As we age we are all plagued by famous diseases like hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, arthritis, cognitive disabilities and to some extreme cases cancer. Surprisingly these diseases have started showing up as early as in the 30s. The modern day stress and lifestyle has fast tracked the appearance of these diseases. We all accept this fact and some of us are trying to do something towards this danger staring at us.
The problem is that our efforts towards countering this health danger which is more widespread than the pandemic are not holistic, are not complete. We are fixing some parts in the whole system (i.e human body) but that is not sufficient as different parts of of the system work in cooperation. So any attempts towards fixing our body should be on all the fronts:
- physical
- emotional
- nutritional
I remember few years ago I was focussed only on physical fitness and ignoring the others. I would read articles related to sweating, exercise and its benefits and then just be crazy about being regular at the gym, running every alternate day. And I learned that this was all wrong the hard way. A very hard way. I will keep that to a different blog post in future.
This is where this book Outlive – The science and art of longevity by Dr Peter Attia and Bill Gifford comes into picture. Peter is himself a highly qualified doctor. He runs a clinic aimed at early intervention so as to prevent the most famous diseases which he calls them as the Four Horsemen:
- heart disease
- cancer
- neurodegenerative diseases
- type 2 diabetes and related metabolic dysfunction
Dr Peter also runs a learning program called Early for those who cannot visit his clinic. Obviously for logistical reasons he can only see X patients. But to make his teaching, his approach to managing our body available to all he started this learning program. It costs 2,500 USD. Quite expensive. But its a wealth of information. Limited enrollment periods. Hopefully I will enrol in this program sometime in future when I can afford it.
Coming back to the book Outlive – The science and art of longevity. It is a subset of the wealth of knowledge Dr. Peter has when it comes to longevity. He introduces a concept called Medicine 3.0. The idea behind this is toe intervene early in one’s life and address the possible health issues which are beginning to take root in the body. The conventional medicine gets into act when the symptoms show up but thats way too late and the doctors prescribe the medications to suppress the symptoms there by increasing your lifespan by few more years. But Medicine 3.0 is all about increasing lifespan in such a way that your quality of life doesnt get affected as you age. You continue to have good cognitive abilities, physical strength and emotional health as you age so that you can enjoy doing the activities in your 60s, 70s that you did in your 40s.
Dr. Peter gives a good overview of the 4 horsemen, why they occur, how we can identify them early and what are the interventions we can do to keep them away. Then he discusses about 3 core areas of human body:
- exercise
- nutrition
- emotional health
He busts some myths around each of these areas and gives guidelines as to how to fix them.
I really found a lot of interesting facts in this book which I generally try to find when ever I look at blood reports. Please places the book gets too technical and difficult to comprehend. But that shouldn’t frustrate you because you would have got a gist of the chapter by then. The initial chapters were amazing and the complex technical aspects were well explained with good analogies. The later half of the book the author talks about exercise, nutrition, sleep and emotional health. At this point I found it a bit difficult to grasp the content may be because of my lack of medical knowledge or lack of interest in them. But there were very interesting ideas which one could implement in their lives like the Zone 2 training in exercise, improving their sleep duration and some techniques one can adopt to have a good quality of sleep. Overall a very informative book.
You can buy this book from Amazon.in or visit the author’s website to find other places from where you can buy the book.