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- [00:04]
Chrissy Teigen
You're listening to Self Conscious with Chrissy Teigen, an Audible original podcast. Join me as we explore the cutting edge of health, wellness, and personal growth with the world's leading experts and thinkers. From inspiring stories to actionable insights, our conversations aim to help you lead a healthier, happier, and more productive life. For much of human history, the goal of medicine was to simply help people live longer, to delay death by any means necessary. In the modern world, however, we face a new paradox. While many of us are living longer, we are not necessarily living better. The final years of life are often spent grappling with chronic illness, physical frailty, and a diminishing quality of life. For many, this marginal decade, as it's sometimes called, can feel like a prolonged decline rather than a time of sustained vitality. In his bestselling the Science of art and longevity, Dr. Peter Attia argues that modern medicine, while effective at extending life, has fallen short when it comes to extending our health span, the period of life in which we remain healthy and active. Dr. Attia, whose client roster includes everyone from Oprah to Elon Musk, believes we need to move beyond simply reacting to disease and instead adopt proactive strategies to prevent the illnesses that often accompany old age, offering a roadmap for extending both our lifespan and health span while helping us navigate the path to a more vibrant, fulfilling life at any age. On Today's Episode in this episode, Dr. Attia will unpack the secrets of what he calls Medicine 3.0, a revolutionary approach to health that emphasizes proactive, personalized care to help us not only live longer, but live better. He'll delve into the science of exercise, nutrition, sleep and emotional health, key components that go beyond traditional medicine to redefine what it means to age well. Dr. Peter Attia, welcome to Self Conscious. I'm 38. I feel like so much of my life has already been lived without being the healthiest person I know. That's never too late to turn things around. But is there something that people can do, looking at themselves right now, today, that they can do to start this journey? Am I too late? That's what I'm thinking about, basically.
- [02:23]
Dr. Peter Attia
I've never heard anybody at 38 wonder if it's too late. The answer is definitely not. It's certainly the case that at some point it is a bit late, right? To take an extreme example, if you took a person who's dying of cancer cancer on their last day of life, it's too late, if we're going to be honest. But for most people listening to us, it's definitely not too late. In fact, for some people it might come across as too early because they don't have enough motivation to make the necessary changes. So I think we can all take steps towards both these goals. How do you live longer and how do you live better? The living longer one, in many ways is easier to explain because if you want to live longer, you basically have to delay the onset of chronic diseases. So that means you have to take a bunch of steps to delay the onset of heart disease, cancer, dementia, metabolic disease. Then I'd add one other thing is figure out ways to avoid and minimize accidental causes of death. But those five things, if you're not smoking, really account for 80% of deaths. So anything you can do to delay the onset of those, and there's lots you can do, by the way, those are great steps. And clearly somebody in their 30s and 40s is by no means too late to start.
- [03:30]
Chrissy Teigen
What do you consider the final decade of your life broadly to be? Are we going to say 80s now?
- [03:36]
Dr. Peter Attia
I think it's probably going to vary by individual. Genes definitely play a role in this. There are certain people who just hit the genetic lottery and they're going to live to a hundred. No matter what they do, despite whatever choices they make, they're going to live a long time. I think for. Honestly, for most people, there's no reason we can't live into our 80s and more importantly, live a very healthy life into our 80s. Right. I'm hopeful I can live longer than that. But what's a higher priority to me is the quality of my life in that area. I think most people would rather live to 80 at a very high quality of life than live to 90 and spend the last decade suffering.
- [04:10]
Chrissy Teigen
Explain Healthspan and why it's a crucial component of longevity.
- [04:14]
Dr. Peter Attia
So I think when most people think about longevity, they think about living longer, which is part of it. That's the lifespan piece of it. So lifespan is how long you live. But there's an equally important component to longevity called healthspan, and that's the how well you live part. And that part is a little harder to explain because it's not black and white. So lifespan, you're alive or you're dead, that's straightforward. But healthspan is really about your physical health. Are you free of pain? Are you strong enough to do whatever you want to be able to do? Do you have the endurance to be able to do things? Are you flexible? Do you have balance? Basically, can you be active physically? Then you have a cognitive piece how is your mind working? And even absent something like dementia, there's still a big change in a person's cognitive performance. How good their memory works, how quick they are at solving problems, all of those things. And then the final piece is an emotional piece. And that has to do with happiness, relationships, relationship with others, relationship with yourself. The nice thing about healthspan is that while the first two things on that list, the cognitive and the physical piece, have to decline with age, they do. Unfortunately. It's just the inevitability. Our mind and our body will deteriorate over time. The emotional piece doesn't have to. And so I think that's something we can all look forward to, which is, if we put enough attention into that bucket, there's no reason you can't be in the final decade of your life and actually thriving in the most manner in that way.
- [05:38]
Chrissy Teigen
What is Medicine 3.0?
- [05:40]
Dr. Peter Attia
Medicine 3.0 is a topic I described in the book that differs from the current practice of medicine, what I call Medicine 2.0. Medicine 2.0 is an amazing system, and it has changed human civilization. Prior to medicine 2.0, women would die at an alarming rate giving birth, people would die of infections, trauma. Life was horrible, right? Medicine 2.0 brought us modern medicine. But the problem with medicine 2.0 is it doesn't really take prevention to the level that's necessary to treat chronic diseases. So medicine 2.0 is really good at treating acute problems. It's not very good at treating chronic problems. Furthermore, medicine 2.0 focuses disproportionately on lifespan, life or death. Doesn't really focus on health span at all. Medicine 3.0 is equally focused on health span. So those are the fundamental differences. Medicine 3.0 is much more focused on prevention of disease rather than treatment of disease. And medicine 3.0 is relentlessly focused on quality of life. So you don't need medicine 3.0 to displace 2.0. You need both, right? I want to know that if I'm in a car accident tomorrow or if I fall and break my leg, I want a Good Medicine 2.0 system to take care of that problem right away. If somebody has a heart attack, you absolutely want them to be able to go to the ER and get a stent placed and all the other things that are going to save their life in that moment. But what we really want to do is have a system in place that minimizes the risk we're going to have that heart attack or get cancer or suffer dementia.
- [07:13]
Chrissy Teigen
I Feel like Los Angeles is so full of medicine 3.0, but not in the best ways. There's so many different doctors here that are telling you the way to live a longer, healthier life and giving you all these different medicines that are preventative for this, that. And it's hard to navigate that world, especially among a group of people that are wealthy and they'll spend anything to be healthy and to live longer. It's hard because there's times I've felt completely being taken advantage of and things. So that is really hard to navigate.
- [07:45]
Dr. Peter Attia
Yeah, it is an unfortunate consequence of the world we're in today. There's just a lot of noise out there. There's a lot of snake oil. And the truth of the matter is that the things that are going to move the needle the most are actually not particularly expensive. It's not to say that money doesn't matter. It does. Obviously, once you get into the details of things that are more elective, like certain types of cancer screening, that can start to, you know, if you're going to have to pay for that out of your own pocket, if your insurance company doesn't cover it, that can add up. But, you know, the kind of time is the most important currency, if we're going to be honest. Right. What's the difference between sleeping six hours a night and sleeping eight hours a night? It's not money, it's time. What's the difference between not exercising and exercising every day? That's, you know, that's mostly a time issue, not a money issue, at least disproportionately. It's really about time, it's about consistency around it. And I think we're just a society, and I'm no different. We all want a quick fix, but the truth of it is that most of these things that are offered, elixirs of life, turn out to be not.
- [08:49]
Chrissy Teigen
So a patient comes to you. What's the first test you're gonna wanna run?
- [08:53]
Dr. Peter Attia
There's probably a bunch. So I think our first battery of test is a pretty extensive blood test that looks at lots of things, the risks for basically everything that can be measured in blood. And then we also do something called the DEXA scan. So this is a way that we can see how much body fat they have, how much muscle mass they have, how dense their bones are and how much fat they have around their organs, something called visceral fat. And then the other thing we do out of the gate is something called a VO2 max test, which is an exercise test. That's done on a bike or treadmill and it tests their maximum aerobic capacity.
- [09:24]
Chrissy Teigen
So how do we translate that VO2 test then?
- [09:27]
Dr. Peter Attia
So when you do the test, you're going to get a number. So the test literally gives you a number. And that number is how much oxygen you're using. And we normalize it to body weight. So how many milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute you can use. And you take that number and you compare it to other people of your sex and age and you get a percentile. So are you at the 50th percentile where half the women your age are better than you and you're better than half of them? Are you at the 80th percentile where you're better than 80% but not as good as 20%? So you actually go and do that analysis and break people up into quartiles. So are you in the bottom 25%? The next 25%? The next 25% of the top 25%? We can look at your risk of death from any cause as a result of where you sit in that group. And we can do this for a lot of things, right? We can do this if you're a smoker. So if you take a bunch of people who smoke and a bunch of people who don't, and you make them look, you otherwise make them equal in all ways, the smokers are going to have about 40% higher chance of death in any given year. It's probably not that surprising. We understand that smoking is bad.
- [10:34]
Chrissy Teigen
40 sounds even higher than I remember.
- [10:37]
Dr. Peter Attia
Yeah, but pretty big. Smoking really does shorten your life. We could do the same thing for high blood pressure. If you take a bunch of people with high blood pressure, a bunch of people who look just like them, but they have normal blood pressure, it's about a 20% difference in all cause. It's called all cause mortality. Risk of death in that year from any cause. If you take those people in the top 25% of VO2 max and you compare them to their same age sex matched counterparts in the bottom 25%, the difference in all cause mortality is 175%.
- [11:08]
Chrissy Teigen
Wow.
- [11:09]
Dr. Peter Attia
Nothing compares to this. High cardiorespiratory fitness is the single greatest predictor of lifespan. The second greatest predictor, by the way, is strength. So we can look at different tests of how strong a person is, for example, how long they can carry their body weight or dead hang from a bar, how long they can do a wall sit, how strong their grip is, markers of strength turn out to be remarkably predictive of how long a person is going to live.
- [11:36]
Chrissy Teigen
So I feel like people my age, we are in the yoga, Pilates and very little cardio. That is bad.
- [11:43]
Dr. Peter Attia
Yeah. I mean, I think you want to be able to have a big portfolio in your exercise. Right. So there's nothing wrong with yogi, there's yoga, there's nothing wrong with Pilates. But any form of exercise in isolation is probably not optimal. You really do have to do cardio training for that VO2 max and you have to do strength training for the strength. There's no way around those things. They don't. You won't get to high enough levels. Right. If you want to at least be in the top quartile for your age, you have to do some training.
- [12:09]
Chrissy Teigen
What tests should we be asking for from our doctors in order to gauge our overall health?
- [12:15]
Dr. Peter Attia
There are a lot of tests and some of them you need a doctor for and many of them you don't. So we talked about a couple of these, right. I think everybody should have a DEXA scan, everybody should have a VO2 max test. Everybody should know how they stack up with respect to muscle mass, bone density, fat mass, fitness, all those things in terms of biomarkers, things that you could ask your doctor for. I think everybody should know their LP and their apob, which are. I'm sure people are listening and saying what? Yeah, totally foreign. But those are the two most important lipid markers, cholesterol markers that tell you about your risk for heart disease. I do think it's beneficial to know your APOE gene if the knowledge which tells you about your risk for Alzheimer's disease would activate you to maybe take greater steps to prevention. I think it's very important to know something about your metabolic health. So there are easy ways to do this and hard ways to do this. The hard way to do it is doing something called an oral glucose tolerance test, where you probably had to do this when you were pregnant. So you drink a glucose drink and then they check your glucose and insulin levels after very helpful test to give you a sense of how metabolically healthy you are. Again, none of these tests are typically done, so if you just go to your doctor, you're almost assuredly not getting an lp, an apob, APOE gene test, or an oral glucose tolerance test. So sometimes you have to go a little bit above and beyond and fight for those.
- [13:33]
Chrissy Teigen
So what's a good first goal then for somebody that really isn't that active? What is something I could do tomorrow and push myself to do and where.
- [13:41]
Dr. Peter Attia
From, then it would just know that you've interviewed Michael Easter. And I think one thing that Michael probably talked a lot about was rucking, right? So walking with a weighted backpack is a great way for someone who, you know, maybe doesn't really want to go to the gym just yet. They've accepted the fact that, hey, going for a walk is a fun thing to do. Okay? Make it a little harder, put some weight on and go for a walk. Especially when you get to the hills, you're going to really feel it, right? So that could become something to do. I think that strength training should be an important part of everyone's workout. Whether you're a man, whether you're a woman, whether you're young, whether you're old. Everyone needs to be strength training. And it doesn't have to be crazy and intimidating, right? Like, it. You don't have to go to a gym and get under the bar and do squats and deadlifts and things like that. Like, it could literally be just using machines that are much safer, much less intimidating, and just pushing yourself incrementally and watching how much you develop. Because the nice thing about it, for people who are starting at a place where they're not exercising much, they're going to make gains very quickly. And you don't have to. Your goal is not to hurt yourself. You know, you don't have to go in there with the objective of coming out, not being able to walk. It's just, hey, could I do this thing three times a week, where six months from now, I look back and I'm literally moving twice the weight I was when I came in? That'll happen.
- [14:54]
Chrissy Teigen
Hey, it's Chrissy. Dig deeper with today's guest and hear more from all our groundbreaking guests on Audible. From bestsellers and new releases to podcasts and Audible originals, discover the next step on your journey. Go to audible.com chrissyonaudible. You've expressed skepticism about the broader longevity movement and its promises of extreme life extension. How come?
- [15:17]
Dr. Peter Attia
You know, I just don't. I just don't see any indication that immortality or profound life extension is anywhere on the time horizon. So I think of it as a little bit of a distraction, truthfully. And again, I don't think there's anything wrong with people thinking about these things and putting some energy into it. But I worry that the layperson comes away with the wrong impression. Right? So if an individual wants to go deep down that rabbit hole in the quest for immortality, I think that's great. But I worry that if, you know, the average person thinks, oh, I don't need to worry about anything because I read that so and so said that we're going to all live to be 300 one day. That to me is really the downside of that.
- [15:59]
Chrissy Teigen
How far out do you think it is? Not this lifetime, obviously.
- [16:02]
Dr. Peter Attia
Well, again, I think not to get super nerdy in the details of physics and biology, but there is zero evidence that the chemical processes, the entropy that is involved in aging us are globally reversible. Does this mean that it is metaphysically impossible? It doesn't. But there's so much we still don't understand about the biology of aging. We know what the hallmarks are of aging. So I can tell you this is what your biology looks like at 38. I can tell you at 78 how it will look different. What I can't tell you is why. What specifically is driving it? It's quite difficult though not impossible to reverse something like that without having a fundamental understanding of the what is driving it. Especially when something is so powerful that it turns into a game of whack a molecule. Meaning you block one thing over here, but it just has an escape route over here and you block it over here and then it escapes over here. So I personally don't spend a lot of time thinking about that. It's not to say I spend no time thinking about it and participating in some of the scientific work that goes into understanding that. But at the same time, I think to me the most important hedge is to assume that's not coming in our lifetime and that any designer, it's very.
- [17:25]
Chrissy Teigen
Freeing to just know that and to finally hear it and hear somebody say it.
- [17:29]
Dr. Peter Attia
Let's assume that nothing is coming down the pike and whatever life extension and health span extension you want, you're going to have to earn the old fashioned way.
- [17:38]
Chrissy Teigen
Say we follow all the rules. What are we looking at here? What is, how is our lifespan looking? If we start now and start following all the rules, what can we expect?
- [17:49]
Dr. Peter Attia
I think that on average we could be thinking about 10 to 15 years of life extension at a much higher quality. So, you know, again, that's not like eye watering. Like, that's not, you know, like people saying you're going to live to be 200. But I, I think we could definitely be living into our late 80s, into our 90s. And again, the most important thing is at what quality, right, can you do that? Could you be 90 but function like a healthy 70 year old? Like to me that's actually the aspiration. So I think an interesting question is how can you train? How can you prepare yourself to make that marginal decade as good as possible? That doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be as good as age 28 to 38. But what is the difference between a person who has a really good marginal decade where they're cognitively sharp, they're still physically active, they're totally engaged? We know these stories, right? This is not impossible. You know these stories of these people who are fully active, totally engaged, and they, they die in their sleep at 91 or they get cancer and they're dead within two months. But outside of that last two months, they had a remarkable last decade of life. For many of these people, it's luck. They just have great genes that have set them up to a great health span right to the end. But I think for most of us, we have to be pretty deliberate about it, and we have to take these steps to turn that last decade of life into a sport, break it down into the activities of the sport, and then spend the previous decades leading up to it training for that. What are the specific things you have to do? Exercise wise, cognitively, emotionally, to practice and prepare for that.
- [19:27]
Chrissy Teigen
Bottom line, if you were to say to my listeners, if you don't do anything else to increase your lifespan, at least start doing this, what would this be?
- [19:35]
Dr. Peter Attia
Exercise more. Why do you not enjoy exercise?
- [19:39]
Chrissy Teigen
My whole life I've tied exercise to weight loss and not health. If I'm not at a point where I'm trying to get ready for a shoot or trying to lose massive amounts of weight, which also came with binging and purgin, not eating and so many different ways of disordered eating, I just don't enjoy the whole process of it because I'm not really like, of course I'm working for something, right? When you're exercising, you're, you're, you want to live a long, healthy, great life, like you said. But my brain is so hardwired to think that exercise is to lose weight, and I just, I can't get past that.
- [20:09]
Dr. Peter Attia
That's super interesting. It would be great to figure out how to get past that and how to. Because you probably know this, but exercise is actually not a great tool for weight loss. It's a good tool for weight mainten. So when they do experiments where they take people who are overweight and then they make one group do diet and then one group do exercise, and then one group do diet and exercise, the group that does diet and exercise and diet both lose weight. The exercise group does not lose weight. Then once they've reached weight loss, the group that exercised and dieted versus just dieted is easier to maintain their weight loss. While exercise won't help you lose weight, it helps you keep weight off. But of course, the real reason we want to exercise is, as you said, it's not really about weight. It's about health, and it's about function. It's important to find something that you can enjoy, and that means discovering, do I like to do this alone? Do I like having a trainer there, someone who I'm accountable to?
- [21:16]
Chrissy Teigen
Yeah.
- [21:16]
Dr. Peter Attia
Am I going to have more fun if I do it with my girlfriends? It's figuring out what's going to make it so that showing up is easy and then being there is tolerable. And I have to work through that. And then you're going to actually start to enjoy it. Once you get the results, you will enjoy it, but you have to get through that first. Probably 8 to 12 weeks of consistency.
- [21:35]
Chrissy Teigen
So this Peter that sits before me today is not exactly the same Peter that has always existed. Can you tell me about some of the big changes you made in your life to be where you are now?
- [21:47]
Dr. Peter Attia
Yeah. First of all, none of this stuff comes easy to everybody. Right? So certain things will come easy to certain people and certain things won't. In terms of all these habits we're talking about, fortunately for me, at least, exercise has always been something that is just a given. I'm going to exercise. It's actually hard for me to not exercise. But that's not true with food. If I ate according to my desires, I'd be £300, literally. I would not stop eating. Like, I love junk food. I love crap. I could eat French fries three meals a day. I'm envious of these people who tell me that they don't crave crap and all they want to do is eat great food. So for me, there's a big amount of discipline and environmental manipulation that leads to how I'm going to just eat better. Emotional health, not something that really came naturally to me to be connected. I struggled a lot. Many aspects, workaholism, perfectionism, anger. All of these things were driving factors. And unfortunately, those are sneaky bad behaviors and bad tendencies because they actually can be quite reinforcing. The world is pretty tolerant of a workaholic who's angry if they produce good results. So unfortunately, that can be reinforcing in your professional life, even if it could be really destructive in your personal Life. That's been the area of my life where I've had to work the hardest to correct my own relationship to myself and others in an effort to be where I want to be, not just today, but also what kind of relationship I want to have with my kids and with my wife later in life.
- [23:17]
Chrissy Teigen
So you speak a lot about the Standard American Diet and its contribution to chronic diseases.
- [23:22]
Dr. Peter Attia
The Standard American Diet is a reasonable solution to a vexing problem that drove our species almost to extinction. Right. How do you make lots of food for really cheap, make it taste good, allow it to be preserved so it doesn't spoil, and make it highly transportable? Okay. So if you want to, those are all reasonable things to want to do for our species to exist as it does today. The problem is the solution, if consumed to excess, which is how it's designed, is not good for us. So the Standard American Diet in and of itself is a. Without it, in some ways, we wouldn't proliferate the way we have, but we have to figure out ways to eat less of it. There's just no two ways about it right now. There's certain ways you can opt out of it. I do my best to do so, but it's hard. You're going to pay a price to opt out. You will spend more money and you will take more time. The two most important things you can do to opt out of the Standard American Diet are learn to cook your food and buy high quality food. So that's time and money, and that's not something that everybody has infinite quantities of. The two most important things to be thinking about are how do I manage total caloric intake and how do I manage adequate protein intake. And this is true for men. It's true for women. Again, this is another reason where women struggle. They tend to have a harder time getting adequate amounts of protein. When I tell women how much protein they need, most of them just can't believe it.
- [24:46]
Chrissy Teigen
Tell me.
- [24:46]
Dr. Peter Attia
Yeah, you need almost a gram per pound of body weight.
- [24:51]
Chrissy Teigen
140 grams.
- [24:53]
Dr. Peter Attia
Yeah, that's work.
- [24:55]
Chrissy Teigen
How much that is sounds like a lot of work. How much is a chicken breast? I should know.
- [24:58]
Dr. Peter Attia
Depends on the size, but a chicken breast might be 35 grams. Holy shit. A day. So you'll need. Yeah, you should be eating absolutely no less than 100 grams of protein a day and ideally closer to 140.
- [25:11]
Chrissy Teigen
Wow.
- [25:13]
Dr. Peter Attia
So how do you do that? Right. How do you do that without eating too many calories? Because this means you need lean protein. Right. That requires attention. Now it's doable, but you have to eat deliberately to make that happen. That won't happen on autopilot. If we eat on autopilot for most of us, we will end up eating too many calories and too little protein. There are three ways that we can manipulate total caloric intake and one of them is just directly manipulating it. How do you directly manipulate it? You just eat less. You mentioned Ozempic a minute ago. Ozempic is, that's the. That's exactly how it works. It impairs your appetite. It makes you just want to eat less. Okay, there's nothing wrong with that. But you just have to remember if you are taking Ozempic or Mounjaro, you've got to make sure you're still getting the right amount of protein. What you don't want is to just eat less of everything. You want to eat the same amount of protein or your total amount of protein and just eat fewer carbs and fat.
- [26:09]
Chrissy Teigen
And you need to exercise. That's right. Because you're losing a lot of muscle on it.
- [26:13]
Dr. Peter Attia
The next thing you can do is let's say you're not going to use a drug or you're not going to just will power your way through it is you do something called dietary restriction. You just pick things in the diet to not eat. You've heard people say I'm going to go paleo or vegan or low carb or low this or low that. And the more restrictive you make a diet, the more it's going to reduce your total calories. And then the last thing which you've probably heard of is called time restricted feeding or some people call it intermittent fasting. And that basically just says I'm going to shrink the window that I'm eating to a smaller and smaller amount and that's going to help me reduce total calories, which it does. But again, you still have this issue of needing to make sure you get enough protein.
- [26:54]
Chrissy Teigen
Sleep is often overlooked in discussions about longevity. How does poor sleep accelerate the aging process? And what role does sleep play in preventing age related diseases like Alzheimer's and heart disease?
- [27:06]
Dr. Peter Attia
Sleep really is important and I think it's definitely gotten a lot more attention in the last seven or eight years, which I think is really important. I would say of all the kind of pillars of aging or of all the pillars of behavior, it's probably one of the ones that I was last to adopt in terms of its utility function. I think up until 12 years ago, I largely ignored sleep. Actually, I think the evidence is Pretty clear that deteriorating sleep, either in quality or quantity, is clearly associated with metabolic disease. So the risk of insulin resistance, obesity, type 2 diabetes, definitely goes up with fragmented or incomplete sleep. And then we know that if that's happening, that the other three horsemen are very likely to increase in risk. Now, the data aren't as clear for cancer, but they are, I think, reasonably persuasive for Alzheimer's disease and for cardiovascular disease for many people. I think there's an even more compelling reason, when you're young, to care about this, which is performance. Right? Most of us, you might be an exception, but most of us make a living by not how we look, but just by, like, the only thing I make money on is my brain, right? You probably make money on your brain and your beauty, but it's not even though if you're earning a living by how your brain works, works, you should care about the performance of your brain. And there's truly no better tool for your brain than sleep.
- [28:33]
Chrissy Teigen
What are the biggest misconceptions people have about aging, and how does your approach change the way we think about getting older?
- [28:41]
Dr. Peter Attia
Well, I hope what it does is allow us to all embrace something that is really difficult to embrace. People ask me all the time, do you have no fear of death? Do you care about aging? And the truth of it is, I'm no different than everybody else. I. I don't love the fact that I'm aging. I don't love the fact that when I look at myself in the mirror, I can see more wrinkles than I can shake a stick at. I don't love the fact that I'm not the person I was when I was in my 30s. And I don't love the fact that I'm going to be dead one day. I don't. I think all of those things are untruths. If I tried to suggest to people, none of those things bothered me. But I also think that by ignoring all of those things and acting as though none of those things are happening, I'm also not doing myself a service, and I'm not living the best life that I can. And it's a balance, because I think, on the one hand, you can become so obsessive about this stuff that you're not living. But at the other hand, I think you can ignore it to your detriment and to your pearl and to the point where at some point, you have no choice. You're in a situation that you can't do anything to mitigate. So I think everybody has to find that balance of what does it mean to be in the present, to plan for the future? I don't think we should view aging as the worst thing in the world. And maybe we view it as a forcing function to get things done right. If we were truly immortal, what motivation would we have to do anything? You could always do something the next day and the next day and the next day.
- [30:13]
Chrissy Teigen
And now for the toolkit. Each episode, our guests distill their expertise into practical and actionable insights. Today, Dr. Peter Aitia shares key strategies to increase our longevity.
- [30:24]
Dr. Peter Attia
One of the most important observations I think I've ever had was that training is different from exercising. Exercising probably gives you a lot of the benefits of lifespan, but training is what's really necessary to get the benefits of healthspan. And to train, you have to have a goal. And so the mental model for me is this thing called the centenarian decathlon. Now, of course, it's not literally an event, and you don't have to literally be a hundred years old to do it, but the idea that just as a decathlete is considered the best athlete at the Olympics, even though they're not the best at any one thing, the idea is picking the 10 things that are most important for you to be able to do in the last decade of your life. What are those things? Some of those things will just be activities of daily living. I want to be able to walk up the stairs carrying a bag of something. I want to be able to pick a child up and put them in a crib and take them out of a crib. Let's say it's your grandchild or your great grandchild. And then some of those things might be actual activities. I want to be able to play 18 holes of golf and actually walk between each of the holes. Or I want to be able to play pickleball or something like that. When you get a person to identify the 10 most important things for them to be able to do in the last decade of their life, that becomes their centenarian decathlon. And then what you do is you actually train to do those things. You train all of the base movements, all of the base level of fitness that's necessary so that when they get there, it's not an accident. They've deliberately worked to be there, just as a decathlete has trained to be in the Olympics and to be able to do those 10 things. If you're a javelin thrower, you don't just show up at the Olympics and say, I think I'm going To try to throw this javelin today? No way. You have figured out years in advance what it is, what is required to throw a javelin. And all of your training revolves around throwing a javelin. You don't train to swim fast. Maybe you swim as part of the training, but you're not optimizing for how fast you swim. You're optimizing for how fast you throw the javelin or how well you play basketball or whatever the sport is. And I think what people need to align around is this idea that we have to start treating life like a sport. Even though you're only 38, in 40 years, you're going to be 78, your son is gonna be in his 40s, he's gonna have kids. You're gonna wanna do stuff with them. What is that? What are you gonna wanna do with them?
- [32:40]
Chrissy Teigen
Be active.
- [32:42]
Dr. Peter Attia
Yeah. So the more you can define what that is with great specificity, what is being active? The good news is you already know what it's like with your son. So you could literally go through a day with your son and say, I really like to be able to pick him up. I really like to be able to sit on the floor with him. I really like to be able to kick a soccer ball or throw a baseball or do whatever it is. And then you have to ask yourself the question, will I be able to do that at 78?
- [33:06]
Chrissy Teigen
I mean, I can barely do it now. Honestly, I'm not joking. Like, John is kind of the more active one. He's playing football with them, soccer back there. And then I do all like the artsy, fartsy, crafty stuff. But yeah, it would definitely pay off to.
- [33:19]
Dr. Peter Attia
It doesn't even need to be sports. Like, let's just say you don't want to do sports, but you would still want to be able to go to a park with them. Yeah, you would still probably want to be able to put a grandchild on a swing and take them off a swing. You would still want to be able to push a stroller potentially. And all of those things that you can do today quite easily, I'm sure. Start to become really difficult in your 70s. And they don't have to be provided you start training for those things. The human body is remarkably malleable, meaning it adapts to whatever stress you put on it, but you have to put the stress on it over and over again for it to adapt.
- [33:55]
Chrissy Teigen
Do you have any weird things on your list of 10?
- [33:57]
Dr. Peter Attia
I want to be able to drive a race car within 5% of the speed that I can drive one today. I still want to be able to shoot a bow. I still want to be able to walk up lots of stairs with heavy weights, relatively heavy, not as heavy as I would today, but some of them are really quite benign. I want to be able to sit on the floor and get up without anybody helping me.
- [34:18]
Chrissy Teigen
Dr. Peter Attia, thank you so much for being here today. On Self Conscious, Outlive the Science and Art of Longevity is available on Audible. Until then, tune in, turn on and feel better. This is Chrissy Teigen and you've been listening to Self Conscious, an Audible original podcast. This has been an Audible original produced by Audible and Huntley Productions, hosted by Chrissy Teigen, Executive Producer for Huntley Productions Chrissy Teigen, Executive Producer for Audible Stacy Creamer Recorded and engineered by Alex Sky Mixed and mastered by Jeremiah Zimmerman Edited by Lisa Orkin Head of Creative Development at Audible Kate Navin Chief Content Officer Rachel Giazza Copyright 2024 by Audible Originals, LLC Sound Recording Copyright 2024 by Audible Originals LL.