Outlive (2023) by Peter Attia

 Audiobook

Outlive (2023)

by Peter Attia

    I'm not a big self-help guy but I'm always on the hunt for non-fiction Audiobooks and someone on my rec-league soccer team mentioned she was listening to this book.  I'm not a crazy bio-hacker nor obsessed with living forever but I do think it's useful to keep up on new developments in the world of health, exercise and nutrition, which is what this book is all about.  Attia IS very much one of these maniac bio hackers/ people who is obsesses with living forever.  He makes a living doing it- talking often about his practice where he advises healthy people how to stay that way.  There were frequent times in Outlive where Attia sounds literally insane, including the penultimate chapter on Mental Health where he recounts his pandemic era menty b that wound up with him having to do rehab for his feelings (that is not a joke.)   He is very much the kind of guy who spends twenty pages talking about how he is past forty when he realized getting enough sleep was important. 

   There is some irony in the increased importance of sleep to mental and physical health considering it is the medical profession itself that sets the professional standard for maniac sleep deprivation. You can't talk to a doctor for five minutes without them referencing it even if they are decades past that part of their professional life. 

   My take-aways from this book mostly reinforced what I've already learned in recent years.  First and most important lesson is that you need to do different kind of exercises- cardio, strength training and balance/stability work- it's this last category that was new to me.  It involves lots of supervised gym training- which seems like kinda bad advice, "Don't do this unless you can afford a personal trainer to closely instruct you" doesn't seem particularly actionable.  The idea is that it isn't enough to just build up your muscles, you also need to maintain and improve flexibility, balance and stability, since part of growing older involves losing these attributes.

  His nutritional advice also fell into the category of largely familiar but well developed arguments and explanations.  Sugar, of course, is public enemy number one these days and specifically the kind of "free sugar" or added sugar you find in soft drinks.  Heavily processed foods have largely replaced fat/cholesterol as enemy number two.  Attia goes to great lengths to defend dietary fat and cholesterol and gives frequent shout-outs to the meat-heavy keto approach based on his personal history.  He links together diet and exercise by arguing that the important thing about consuming carbs and sugar is that you exercise to use that energy up.  If you don't exercise, you can't eat those things, basically.   

   He develops a diet-agnostic approach to nutrition- it's not what specifically you eat but how much of it you eat of it, and what you do with the energy you take in.  That's one reason weight training is so important for long-term health- it's an easier sink for those calories than going for an hour and a half run every time you have a steak dinner.   Attia, for example, says he works out four times a week- just strength training.  He recommends "rucking"- which is walking with a full backpack on, over running for cardio. 

   I can see why this book was a hit.