Alexandersmap

    Tag: Dr. Peter Attia

    • The Time for Vigorous Pruning

      “I now consider exercise to be the most potent longevity ‘drug’ in our arsenal, in terms of lifespan and healthspan. The data are unambiguous: exercise not only delays actual death but also prevents both cognitive and physical decline, better than any other intervention.” ― Peter Attia, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

      It’s that time of the season where the first wave of roses have faded and the garden requires serious dead-heading. So yesterday, despite heat, humidity and the company we were keeping at the time, I excused myself to dead-head the roses at my in-laws. The fragrance was lovely, the thorns unforgiving, and the shear abundance time-consuming, but I pressed on anyway.

      Their health doesn’t allow them to even go out to smell the roses, let alone prune them. It’s a stage of life I hope to kick down the curb as long as possible myself. Which is why I’ve chosen to change my own comfortable routine to something decidedly more challenging.

      Like those roses, we all have our peak season and then we fade. But roses will continue to bloom as long as you maintain them. A vigorous pruning results in more abundant blooms, ignore them and they put all their energy into rose hips and the show is largely over.

      We too, benefit from a vigorous pruning in the form of habit change. Eating and drinking less, and exercising and sleeping more will each change the game for us. The game is health span, or extending the time when we can be enjoying our days instead of suffering through them in a precipitous decline. Who wants their golden years tainted by nagging pain and atrophy? The time to do that is now, friend. Forget about how busy we are in our lives. We must get pruning now.

      Life has a way of rolling a roque wave over us when we wanted nothing more than a casual sail through some stage of life or other. That’s why we must develop buoyancy—our inner strength and resilience that will hold us above when life tries to drag us under. We are building the foundation today to weather the storms of tomorrow.

      This must be the season of moving more and consuming less. It’s a fascinating process of self-pruning with an eye towards a better health span in the long term, with more vibrancy and vigor in the present. We must prune away that which is no longer sustaining us, that we may thrive again and again, whatever our current season. And don’t forget to smell the roses we’ve worked so hard to maintain. That longer health span must be fully enjoyed.

    • Raising the Average

      “If you have the aspiration of kicking ass when you’re 85, you can’t afford to be average when you’re 50.” — Peter Attia

      A while back I committed to doing a fundraiser to fund research grants for children’s cancer. I more than doubled the amount of miles I would do compared to last year, when I walked 100% of the miles. The logic was that by combining walking with higher return on time investment workouts like rowing and cycling I should be able to do much more than I did simply walking. But there was a secondary motivation for ramping up the mileage: habit reformation. I’d simply gotten out of the habit of doing some workouts I love to do but aren’t as easy as simply walking. But we’re in it for the long haul, aren’t we?

      We’re all going to decline both physically and mentally over time. I’ve seen too many people I know slide in one or both ways over the last few years, and it’s a reminder that time is coming for us too. If the goal is to live a vibrant, healthy life for as long as possible before we decline, like Attia’s ass-kicking 85 year-old, then we’d best build a strong foundation now, whatever age we’re currently at. A walk is better than sitting, but a diverse fitness routine is better still. Queue the fundraiser as catalyst for lifestyle change.

      Time is the enemy of all of us. If we’re going to be productive in ways other than exercise, we can’t afford the time to be working out constantly. At least that’s what that other voice keeps telling us when we’re deciding between working out or making coffee first thing in the morning. We can do it tomorrow is the biggest lie we tell ourselves. The reality is that we get more energy when we move more, which makes us feel more productive than we’d have been otherwise. It’s 8 AM and I’ve completed a 13 mile ride, a swim, showered and fed the pup and I’m about to click publish on this blog post. We nurture and increase possibility in doing more with the time we have.

      Now extend that lifestyle out to the end of our days. Imagine what else if possible if we simply use our available time in more productive and exhilarating ways. A bit of ass-kicking today can build a future well above the average.

    • Pulling Dietary Levers

      “I guess I just encourage people to be much more attuned to all of the tools, right? So caloric restriction, dietary restriction, time restriction, right? You’ve probably heard me go on and on about my framework, the three levers; always pull one, sometimes pull two, occasionally pull three, never pull none.

      So time restriction… restricting when you eat, but otherwise not restricting how much or what. Dietary restriction is restricting some of the content in what you eat. So not eating carbs, not eating wheat, not eating meat… not eating sugar. Those are all forms of dietary restriction. And then caloric restriction is restricting the amount.

      And so if you are never pulling one of those levers, which means you are eating anything you want, any time, how much, whatever, that’s called the Standard American Diet (SAD)…. We’ve been running a very good natural experiment on that for the last fifty years and the data are in. So it turns out that less than… 10% of the population are genetically robust enough to tolerate the SAD… But for the rest of us the 90% of us schmucks… the SAD is lethal. And so you’ve got to come up with a way to escape the gravitational pull of the SAD.” – Dr. Peter Attia, on The Tim Ferriss Show

      We all know this at a certain level, don’t we? We’ve all seen what the standard American diet does to those who eat it. But escaping the gravitational pull of it is the trick. What I love about this statement by Attia is how he lays it all out there, simplifying it to three basic levers. Always pull at least one, sometimes two or all three. And never none.

      Chart your food consumption over the last week and ask yourself, how many days did I pull none of the levers? For most of us, it’s most days. Notice there’s nothing in here about exercise either. We tend to think that exercising cancels out the crap we eat. That might help burn off the calories, but doesn’t account for whatever that crap is doing to your body as it circulates through your system.

      When it comes to things like diet I like simplicity. Doing a no carb diet is a pain in the ass when you travel a lot, so maybe you don’t pull that particular lever and opt for intermittent fasting or limiting the number of calories you consume that day is the better way. Pull one to three levers in a day and see how it transforms your body over time. With discipline and work we might just reach escape velocity. Pull a couple of levers and get in at least an hour of moving to drop the SAD from your days. I’m happy just thinking about that.