Outlive

I read this book because it was hyped by authors like Siddhartha Mukherjee, whose books I really liked.

The book is a glimpse into the future of all our fitness lives. Peter is obsessed with health and aging gracefully, and runs a practice making rich ppl healthier and fitter.

Peter makes the excellent and obvious point that current medicine, or medicine 2.0 as he calls it, is only concerned about treating disease, but most issues we face arose from health choices we made over a long period, e.g getting diabetes because of over eating sugar for 10+ years.

He argues for medicine 3.0, which takes a longer term view of what ails us, where it starts, and argues we should be working to fix them ages before the problem gets big.

I found this book useful as it provides a context of how to think about health and evaluate all the health news/studies as they come out.

My personal takeaways:

• I can’t afford Peter’s service, but keep an eye out for AI powered health labs which test your bio markers (blood test), connect to your health tracking devices (watch, strava etc) and give some insights.
  • In the absence of a real life doctor or a online service which helps to make sense of your bio markers, I don’t think its that useful to go around testing.
• Don’t skip meals, and make sure you eat more of the good stuff - protein, healthy fats, vegetables etc.
• Muscle is a very important organ - grow it while you can, and work your whole life to keep it.
• Strength and cardio are very different, and you need to do both, one isn’t enough.
  • The older you get, the more you have to do. Retirees should be out there walking, walking, doing a lot. Its sort of the opposite of the image of a retiree.