Where to Start

Most people have some inkling about the big three movers in longevity: exercise, nutrition, and sleep. Anyone that would advise you to start anywhere else is misguided. The problem, however, is that there’s SO much noise, and so many disparate voices giving such a wide range of advice on these big three. It’s hard to know which specific tactics to adopt, which way to point yourself on a daily basis. Before jumping into that fray of diet wars and gym routines, I’d like to suggest that a real concerted effort to improve your health first start with…

Visibility: 

You need to have some idea of your biometrics, some idea of how you’re doing both as a baseline and to track weekly change. If you don’t measure it, it can’t guide your journey. Without numbers, you’re mostly driving blind. There are so many things to measure though, right?

First, I would say that EVERYONE needs to know about their blood pressure and their fat related measurements. If those measures aren’t within healthy range, stop all else and focus on nothing else. As for fat, you especially need to address your visceral fat, even above BMI. I recommend buying a smart scale that can tell you lots of these metrics, but if you don’t have that even just waist size is a decent measurement of visceral fat. For each one inch in waste size you lose, you also decrease your all cause mortality risk by 8%. Visceral fat, fortunately, comes off first when you fast or embark on a disciplined ketogenic diet. Reducing your visceral fat is not like other fat, and it’s the number one way to put yourself on longevity fast track (or rather the slow track, since we’re pursuing more years).

After these first two metrics, I would advise a whole metabolic blood panel, advanced lipid panel, and immune related panel. You want to know everything you can about your insulin sensitivity, diabetic risk, cholesterol related molecules, atherosclerotic indicators, and inflammation indicators.

Unfortunately, I think the reality most people will experience is that things are worse than they thought. My guess is that most people think they’re doing a much better job until they finally look under the hood and are presented with some data. Knowledge is the first step, in my opinion, and this knowledge leads into…

Motivation:

This aspect of the game really requires some skill and finesse. Eating right, exercising intensely, and sleeping well is… HARD. Don’t let anyone tell you any differently. It’s so easy to stumble, and even fall off the wagon completely. Here are some hacks that I’ve found to be critical in my own motivational journey:

1. Count calories: I admit, this is such a drag… really, no fun at all. That said, I’ve NEVER been able to lose weight without doing this. I've tried so many different things in so many different ways, but unless I’m confronted with my sins in clear quantifiable ways, unless I have accountability, I fail. Always. Do you have a history of failure or success in this? I’d suggest that if you fail enough times, you finally have to face the cold hard truth. Maybe this is never going to work until I document every single morsel that goes in my mouth, What’s more, not only does calorie counting provide accountability, but I’ve also found that I am just TERRIBLE at guessing how I’m doing. I’m almost always severely undercounting my calories when I’m not writing down the numbers… and I think I’m probably like most people. Most of us severely underestimate how many calories we eat, and then act so surprised though when we inch up on the scale week after week. When will we face the truth? We eat way more than we should almost any time we’re not counting.

2. Identity: Instead of all kinds of clever mental games to try to rev yourself up to do hard things, and push that rock up the hill, day after day after day… Instead of pep talking yourself to go to the gym and giving yourself reasons for why it should happen,,, instead, you need to try to start changing your identity, your base perception of who you are. You should tell yourself “I am the type of person who goes to the gym” instead “you can do this, come on! Tough it up, and you’ll be glad you did…” When you tell yourself the latter, your brain is smart enough to notice the contradiction, and the games you’re playing. It hears you say “Although you’re not actually the type of person that goes to the gym, you can still do it anyway…” It hears the conflict, and the contradiction. Your brain hears you telling it to do something that is not in accord with WHO YOU ARE. The brain responds to affirmations of its identity, not pep talks AGAINST its perceived identity. You have to pay a lot of attention to your self-talk, and the inherent contradictions within it. You need to tell yourself what a winner you are, what a healthy eater you are, what a discplined exerciser you are, etc. It needs to hear this as a mere identity affirmation, not as a pep talk. You need to tell yourself you are strong, you are a victor, you’re an overcomer. That’s just WHO YOU ARE, not someone you’re pretending to be. When you change your identity, then motivation becomes MUCH easier. Why? Because then you’re not a hypocrite. Rather, you’re merely acting in accordance with who you are. It takes way more energy / mental power to defy who you perceive yourself to be. When you are just being you, however, things unfoil much more smoothly and calling upon fewer will power reserves. You’re just you being you, instead a coach screaming “be someone else!”

Nutrition:

Most of us are “over-nourished.” There’s a lot that can be said about the benefits of different diets, but it's hard to get around the simple calorie in vs calorie out (burned). Since it takes roughly 3500 calories of deficit to lose one pound of weight, and exercise usually burns such a disappointingly low amount of calories, there’s really no way to exercise yourself skinny, You’re going to have to simply do a lot of NOT EATING. For me, it's even much easier to eat nothing at all than eat in moderation, I thought I was strange in this particular psychology, but I’ve recently discovered that many people actually feel the same way. I would urge many of you to give fasting a chance. If you really look into it, the benefits are innumerable, and most people can do it with no negative health effects at all. It’s really the small subset of people that need to do it in conjunction with a doctor. Fasting, off and on, was arguably what our body was built to do, and did for many thousands of years before the advent of farming. While fasting, not only will you see the pounds fall off and organ systems undergo beneficial reboots, but you’ll also see a preferential burn off of your visceral fat, which is arguably your most important first priority in this whole game. Whatever the case, as most successful weight-losers will tell you… you’re not going to win the weight game on the exercise side of the balance alone. You win it much more on the food side of the balance. And on the food side, the biggest thing you can do is straight up calorie restriction– simply denying yourself food for extended durations.

In my own journey, it’s also been important to take the “low hanging fruit” wins as much as I can, when they’re available. By that I mean… When I can sense my will power is high, and I feel mentally strong, then in those states I need to do the maximum possible, because that state won’t last. Regarding food, for me that means if I have the will power to eat nothing at all, I should always do that. Later I will be weak and uncontrollable. If I have the will power NOW, then I use NOW. I basically have to plan for that failure later, and make a buffer I can fall back on. If, say, I’m prone to binging in the evening, it’s at least not as bad if I haven’t eaten anything else until that day up until that evening time. If I have extraordinary will power for an entire day or two, it's ok to not even eat for say those two whole days. Again, it’s a given there will be many failures later, so I need to make room for them. Fasting will not hurt you. Don’t be afraid of it.

Beyond all that, to keep it simplistic I would just say eat mostly whole foods. Stay away from the center of the store where all the processed foods are. Primarily only fill your cart with the things on the periphery edges, and if you do that alone you’ll be much healthier. Beyond that, of course you know that you should eat a lot of vegetables, and white meat over red. Above all, cut your sugar to as low as you can possibly tolerate it. It's really not overblown, in my opinion, when physicians refer to sugar as poison. Hyperbole or not, we’d all do better to perceive it that way, especially the “added sugar” we find in our foods.

Exercise: 

This one is not complicated. Do what you can, as much as you can, as soon as you can… and then try to add to that amount and intensity every week. No medication for mental health works as well as exercise does, studies repeatedly show. The same is true for most ailments across the body systems. There’s nothing that drives down all-cause mortality more greatly than mitochondrial and cardiovascular fitness. VO2Max, the amount of oxygen your cells can take in and utilize, drives down call cause mortality on par with or greater than even quitting smoking. 

Anyway, you can learn more as you go about things like zone 2-4 cardio programs, etc… but the best exercise routine is one that you can stick with, one you don’t absolutely hate. Take baby steps and keep pushing yourself to do more. Your mental outlook and positivity toward all of life will change, and it will make the other tasks of longevity that much lighter as well. 

Lots of exercise is also a big part of reforming your identity, as mentioned earlier. When you do hard things in your exercise time, you prove to yourself that you ARE indeed that “bad-ass” you’ve been telling yourself you are. It’s self-refinforcing, and as you learn that IS your true identity, and you’re not lying to yourself, your entire mental burden becomes lighter once the self-deception game vanishes. At that point you’re merely being who you are, not pretending to be someone else. This puts you on the high stable road that is sustainable for the long term. 

You CAN do hard things. You’re not just proving it to others, you’re proving it to yourself!

Sleep:

There’s less to say here, but it’s no less important. All of your body responds to the quality or paucity of your sleep. The most telling metric of how your night will go is your heart rate at bedtime. You want to do everything you can to wind this down on schedule. Try to finish eating 3-4 hours before bedtime, try to go to sleep at the same time every night, and get at least 7-9 hours every night. Err on the side of giving yourself too much. Get the temperature pretty cold, 65-66 degrees. Make the room very dark or sleep with a dark mask. If you have sleep apnea or think you might, do something about it. See a doctor and get treatment. Sleep is too important to let go on, unperfected. What’s more, you’re just cruising toward Alzheimer's or other dementia if you can’t get this right. It’s THAT important. You need to get really serious, even ruthless, about clearing out all the obstacles for this domain of your life. It’s impossible to have longevity success without this key lynchpin.

Beyond:

I would not advise really trying to tackle more until you get a good handle on the big three above (exercise, sleep, & nutrition). If you’ve come close to mastering those domains though, there is indeed more. Mostly the above activities will primarily slow the pace of aging, but there are actually a few things that could even be said to reverse aging to varying extents. 

My first favorite, and arguably most powerful, is hyperbaric oxygen therapy, or HBOT for short. I’ll just link to it since I’ve written about it more thoroughly here.

Another simple but well tested therapy is sauna, or more specifically Finnish style dry sauna. Notes on this protocol and benefits can be found here.

Peptides and off label medications are the new pioneer for many, and you can find more about those here.

Finally the cutting edge, and arguably the holy grail for epigenetic resetting is… stem cell therapy. More can be found about this field and treatment possibilities here.