Increase Your Lifespan with Simple Diet Hacks | Peter Attia EP 371

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

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0:50You eat a healthy meal, let's say, an hour before bed. I'm talking about grains and lean meat and healthy stuff. Or if you eat pizza an hour before bed, are they both going to impact your ability to sleep better? Or is the quality of the food before you go to bed matter? The short answer is, yeah, it does matter. Probably the two things that would have the greatest determination would be the simplicity of the carbohydrates or the glycemic load, because that's going to impact the sort of glycemic roller coaster you go on at night. and then probably the amount of protein because that has a greater contribution to what's called the thermogenic effect of food.

1:28So the thermogenic effect is how much does your body temperature actually rise to digest the food? Our bodies want to be very cold at night. So anything you do that opposes that leads to lousy sleep. So what foods help you sleep better? Honestly, it's like almost anything you're going to eat is going to come with something that's going to slightly raise your temperature. So I just generally say, try to not eat too much before bed and I go out of my way to avoid the two things that I think are worse. So I just say I wouldn't have huge protein before bed and I don't want to have anything that's going to raise my blood sugar before bed.

2:01The body really rewards you in terms of if you wait or if you don't eat right before bed, is it going to sleep better, sleep deeper, be cooler and therefore help you have more energy the next day if you don't eat before bed? Yeah. And this is at least for me been most easy to exhibit. And I think many of my patients would agree during periods of fasting. Fasting is kind of a funky state because you're altering so many other things in the physiology. But one of the things that happens, especially by about the second day of a water only fast is you really are seeing the impacts of what deep sleep can look like in a state that is totally absent food.

2:36It's very interesting because you're competing with two forces, one that's keeping you awake and one that's helping you sleep a lot deeper. The one that's keeping you awake is cortisol. salt. You have more of it. You have more stress hormones when you're fasting because that's the thing from a prehistoric standpoint that would have been going on, right? Fasting would trigger a signal that says, go get more food. But the flip side of that is total absence of nutrient is allowing you to get into this amazing sleep and your body temperature is really going down because your body's turning down its metabolism.

3:07So I actually find fasting sleep to be some of the most amazing physiology because I'm watching this plummeting temperature, rising heart rate variability, falling heart rate, all of these really valuable things, but a little bit of rising cortisol that can lead to shorter sleep times. But I still feel quite, you know, rejuvenated by sleep. If you're a kid and you're eating a lot of junk food, you're not sleeping, you're staying up late, but you've got all this energy all day and you're active. Is there a negative in your early ages, teens, early 20s for lacking sleep, eating poorly? Or is there a way to recover in your 20s from the damage you've done at 420?

3:48Certainly, you can break it down into sort of the behavioral habit side, and you can talk about it through the physiologic lens. The good news is before the age of 20 or 30, we are pretty remarkably resilient. So there's this thing called homeostasis, right, which is one of the hallmarks of youth. And it's one of the hallmarks of aging. It's our lack of homeostasis. We lose this ability to get the body back into the zone of optimal performance. Everything about the human body is very particular. For example, take pH, which is the amount of acidity in our body. We're so highly regulated. Like our body really needs to be at a pH of 7.4.

4:257 would kill you and 7.6 or 7.7 would kill you. And this is a scale that goes from 0 to 14. To put that in perspective. Tiny perturbations will kill you. How good is our body at staying in that? Amazing. Temperature. You go much below about 94, you're dead. you go much above about 104 you're dead how good are we at staying in that range oh i mean good i mean we generally stay within a 1.5 degree band so this homeostasis thing is amazing it gets weaker and weaker as we get older and so your ability to tolerate bad food bad sleep sedentary behavior more stress all those things it just gets weaker and weaker and weaker and i think it declines non-linearly.

5:08So what you experience as a decline between 30 and 40, it's bad. 40 to 50, yeah, that's worse. 50 to 60, you can fall off a cliff. Is there a way to reverse this? I would say you probably can reverse it, right? So just as you can clearly reverse diabetes, diabetes is a glucose homeostasis problem, and it's clearly reversible. So there are probably some variants of this that are harder to reverse than others. But no, I think we can reverse this process. It gets harder. You know, it gets harder as time goes on and it gets harder the further you are into the physiologic trap. What are you doing to reverse it now that you've been experiencing this kind of, not maybe a cliff, but a dip over the last five years for yourself?

5:50How are you thinking about it? Well, I sort of had a change of heart six years ago, 2014. So at that point I'd switched from swimming to cycling as sort of my main sport. At that point, a couple of things had happened. So one, I had become very familiar with a lot of emerging research on excessive cardiovascular training. Ultra marathons, ultra biking, ultra swimming, hiking. That's right. That's right. And it's the same sort of curve, right? Where as dose of exercise goes up, mortality comes down, but it has this little bit of a J where once you start to get into hyper amounts of exercise, especially over the age of 40, you're actually driving an increase in mortality.

6:29Running a marathon once a year, probably not increasing your mortality at all. But, you know, running 40, 50 miles a week probably is, especially at that age. Now, again, this gets to your point about resilience. Someone in their 20s doing that doesn't seem to have any impact on mortality. It really only seems to be an issue if you continue. I realized, like, my prime was so far behind me that I needed to think about, like, what was I doing this in service of, right? Just as a joke, one day I asked my wife, I said, hey, do you know what my PR is for 20K? This is my wife. She hears me talk about this stuff all the time.

7:06I have spreadsheets and models and data, and I analyze my power data every single day. And I'm trying to break the record for San Diego. Like, I'm really so switched on to this. She'll probably get it within a minute. She'll guess what my PR is within a minute. She was off by 20 minutes, meaning she wasn't even in the zip code. So I was like, huh, that's funny. Like literally the most important person in my life couldn't care less about this. And what I realized was, you know, I need to start thinking about a different sport, which is the sport of longevity. And so that was the beginning of a mental model for me that in the past two years has gained much more traction called the Centenarian Olympics.

7:48How do you train to kick at 100 should you get there? And of course, everywhere along the way. So that now dominates my landscape of training, which means I don't care about how fast I can ride a 40 kilometer time trial, because that doesn't quite fit into what a centenarian needs to be able to do. What is your mindset going into a 40-mile bike then or some type of experience? Is it more the joy of it? So I don't train. No, my training is very specific, but now it is fundamentally organized around four pillars. So the pillars being stability, strength, mitochondrial or aerobic efficiency, and anaerobic performance.

8:28And so each of those then has a super layer detail approach. And I still ride my bike four hours a week. So it's a fraction of what I used to do. And it's now very much geared to a certain energy system and a type of training. So you focus on those four metrics now on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, those four pillars sort of make up the training program, which is then in service of something that I invite every patient to define for themselves. Because you will have a different set of variables for me potentially. But my Centenary Olympics has 18 events in it. You know, like I want to be able to pull myself out of a pool that, you know, where there's a one foot gap between the water and the curb, like lift myself up.

9:12I want to be able to hop over a three foot fence. I want to be able to walk three miles in an hour. I want to be able to carry two 10 pound bags up four flights of stairs. I want to be able to goblet squat 30 pounds because that's about the weight of a kid. I want to be able to get up off the floor without using my hands. I could rattle off all of my 18 things and you would say, Peter, those seem really easy. And you'd be right as a 37-year-old stud. As a 60-year-old, a lot of them aren't easy. Most 60-year-olds couldn't do this if their life depended on it. And I have yet to meet but maybe one person in their 80s or 90s who can.

9:48And so that's the aspiration is to get to that level in your 80s or 90s. How do you work that backwards to inform your training in your 60s, in your 50s, and in your 40s? And it's actually very hard. I think it's never too late to at least become familiar with what these ideas mean. It doesn't mean that you have to go whole hog and devote yourself to this. Like I've obviously made a very conscious choice that I don't go to swim meets. I don't go to bike races. Like I don't train for those things anymore. And a big part of that is just time. You know, there are only 168 hours in a week and I have a very clear set of priorities and I'm willing to set aside 10 to 12 hours a week for exercise, which by many people's standards is still quite a lot, but probably by the standards that you exercise and certainly by the standards that I used to exercise, I've never exercised so little in my life.

10:37So I have to be very efficient with every one of those minutes. And that means I'm laser focused on the four principles of that. How much time do you want to devote to the long game? How much time do you want to devote to the short game? Another way to think about this would be investing. If you're looking at an investment portfolio, you might say, how much do I want to put both time and money into my retirement account versus how much do I want to invest as a day trader for short-term gains for, you know, money that I'm going to be using in the near term that's maybe even supplementing my income today.

11:09You could have totally different strategies for that and that's totally fine. So I'm just in the category where I'm only thinking about long-term permanent capital. So that's the first question is you have to decide how do you want to do that. And it might be that you say, you know, Peter at 37. I just want to focus on running a marathon. I've always wanted to do an Ironman. So I'm going to go and do that. You know, I want to climb Mount Everest and that's going to require, like, you might have a whole bunch of these bucket list things. And truthfully, I would say, do them now because it's only going to get harder.

11:34Because you're not going to be able to do it later. And then maybe when you turn 40, you say, okay, now it's time I'm going to really focus on my centenarian Olympics.

11:53Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. And I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

12:43Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.