the fundamentals that make a true difference - like sleep, daylight, recovery, and actually slowing down.

Taking the GlycanAge test was literally like the universe,God, whatever wording you want to use, stopping me in my tracks and pointing out that I was doing all of this wrong. It showed me what I still needed to learn. My path is about helping other people, and you can’t do that if you’re doing it all wrong yourself, or if you don’t actually understand what the right things are. You have to start with you.

And the reality was simple: my body was older than it should have been. And it was a major shock. I fully expected to come out biologically younger, not almost 20 years older. It was definitely an ego dent but at the same time it was exactly the wake-up call I needed.

That must have been a real shock - especially for someone who looked extremely fit on the outside. Many people assume that looking good automatically means being healthy on the inside.

After that initial GlycanAge wake-up call and your consultation with the team, what did you do next? How did you apply what you learned, and how did it end up changing both your life and your work?

I changed everything. Everything. It made me look at health from a completely different perspective.

As I said, it was divine timing that this happened during lockdown, because I finally had the time. I could wake up at the right time, go to bed at the right time, and actually slow down. I could do breathwork for as long as I wanted. I trained at home and that completely changed the way I approached movement. It became much more about looking good and moving well, rather than beating yourself into the ground and puking in a bucket in the corner. 

I also changed how I looked after myself nutritionally. For the first time, I had the time to actually cook. Instead of throwing something quick into the oven. I ate more regularly and more intentionally, remembering that food is a timekeeper - when you eat at certain times, all the clocks in your body respond to that. 

Another big change was supplements. I actually cut most of them out. I realised that if someone put a gun to my head and asked which ones were working, I wouldn’t be able to answer - because I was taking too many. So for a couple of months, I stopped everything. I focused on food, movement, magnesium baths, getting to bed early, reading, meditating, walking - the basic, day-to-day things that most of us would probably do anyway if we felt we had the time.

So, that’s where my focus really went. I realised that what I’d been doing clearly wasn’t working. And the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. There was no return on energy there. So I had to ask myself why I was still doing things I knew were detrimental. As I often say to my clients now: if you keep doing something you know is harming you, it’s usually because you love that thing more than you love yourself. And that’s a hard question to sit with.

I don’t see the point in punishing myself anymore. My priorities changed from looking a certain way to feeling a certain way - that’s the biggest change of perspective. I’m still fit, still strong, but now I’m also much healthier on the inside.

That sounds like a real turning point - and it’s great to hear how everything aligned during that period, with GlycanAge being part of the picture. 

After that, did you continue retesting? When did you test again, and what did the results show you over time?

I first tested in May 2020, and then again in April 2021. Between those two tests, I reduced my GlycanAge by five years.

Some people might hear that and think, oh, that’s not a lot. But five years is actually very significant. A lot changes between age ranges - not just at a DNA or cellular level, but epigenetically as well. So given how bad my initial result was, a five-year reduction was actually very meaningful.

The third time I tested leads into another part of my story, around an autoimmune condition, although personally, I don’t believe the body attacks itself - I think it’s more accurate to say the immune system becomes overactive, and we then give that pattern a name. In my case, it showed up as IBD - ulcerative colitis - and it was a very severe case and this has pushed my markers considerably high up again, even more than before. So, GlycanAge has reflected this “condition” in the results.

One important thing I also want to add is that the very first GlycanAge test led me down a functional, alternative, holistic, ancestral path. About a year later, that took me into quantum biology - something I never would have explored if I hadn’t met Nikolina and Zorrie and done this test. And it helped me a lot in navigating and soothing my health state.

I’ve told this to Nikolina and Zorrie before but I truly owe those two beautiful women my life. Not just professionally, but from a health perspective. I genuinely don’t think I’d be where I am in life now, if it wasn’t for them.

You mentioned that your third test connected to an autoimmune condition. When did you first realise something deeper was going on, and how did you identify it? Were you running other tests alongside GlycanAge at the time?

To me, two main factors contributed to what later got labelled as an autoimmune condition. The first was a very stressful personal situation which led to prolonged periods of stress - and it damaged my gut. When you’re stressed or anxious, your digestion is often the first thing to suffer. 

At the same time - and this is a part that might polarise people - I was exposed to the spike protein from COVID, not through the virus itself, but through exposure to a vaccinated person. Based on my research and understanding of shedding, my immune system was already compromised and hyper-alert, and my gut was already in a weakened state from stress.

Putting those pieces together, it made sense to me. A compromised immune system, a compromised gut, and then an additional inflammatory trigger. About six months after that exposure, autoimmune symptomology started to appear. From August through to the following March, I was in a full flare. 

Later, around the second half of 2023, I took another GlycanAge test. As expected, the markers had trended in the wrong direction. The good glycans were suppressed, the inflammatory ones were elevated. It wasn’t as bad as my very first result, but it clearly reflected the internal stress and inflammation my body had been under.

For me, that test wasn’t showing the condition itself, it was showing the collateral damage. The chronic inflammation, tissue breakdown, nutrient depletion, and prolonged stress response were all visible there. That last GlycanAge test showed me exactly where I was - not as a diagnosis, but as a reflection of what my body had been through.

This really highlights the epigenetic side of things. Epigenetics simply means above genetics - it’s about the environment influencing how our biology behaves. And that environment isn’t just external. It’s internal too. Our thoughts, stress levels, and physiology all impact that internal environment. Right now, I’m doing everything I can to stay stable. I know there are factors I can’t fully control, so the focus is on the ones I can.

That’s a powerful way of looking at it - and I totally agree! On a more personal note, if you could go back and give one piece of advice to your younger self at the very start of your health journey, what would it be?

It’s a very easy one: balance.

As it says in the Dao De Jing: Nature takes its time, yet everything is done. Man busies himself doing everything and never achieves anything. So slow down. Otherwise, you’re like the duck that looks calm on the surface, but underneath the water its legs are kicking like mad.

There’s also a difference between power and force. Power is flow. Look at children playing in a park - they can play all day and not get tired because they’re in the moment. They’re in that natural flow of giving and receiving. Yin and yang. We’re too driven to push all the time. We’re like a phone that’s already on 20% battery trying to get through the entire day. That’s exactly how I lived. Push, push, push. Burn out. Push again. Burn out again. And once you find that balance, everything becomes achievable. 

Also, take ownership of your choices, because everything you are now comes from the choices you made before. Even if something feels unfair, taking ownership gives you power. And with that power, you can return to balance and make a better decision. Everything comes down to choice in the end.

You clearly think a lot about making the right choices for the individual, rather than following one-size-fits-all rules.

Given your own experience with inflammation and autoimmune symptoms, what practical tips would you share with our community - especially things that have genuinely made a difference for you?

When the autoimmune symptomology hit, functional medicine and peptides only took me about 70% of the way. That’s when I fully implemented everything I’d learned from quantum biology - and that’s what carried things forward.

It might sound complicated, but it’s actually about very simple things, done at the right time. Light is the biggest one. I never miss a sunrise. When light enters the eyes in the morning, it signals the suprachiasmatic nucleus - the body’s central clock - which sets hormonal rhythms for the entire day. Cortisol rises at the right time, downstream hormones follow, and the nervous system knows it’s safe to be awake and active.I expose as much of my skin as I can to natural light whenever I’m outside, and I always watch the sunset, even if it’s through a window. The changing light spectrum in the evening tells the body that night is coming, helping melatonin rise and inflammation come down.

I also use blue-light-blocking glasses at different times of the day because artificial blue light at night disrupts circadian signalling and keeps the nervous system in a cortisol-driven state. 

Most of this costs nothing. Ten minutes outside at sunrise is free. Sunset is free. Structuring your water is free - you can vortex it by shaking it in a glass or using a simple frother. These small inputs change how cells communicate and how the immune system behaves.

Slow mornings also matter because the body needs time to transition. Going straight from bed to phone to caffeine spikes stress hormones before the system is ready. 

In winter, cold exposure becomes important - not extreme, but enough to cold-adapt the body. Cold improves mitochondrial efficiency, supports energy production, and helps mobilise stored vitamin D. The body works seasonally, and when we ignore that, things start to break down.

These are things our ancestors did naturally. They weren’t living in artificially warm, artificially lit environments all year round. They adapted to light, temperature, and seasons - and our biology still expects the same signals today.

It’s impressive how such simple, everyday choices can have such a profound, scientifically grounded impact on the body - thank you for sharing these tips with us.

To finish up - for people who take a GlycanAge test and get a higher-than-expected result, what would you tell them based on your own journey?

First of all - don’t panic. It doesn’t mean anything other than that the things you’ve been doing up until this point aren’t working. So sit down and be honest with yourself and ask, “What am I actually doing?”
Second, speak to a GlycanAge consultant. Data is useless unless you understand what it means. That number doesn’t mean what people think it means. It’s not saying, “Oh my God, I’m really old.” What it’s showing is that your body is expressing patterns that are older than expected based on the habits you currently have.

Once you understand the why behind the score, you can actually do something about it. You don’t need to do anything extreme. If a plane is off by just 0.1 degrees at take-off, by the time it reaches its destination it can be hundreds of miles off course. Small changes matter.

A simple example could be going for a morning walk when you never did before. That small habit changes your environment, your behaviour, and your biology. Everything works epigenetically - through what we expose ourselves to, where we are, who we’re around, what we listen to, even what we put on our skin.
That’s why trying to figure everything out on your own is hard. I know a lot  and I still had a consultation. Someone else will always see things you don’t.

So don’t panic. Get guidance. Build a plan. Because without a plan, you don’t know where you’re going. It’s like heading west looking for the sunrise  no matter how fast you go, you’ll never find it if you’re facing the wrong direction.
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To explore more of Mark Dini’s practical insights and applied health guidance, check out his podcast The Decentralised Health Podcast.