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Living
Just when I thought I’ve heard everything on aging well, optimal health, longevity, exercise, and the importance of emotional, spiritual, and relational health, an insightful book by Dr. Peter Attia finds its way to me. Thank you, Barbara Madorin, for the recommendation. The book is the newest wake-up call for proceeding from the eras of medicine, health, and science 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0 and beyond.
OUTLIVE, The Science & Art of Longevity is one of the most comprehensive and transformative dialogue on how to be ‘alive’ while living. I realize it sounds redundant to state the obvious. Isn’t everyone who is living alive? Not necessarily.
A couple of things we know for sure about life, no matter how much we have, if we don’t have our health, it’s impossible to enjoy what we have. And no one knows how long they will live, but they know how they feel each day living. Health and awareness are the keys to being alive.
In the book, chapter 4 is titled, "The older you get, the healthier you have been". I thought of the people I know who are remarkably alive. They are working, traveling, dancing, grandparenting, volunteering, writing, gathering, happy, reinventing their lives, curious, and playing. Of course, they go down occasionally with a cold or virus, or even medical setbacks, but not for long. Their preventative medicine is being active, relational, emotionally sane, and spiritually connected.
OUTLIVE describes healthy living with medicine in three eras. The first era, exemplified by Hippocrates, lasting almost two thousand years after his death, is called Medicine 1.0. "Hippocrates' major contribution was the insight that disease is caused by nature and not by actions of the gods, as had previously been believed. That alone represented a huge step in the right direction. They did the best they could without an understanding of science or the scientific method." At least they’re not bloodletting as a form of treatment any longer.
MEDICINE 2.0 treats everyone basically the same, obeying the findings of the clinical trials that underlie evidence-based medicine. Evidence-based medicine then insists that we apply those average findings back to individuals. The problem is that no patient is strictly average.
MEDICINE 3.0 takes the findings of evidence-based medicine and goes one step further, looking more deeply into the data to determine how each patient is similar or different from the ‘average’ and how its findings might or might not be applicable to them. Medicine 3.0 pays more attention to maintaining health span and the quality of life, considering the individual.
Aside from the usual advice on nutrition and exercise, other chapters include The Price of Ignoring Emotional Health, The Deadliest Killer on the Planet, Heart Disease; The Runaway Cell, New Ways to Address the Killer that is Cancer and Chasing Memory, Understanding Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Neurodegenerative Diseases. Dr. Attia leads us into Training 101: How to Prepare for the Centenarian Decathlon. I loved the chapter.
Another favorite chapter, The Awakening, How to Learn to Love Sleep, the best medicine for your brain reminded me that I had been wrong in my relationship with sleep. Boasting a four-hour sleep cycle for most of my life, I fully know I was wrong. I now give myself permission to sleep.
Dr. Attia’s last paragraph in the book says this: “I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future…. If you want to find someone’s true age, listen to them. If they talk about the past and they talk about all the things that happened in the past, they’ve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to—they’re young.”
OUTLIVE is a must for those who are genuinely looking to be alive and enjoy every day as much as possible. I highly recommend exploring its unique content and stories and be prepared as Dr. Attia shares his private life struggles with his own mental and emotional challenges. We are not alone on this journey.
Here’s to staying young, as we age.
With love,
Hilda
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