Outlive

Summary:

Outlive is a book about longevity and healthspan, written by Dr. Peter Attia, who has spent a large portion of his medical practice career researching what allows centenarians to live beyond ten decades while the rest of us might get seven, if we are lucky.

Review:

I’ve had this on my TBR list for a few years now. I’ve heard Dr. Attia speak on several podcasts, including one of my favorites, The Huberman Lab podcast, more than a few times. I have thus been familiar with the work, but hadn’t taken the time to digest the full contents until now.

To say this book covers a lot of information would be an understatement. At its core, it is a book about living a long and healthy life, ideally well into our ninth or tenth decades and defeating the “four horsemen” of disease that kill the vast majority of humans on the planet - most of which are avoidable… or can at least be delayed by decades if we follow the principles laid out in the book.

What he and other researchers have found is that exercise and sleep are two of the most important things we can do to provide ourselves many years of healthy living. Nutrition and hydration are also important, but not nearly as impactful as exercise and sleep.

I was pleasantly surprised that he spends a lengthy chapter discussing mental health and the importance of healing from trauma and prioritizing our mental wellbeing. He does a good job of calling out that men need to do this equally as much as women, if not more in many instances. In modern Western culture it is becoming more accepted that men experience trauma that needs to be healed from as well, but we tend to still try to tough it out and deny our need.

He makes a great point when discussing this when he says:

Mental health is crucial for everyone and should be a priority, starting now if you haven’t already. After all, what’s the point of living a long life if you’re miserable the entire time?

Structurally, the first half of the book talks about the need to focus on longevity and healthspan by reframing our view of medicine from what he calls Medicine 2.0 to Medicine 3.0, as well as the explanation of the Four Horsmen and how to best avoid them. The second half of the book focuses on the practices that will allow us to expand our lifespan and healthspan well into our later years. He frames this through the lens of the Centenarian Decathalon - a list of ten life events we want to be able to participate in while we are in our nineties or older.

He doesn’t give strict prescriptive fitness or nutrition recommendations other than the fact that everyone should be training now and improving their markers of longevity (VO2 Max, Grip Strength, Muscle Mass) to ideally be great not for their current age, but for a decade or two younger, in order to properly ensure our older years are set up for success.

Overall, I think the book is well written and easy to follow, even for a lay person who doesn’t have advanced medical training or a background in fitness and/or nutrition. He also avoids using scare tactics when speaking of the diseases that lead to most deaths, but handles our mortality with care and wisdom. In other words, he has good bedside manners.

I enjoyed the book, though I do tend to nerd out about these topics. I’d recommend if you really want to take a deep dive into what you can do to live your best life for as long as possible, but if you don’t want to spend 15+ hours reading a book, you can learn a lot of this through his podcast appearances or YouTube videos as well.