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Extend Your Healthspan with Bill Gifford - E52
27 Plays5 days ago
Could the key to adding vital, healthy years of your life be hiding in plain sight? In today's episode, we separate fact from fiction in the often confusing world of fitness and aging. Many of us reach a point where maintaining health feels like an impossible challenge, with contradictory exercise advice only adding to our frustration. We'll cut through the noise to reveal how strategic movement can transform your health trajectory, helping you break free from stagnation and rediscover the vibrant energy you thought was lost to time. Join us as we share the science-backed strategy that can turn exercise from a chore into your most powerful tool for extending not just your lifespan, but your healthspan.
Bill Gifford is an acclaimed journalist, author, and curiosity-driven outdoorsman. He is best known for co-authoring the New York Times bestseller "Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity" with Dr. Peter Attia, a definitive work on the science of longevity and healthspan. Bill also wrote the bestseller "Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying)", a deeply personal and investigative look at the aging process. He has written for Wired, Bloomberg and Men's Health, among others.
“There are more people who need to start doing something, or do maybe a little bit more than they are now… than there are people who are worried… about overtraining.” - Bill Gifford
In this episode you will learn:
- How curiosity, adventure, and a passion for learning can act as lifelong drivers for health and vitality, shaping both career paths and daily habits.
- The value of diverse, enjoyable movement and how a broad approach to fitness—including strength, flexibility, and balance—contributes to healthy aging.
- Why individualized dietary approaches matter more than following popular nutrition trends, and what the latest research suggests about fasting, muscle mass, and metabolic health.
- The importance of quality sleep and proper recovery, including the trade-offs between early morning routines and getting adequate rest.
- How social connection, intentional relationship-building, and shared experiences help to combat loneliness and add meaning to our lives as we age.
- Practical steps for creating lasting change—such as signing up for an event or making a firm commitment—that can impact all pillars of healthspan, from nutrition to social engagement.
Resources
- Connect with Bill on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/billgifford
- Buy his book, ‘Spring Chicken’: http://a.co/d/dA35FHE
- Read and buy the book he co-authored with Dr. Peter Attia, ‘Outlive’: https://www.amazon.com/Outlive-Longevity-Peter-Attia-MD/dp/0593236599
This podcast was produced by the team at Zapods Podcast Agency:
https://www.zapods.com
Find the products, practices, and routines discussed on the Alively website:
https://alively.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Midlife Realization and Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
I had my 40th birthday in the office. You know, I didn't even have enough self-care instincts to to take the damn day off. Right. And so finally around like nine o'clock, they trot out a birthday cake that has a tombstone on it. You know, one of those RIP, my youth things.
00:00:18
Speaker
And I was like God, what am I doing? It's half my lifespan. I got to do something different.
00:00:26
Speaker
This is the Home of Healthspan podcast, where we profile health and wellness role models, sharing their stories and the tools, practices, and routines they use to live a lively life.
00:00:40
Speaker
Bill, it wonderful to have you here on the Home of Healthspan podcast. How are you today? I'm great. How are you? I'm doing very well. I know
Bill's Background and Influences
00:00:49
Speaker
most of our listeners, if not every single one, are going to be very familiar with your work. But before we jump into that, could you define yourself?
00:00:58
Speaker
Oh, OK. Well, let's see. I would say i am ah lively, ah very lively author, writer, journalist.
00:01:09
Speaker
outdoors person, curiosity seeker, knowledge seeker, adventurer, and also ah guy who likes to have a lively, good time.
00:01:21
Speaker
Fantastic. Yeah, the the curiosity, the adventure seeking... Those seem like gifts that are perpetual, right? Like at any age throughout your life, if you have those every day, it can be an adventure. Every day you learn something new. It's, it's what gives that vibrancy to life. Is that fair?
00:01:41
Speaker
Yeah. And I think I got a lot of that from my dad who, um, he was a corporate lawyer, but he was always seeking knowledge, information, going deeper on things, whether it was French wine Or tax law, which was his specialty, or like antique rugs or photography or whatever he got into. He was always seeking knowledge. And I think he he passed that down to me.
00:02:09
Speaker
May I ask as, so that's how he experienced his life and he's your father and and you're his son. How did that manifest in parenting or helping you, Sierra? I ask as a father of a nine-year-old, because I feel like I have the same thing following my passion and I'm curious the best way to instill that because you seem to very much embody that life and and live this incredible, curious, and following your curiosity sort of life. And so I'd love to pass that to my child.
00:02:38
Speaker
Yeah. So when I was a little kid, um instead of throwing the baseball or the football like a normal dad, he'd take me to the library. And a library is a place where they have a lot of books, right? And you can kind of follow your nose. And would I would pick out whatever book I was interested in I went down rabbit holes on dinosaurs and Native Americans, all that kind of stuff.
00:03:01
Speaker
And I think that's where I i kind of learned it. He did sign me up for the soccer team as well. but But it was the library that was really that really set me on the path ah to becoming who I am today.
00:03:13
Speaker
Is it
Career Transitions and Writing
00:03:14
Speaker
the exposure? So a lot of times we only know what's possible based on what we've seen. And in a library, you have the universe of knowledge, depending on the library. And so did it just expand your world of, wow, right? Like maybe what they're teaching me in school this week is not interesting. I'm checked out, but that doesn't mean I'm uninterested because there are other things here that I really get sucked into.
00:03:36
Speaker
Right. So it allows you to experience um ah a tremendous, tremendous range of things. um I gravitated to biographies eventually. so different people's life stories and how ah that a sequence of events built into an extraordinary life.
00:03:56
Speaker
That was one thing. ah Natural world was was a big one. So, you know, you could experience it. You could read about it, then go experience it. And I like that as well and still do.
00:04:09
Speaker
Yeah. So, I mean, there's a lot of consumption exploration, but I think what your career is, what most people are going to be familiar with is what you then have contributed to that knowledge base. Certainly with the runaway bestseller Outlive, i co-written with Peter Atiyah, but also your other New York Times bestseller Spring Chicken.
00:04:32
Speaker
And so how did you take that childhood, that curiosity, that pursuing your interest to translate that into the life you live today?
00:04:43
Speaker
Yeah. So I, I didn't plan on writing a, about a book about aging, a book about longevity. I didn't, you know, when I was younger, I didn't think about it at all, honestly.
00:04:53
Speaker
And then i found myself in New York city working for a magazine. It wasn't very fun. And I had my 40th birthday,
00:05:04
Speaker
in the office. you know I didn't even have enough you know self-care instincts to to take the damn day off. right And so finally around 9 o'clock, we're still there, right still at work, and they trot out a birthday cake that has a tombstone on it. you know One of those RIP my youth things. And everybody else I worked with, they were like 26.
00:05:32
Speaker
okay And I was like God, what what am I doing? you know but It's half my lifespan. And I'm in my office at 9 o'clock at night. you know I love the people I work with, ah despite the birthday cake.
00:05:47
Speaker
But I got to do something different. And
Aging, Longevity, and Healthspan
00:05:49
Speaker
so I did two things differently. One is pretty quickly transitioned out of being an in-office editor to writing full-time.
00:06:01
Speaker
And the magazine... My editors facilitated that. And then the second thing was i started thinking about, okay, you know, I'd been a kind of an athlete, not a very good one, but all my life.
00:06:15
Speaker
And i was just different, right? It took a very short time to get out of shape. It took a long time to get back into shape. Yeah. And then, you know, I had an injury and and that took forever to heal from. It's like, okay, what changes as somebody gets older?
00:06:32
Speaker
And then I just started thinking about about that and researching that and and and applying that curiosity to to this phenomenon of of aging, which is very much, as someone once said, and unsolved problem.
00:06:46
Speaker
It's the great unsolved problem in biology. Why and how we age and why people age at different rates. You know, and can we do anything about it? So that started ah i mean, it's been almost... um You know, it's been almost 20 years well okay of of that question that led to spring chicken, which is very much a personal investigation of what's happening to me.
00:07:12
Speaker
And let's look at some other people who are who are looking at ways to um either understand the aging process and modify it. Yeah. And I definitely want to dig in to everything you learned with that. And in writing Outlive, I do want to come back to the first point, though, of realizing the changing the professional side. So you're editing, you move to writing.
00:07:36
Speaker
Now I got this question recently because I switched industries and people are like, wow, you spent all this time building this brand, building your expertise, your network, everything, your professional in this one area. And then you went backwards. Was that difficult?
00:07:51
Speaker
And what I don't know with writing right? Like a teacher, you kind of go teacher to assistant principal to principal. But if someone gets there and says, you know what, I actually just love teaching or a salesperson to move to manager and say, you know what, I just love sales.
00:08:04
Speaker
It can be seen as going backwards. At that time, did it, whether financially or optically, was it perceived as what you went from editor to a writer?
00:08:14
Speaker
Like you started as a writer and moved into editor, you're going backwards. Yeah. So instead of moving up You know, I've had my go at moving up the management chain and found that, you know, kind of unsatisfying for various ways.
00:08:28
Speaker
You know, I didn't love the magazine I was working for. And I just, I just loved writing and I loved having my, I post probably better at writing than editing. There's a financial cost.
00:08:40
Speaker
There was a security cost. Um, It was a big risk, honestly. know, I didn't have a 401k anymore. But the risk on the other side was not, was living this like, I'm not fulfilled and satisfied. So I, I just, I came back to it because I think it's a really important point for listeners because they think of, a lot of people think of life as this linear progression up, but maybe you've gotten to the peak and it's not the peak you want. You have to go back down to go climb the mountain that you actually want to be on.
00:09:10
Speaker
Exactly. and the irony is, you know, if if I had just stuck to the, the secure, you know, six figure paycheck, health insurance, blah, blah, blah. Uh, I would have been laid off in like a year anyway, uh, cause of financial financial situation.
00:09:25
Speaker
So the safe answer is not always that safe too. Yeah. Okay. The safe thing wasn't the safe thing. Yeah. So instead I, I, I just, I went back to, you know, I started, i started building and creating something that ended up being like this, uh,
00:09:44
Speaker
and like enduring pillar of, of my career. it Like, like my career rests on that decision. Actually, I'd never thought of it that way until just now, but everything I've, everything I've built is, is on that, that one conversation, you know, not long after I turned 40 with my friend and my, my, the new editor, i was like, listen, I, I want to be a writer.
00:10:07
Speaker
So I'll, I'll write for you. Cut my pay in half. It's fine. I mean, it's just, it takes tremendous self-awareness and courage and the rewards are almost infinite. So I just, I, not to belabor this too much, but I do think this is important for listeners kind of hear this story and this modeling because we only get this one life. I mean, it's really, really important. and Yeah. And, you know, I, I happened to pick a subject that has value. A lot of people are interested in it, aging, longevity, health,
00:10:41
Speaker
And what I realized eventually, and then most writers certainly don't, most journalists certainly don't, like you have like intellectual capital, like the things you know are, you learn a lot, right? You become an expert in these fields and that knowledge is worth something, right? Either in something you create or places where it can lead you to invest, for example, invest your money, invest your time.
00:11:10
Speaker
And people will pay you to not only write, but speak about it. that That was a big ah learning for me after writing my first book that it was, the book wasn't where the money was, it was the bigger speaking fees. And that's actually
Fitness, Exercise, and Balance
00:11:23
Speaker
where you did the thing. So that was that was pretty funny. So you actually, you referenced the word pillar about the pillar of your career. And we think about, you know, our five pillars of healthspan, fitness, yeah nutrition, sleep and recovery, stress management, and social connection. Yeah.
00:11:38
Speaker
yeah And whether it's with Spring Chicken, it's with Outlive, this knowledge base that you talked about, You've spent the next 20 years doing a lot of things, but very much digging deep into this area. What what is it? What do people do? What does it work?
00:11:52
Speaker
There was this quote from Quentin Tarantino of it's not Learning, it's not knowledge until you implement it. So I'd be curious kind of across these, right? You had your 40th birthday, you have this kind of epiphany, you change direction, and you go spend two decades doing this research, writing these books.
00:12:08
Speaker
There's one side of, hey, I learned these things as objective truths. There's another of, and then they inspired me. to do these things. So I'd be curious across those five, like what does your life look like today because of all that knowledge that you've gained?
00:12:23
Speaker
Whether it's maybe we start with fitness because right you talked about adventurism and and everything there, finding you on the snow. I did a really deep dive, right? So i learned a lot about um molecular biology.
00:12:37
Speaker
And so I didn't really apply a whole lot of molecular biology to my life. you know I took a graduate course at the Einstein ah School of Medicine and in the Bronx, part of Yeshiva University.
00:12:52
Speaker
um And I went to conferences and met all kinds of scientists. um But it was really interesting. you know Even in these high-level scientific conferences, pretty much everybody was in shape to some extent.
00:13:10
Speaker
And It was really interesting, their behaviors. like They would always take the stairs. They would walk everywhere.
00:13:22
Speaker
like If you got in the elevator, it would be like like saying, like do you have a cigarette? you know They always took the stairs everywhere. So, okay, that's interesting. They didn't do studies about it.
00:13:35
Speaker
They just did it. So I thought, okay, there's something here. And and it turned out that obviously exercises and activity and movement and strength are tremendously important to your aging trajectory at a molecular level as well as like a structural systems level.
00:14:01
Speaker
But, you know, i I was already kind of an athlete. Like I'd done um sports in college and always been active.
00:14:11
Speaker
Um, I gotten into, ah hesitate to say this because a lot of people are annoyed by cyclists, but I was into bicycle racing for a while.
00:14:23
Speaker
Um, and that was tremendous. Uh, that was an amazing experience. Um, you know, it led to some injuries, but, uh, as far as like discipline and just making fitness kind of a, ah another pillar of life,
00:14:40
Speaker
you know, for several years, that was that was me, um you know, more than a decade. And so that carried over. So that that was had always been um really important to my daily life and my sense of identity.
00:14:56
Speaker
um So that didn't really change a whole lot. Did you get more structure? So I think about like Peter Atiyah with, okay, VO2 max and the four by four and zone two and strength training. Did you put structure around it once you learn, oh, here's specific benefits or you say, no, I do this because I know overall it's healthy and I enjoy doing these things. So i'm going to do the things I enjoy.
00:15:16
Speaker
I'm not a gym guy, right? I like to be outside. like to have fun. So fun to me, something's fun, I'll do it. Something's not fun. going to be less likely to do it. But the mistake I was making in those years was I was training. i was doing one thing, right?
00:15:32
Speaker
Always training on the bike. So I weighed like 15 pounds less easily than I do now. It's because I didn't have a lot of muscle and I was doing something that was like, you're going in a straight line essentially.
00:15:45
Speaker
And so if I learned anything and this took me a while, but you have to be more diverse. You have to be be broader in your... You have to be like... In Outlive, we came up with this idea called the centenarian decathlon.
00:16:01
Speaker
Now, I think no centenarian is going to be doing a decathlon, right? You'll be lucky to be standing at that age, right? But but kant the idea is still useful. It's like you're good at a lot of different things.
00:16:14
Speaker
And so I started broadening the repertoire, you know running, ah doing some strength stuff, adding especially yoga, flexibility.
00:16:25
Speaker
Yoga is annoying sometimes, but you know, all the woo-woo stuff, but like, it's amazing for your body, especially for a man, especially as you get older, it teaches you balance. It teaches you like body awareness. It teaches you connecting your breath and your movements, right?
00:16:42
Speaker
And how to manipulate your breath and how to use your breath to to change your mental state.
00:16:49
Speaker
Tremendously useful. Even builds a little bit of strength. Yeah, the the diversity to to build resilience, not just optimizing in a narrow focus area. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Exactly. Yeah.
00:17:02
Speaker
And then, I mean, you you talked about the breath and coming back to your breath and stress management. i mean, from what stress can do to our hormone ah hormones and impact longevity,
00:17:17
Speaker
did you put anything more into practice there? Any kind of meditation, any kind of journaling, anything that your research brought up that changed what you do? Yeah. You know, um, I'm, I'm one of those people who says that they, they're not a good meditator. Um, I honestly haven't given it an honest go, but it's hard for me to, to sit still and do that. You know, I, I'm getting a little bit better, but, um, you know,
00:17:46
Speaker
Like long distance cycling for me is like a meditative practice. Swimming is the same for me. Yeah. And you're a swimmer. it's It's interesting. Peter was a big ah open water swimmer. Yeah. That's what I did. Yeah.
00:18:00
Speaker
Yeah. um Oh, open water. Really cool. Yeah. i was on the U S national team for open water swimming. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I had a whole period when I was fascinated by, ah swimming. Cause I was kind of bad at it.
00:18:14
Speaker
It's a great exercise. modality But it's also just kind of like, like being out in the water like that, not in a pool. the blue mind. Yeah. They talk about blue mind and it's another way to get into nature and just get in the ocean and go.
00:18:30
Speaker
Yeah. So, I mean, I guess that's, they're not necessarily, there's a lot of blending between pillars, right? So your point of your stress management and meditative state can come through certain fitness modalities you may choose. Totally.
00:18:44
Speaker
yeah Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do find I'm the same. Like if I'm really on edge things, whether it's work or whatever, like getting a good workout in, is the best thing I can do for myself. Right. That sitting and meditating for me at that point is not the best. Like if I can start the day and set my tone, that's helpful. But once I'm already in it, I find like, I need to burn it out, not sit with it at that moment. Yeah. for me Yeah. Like yesterday, like I, I was feeling kind of, you know, not so great.
00:19:12
Speaker
And at the end of the day, I just finally got on my bike. You know, I had to like fix the bike to get it ready to go and went out for like 45 minutes spinning around, felt a hundred times better. was because I had been able to process, you know, work thoughts, other thoughts, and just, I just felt better.
00:19:31
Speaker
Movement is by far like the number one thing for me. And I bring a lot of other, other things into it. Meditativeness, the stress management, um, you know, trying, trying, trying to vary it, maybe a little social component as well.
00:19:48
Speaker
Well, let's talk about that, actually. I mean, as a pillar, I do think for most people, it's the less obvious one. We
Social Connections and Purpose
00:19:55
Speaker
know physically, right, it's the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, right? So when you talk about getting on the elevators, like, hey, would you like a cigarette? It's like, hey, do you want to just be by yourself for the week?
00:20:05
Speaker
That's the same, of like, here's a couple packs of cigarettes. yeah yeah And so yeah I know that that's coming up more. You seem like a pretty social person. I don't know. Did you change anything once you learn more about that and its impact on it?
00:20:20
Speaker
Or you're like, hey, i'm I'm pretty good at this. So it's not much needs to change here. I haven't done anything sort of intentional in in that area. And i I probably need to, honestly.
00:20:32
Speaker
You know, and' like I'm i'm and making more of an effort to, you know, strengthen or reconnect with people, strengthen connections, find activity partners, that kind of thing.
00:20:44
Speaker
um and be more in touch with with old friends. You know, I'm i'm in my 50s, right? And a thing that happens after you get to be a certain age and not to be ah downer, but like people die. Yeah.
00:20:57
Speaker
You know, often people who are fun, you know, in their 30s and 20s. And so I've been blindsided a couple of times by that. Like, oh man, you know, I wish I'd been more in touch with that person.
00:21:13
Speaker
And so I'm trying to um trying to do that. I'm trying to like go places and visit people and you know strengthen connections with people who I have a tenuous connection.
00:21:25
Speaker
I would encourage again, listeners, it's it's not just at a later age, right? We had a prior podcast guest, Jody Wellman, who wrote this book, You Only Die Once. And this principle of momentum, like just remember, we're all going to die. We don't actually know when it's going to be.
00:21:40
Speaker
And that can be ah not necessarily just morbid, but also focusing, clarifying, life affirming and giving when you understand there is a finite time. Don't don't waste it. Like, Enjoy those people. You don't know if you'll see them again. That's a principle with my daughter of like, no matter what are tension may be at any moment, like never part from each other without just love.
00:22:01
Speaker
Like, Hey, whatever happened, like, cause you never know, you never know the car accident, whatever, like never part with someone, ah without anything but love. Cause that, that death comes for all of us. We just don't know when.
00:22:14
Speaker
Right. And focus on the living part. yeah Yeah, exactly. Use it not as a morbid thing, but as a, wow, okay, then I've been given this amazing gift right now to live. Totally.
00:22:25
Speaker
Yeah. With doing all these different
Recovery, Sleep, and Lifestyle Changes
00:22:27
Speaker
modalities, one of the things I've been thinking about more is this idea of overtraining. And there are a lot of experts on like overtraining is a myth, right? You see these professionals, how much they train, they can do all this. Like you were not overtrained. There's no normal person overtrained.
00:22:41
Speaker
I say, yeah, but they also recover professionally, right? They sleep 12 hours a day. They get all this. And so you might not be technically overtrained, but you may be under recovered for what you're doing. So what what have you learned in your research on the importance of sleep, recovery, like how to bake that into your life?
00:23:00
Speaker
You know, professional athletes are are very bad. And I've spent a lot of time around, you know, different kinds of athletes, mostly in sort of niche sports, but they're kind of a bad comparative set.
00:23:13
Speaker
They're not like us. Yeah. Like from the get-go, right? Not just talent, but physically... um the way their bodies are built and they don't have jobs typically.
00:23:26
Speaker
if they do know which their job They're professional at that thing. Yeah. Yeah. They don't have like a different job and a family to take care of. And yeah so do less, you know, if, if that's, if that's you, like nobody needs to be, and you know, people are going to hate this, but like nobody needs to be doing an Ironman every quarter.
00:23:49
Speaker
Right. but That's a lot. yeah That is a lot. That is going to like beat your body down. um Most people don't have that problem. Most people have the other problem, right?
00:24:00
Speaker
Going from zero to like 30 minutes, right? yeah That's where most of us are, right? But that's where 90% of the benefit is, right? Is that first 30 minutes. It's not the last 30 minutes, right? Yeah, no, absolutely. you know um you know ah someone who You know, someone who's an influencer and works out two hours a day You know, is that going to, are they going to live any longer than if they worked out 90 minutes a day or an hour a day?
00:24:27
Speaker
Probably not. But the person who doesn't do anything and then starts walking 30 minutes a day, they've just made a huge jump. And the research overwhelmingly shows that.
00:24:38
Speaker
Yeah, that was another podcast guest kind of woke me up to that of like, look, the gap from fiftieth percentile, say VO2 max or whatever, and zero is enormous in terms of longevity and health span, et cetera.
00:24:51
Speaker
But the gap from fiftieth to 90th percentile or 99th is just not that big. Like it's it's probably not worth the squeeze for that extra juice. If you are a professional athlete, it's very important. But if you're saying, hey, how do I want to balance my life to make the most of it and be healthy and have this health span to do the centenarian decathlon?
00:25:08
Speaker
maybe the 50th, 60th percentile is the right ah target. You want to be better than where you are now. Yeah. For most people. But, you know, if that elite sliver, I mean, they really do do well if you're looking at VO2 max as the ultimate predictor. I mean, VO2 max is something that can be measured.
00:25:28
Speaker
Right. You know, I'm not sure that's the ultimate, the ultimate test. You know, it might be,
00:25:35
Speaker
how fast you can swim a mile or how fast you can run a mile. That might be a better sort of functional. I'm trying to say it's, there are more people who need to start doing something or do maybe a little bit more than they are now go to the next level.
00:25:50
Speaker
Then there are people who are worried or concerned about overtraining, but overtraining is a real thing. You know, some of my ah veteran um endurance athlete friends now, like in their sixties, fifties,
00:26:05
Speaker
are having ah like AFib type issues. You know, they're having they're having issues or they're having like spine issues, that kind of thing. And I guess my question there from from your research, what you've learned, like what you and Peter did, ah is the separate side of that on the recovery and the sleep.
00:26:24
Speaker
Because it could be like we think about, again, healthspan, you're balancing across these five pillars and maybe not balancing its equilibrium, but saying, hey, if I have X number of minutes or hours to put in, maybe this 20 minutes you're currently putting into fitness out of 80 minutes, you're better off taking it and getting 20 minutes more sleep and only doing 60 minutes of fitness because it's it's the recovery, it's the sleep that you're really behind the eight ball here, right?
00:26:50
Speaker
And so I guess that's my question of like, how do you think about your sleep and recovery based on what you've learned? Yeah, and and this is kind of why I question the whole 5 a.m. club thing, you know, like, okay, you're getting up at 5 a.m. m Are you cheating yourself of half an hour or an hour of sleep That you really need it.
00:27:10
Speaker
Right. And are you a person who what's your cycle like? Right. Are you someone who does their heavy duty sleeping? Like I do from like five to eight in the morning.
00:27:22
Speaker
So I pay the price getting up before about 730. and just That's just my cycle. So what what are your normal hours, right? Do you find your best writing times at night or something? And so you just have a more shifted schedule? No, best is in the morning, actually.
00:27:37
Speaker
Sharper cognitively. So doing less and sleeping more, I think, is is is never a bad idea. You know, if you're if you're if you're consistently sacrificing sleep to get another half an hour of workout in,
00:27:54
Speaker
you know You need to you need to look at look at whether you might be you know robbing Peter to pay Paul kind of thing. Yeah, there's there's a cost benefit to any trade-off like that. And going slower, I think, is is you know is is also good. you know um Not every workout needs to be a ah total slam fest, right?
00:28:16
Speaker
I mean, there there are a lot of lessons here I need to start putting into practice in my own life on this of not going to failure in every single set, you know, and what they're covering and everything. You do it when you need to, but yeah.
00:28:27
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So, ah I mean, given, because I was the the child of two physicians that initially was taught sleep is not important, right? Like yeah train yourself not to need it.
00:28:40
Speaker
Yeah. And scientifically, it's not true, right? Yeah. You actually do, your body does need it. And here are all the costs. When you talk about robbing Peter to pay all, you know this, right? you've You've done the research, you've seen it.
00:28:50
Speaker
how How does then sleep fit into your life? How do you structure it or how do you prioritize it? Like, what do you do in your own life knowing that? You know, sleep has been ah lifelong struggle.
00:29:02
Speaker
You know, I come from ah generations of insomniacs. ah There's a strong streak of, you know, ah bad sleeping in some parts of my family.
00:29:15
Speaker
um And yeah, so I've had issues with it. I'm doing pretty well now. And I think um I'm working on things like going to bed a little earlier, right?
00:29:28
Speaker
doing some reading before bed. lot of people talk about journaling in the morning. You should really journal at night because you've you've done a lot of stuff in the day. You have a lot of thoughts about what's going to happen in the next day, next days.
00:29:44
Speaker
And so rather than having those turn over in your head, offload them. So I write things down. Typically, I'll What typically happens is i'll go to I'll go to bed, I'll lie down, I'll be thinking about 10 different things I'm going to do the next day, or what I'm going to write, or some clever phrase.
00:30:01
Speaker
Like, ah, turn the light back on. he's like right right And then go to bed. And my wife's like, what are you doing? Like, sorry. And then having a, you know, having a, I started doing like the cup of tea at night.
00:30:17
Speaker
And that helps, you know, just having a little ritual that signals, Time to wind down. And you do it you have kind of a a typical time, right? Like it's it's this psychological trigger for you of like, hey, now my mind, my body's getting into this state because at 1030, I make this cup of tea or whatever it is.
00:30:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Trying to do it a little earlier so I don't have a bunch of liquid in my body. but Yeah, that that matters. Yeah, that that was a big change for me actually of I think it was Lane Norton talked about the the focus on hydration, hydrating, hydrating, hydrating.
00:30:51
Speaker
Oh my God, yeah. you're You're picking up pennies, but giving up dollar bills and how it could be interrupting your sleep. And so just changing my timing of how much fluid i drink. So like after four o'clock, I just don't have that much.
00:31:05
Speaker
I went from waking up like three times a night to mostly zero. Like that's a big difference in terms of quality of sleep. Yeah. And you know, most people, you know, lugging around the giant water bottle or probably over hydrating generally.
00:31:18
Speaker
And then that's one of the ways that it manifests itself. So like
Nutrition, Diet, and Fasting
00:31:22
Speaker
hydration, right? And you can too much of a good thing there. I'm reluctant to get into it, but I feel like we have to on nutrition, right? This third rail of health, because you have the carnivores, the ketos, the vegans, the, you know, all the different, um, religions, I guess out there.
00:31:41
Speaker
What did, did you, in your research, you feel like you walked away with a solid understanding of like, Hey, here's some objective truths. Here are some things we don't know. Here's what I'm going to do differently as a result or not.
00:31:55
Speaker
Objective truth. Yeah, that's tough in nutrition, you know, in, in spring chicken. And then to a greater extent in, in outlive you know, Peter and I, and Peter has a lot of experience in the world of nutrition. He came from kind of a, some,
00:32:13
Speaker
he was overweight and unhealthy and then he did some keto stuff and he was very involved in that community for a while and now he's not. And we kind of looked at this, um these these diet wars and it's really like, it's like one of those pro wrestling shows that gets like completely out of control and you have like the the the keto guy jumping in and slamming the vegan and then the carnivore and then, you know, ah you know, paly throws a chair.
00:32:44
Speaker
It's just absolute chaos. And we looked at this crap we and that we looked at the studies and the studies, you know, just the quality of research just isn't great.
00:32:55
Speaker
It's kind of click baby, right? you're Right. 23 cashews will help you live longer. Study says, well, it doesn't really say that or whatever. Low fat diet, you know?
00:33:07
Speaker
So we took a step back and just looked at, okay, What's our goal? Our goal is is to to avoid obesity, metabolic dysfunction, diabetes, anything down the road of diabetes.
00:33:21
Speaker
Anything in that direction of the compass is going to harm your longevity because diabetes and insulin resistance are an overweight, are massive risk factors for all of these horseman diseases, which is what will kill most of us.
00:33:38
Speaker
So we don't want to go in that diabetes direction. Whatever you need to do to to get yourself off that trajectory is what you need to do. And it varies for every person.
00:33:49
Speaker
So if you look at diet-specific studies, you know you'll you'll find like, oh, the average person lost three pounds in six months. But then you'll find that some people actually gained 10 pounds and other people lost 10 pounds.
00:34:04
Speaker
So everybody's super different. in terms of how they respond and what, what they can do. So we we tried to like, we tried to like, you know, whistle the wrestling match to a stop and, and and say, here's what matters.
00:34:19
Speaker
The interesting thing though, you know, this book took five years to write out live. And at the beginning, ah Peter was super into fasting. Yeah. I was going to ask on this because I got super into fasting because of Peter and then he stopped and I'm like, cause I used to be like, Oh, there these magic pills, exercise, sleep, nutrition, and fasting. Fasting is this like magic pill for health.
00:34:42
Speaker
And then he he'd kind of fell off that train. So I'm really curious your take there. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, one good thing about ah my coauthor is that he is
Impact of Bill's Work and Health Advice
00:34:52
Speaker
is able to change his mind.
00:34:54
Speaker
But then it does make you question, like you sounded very convinced about fasting a year ago. So, have thousands of words in my hard drive still about fasting and fasting studies. And he used to do a pretty significant fast once a quarter. And I think what happened was, well, COVID happened.
00:35:15
Speaker
And he wasn't going to New York, which is where he did the fasting thing. i Yeah, because he wanted to do it away from his family. Yeah. Frankly, like to me, yeah idea of spending a week in New York and not eating anything.
00:35:28
Speaker
i mean, that's insane. Torture. Yeah. You're a crazy person. Like go do it somewhere else, you know? Yeah. But I mean, I get the principle, right? Cause it, you don't want to be the weirdo in your family. Like family dinners are an important thing. And so I can understand. He's like, look, this is my time where I'm not with them. Yeah.
00:35:45
Speaker
No, I'm totally joking. But what happened was, um,
00:35:51
Speaker
And, you know, I was meanwhile dreading this because i was like, oh, you know, going to have to do this to to write about it. i don't enjoy going without food for long periods. um But COVID happened, stopped the fasting eat.
00:36:07
Speaker
And I, you know, six months go by and I, we get back in touch and sort of like, you know, ah i weigh like 10 pounds more than I did. And it's all muscle.
00:36:20
Speaker
So he realized what the data had shown. Meanwhile, I'd been researching fasting and and finding that that actually there weren't terrific outcomes. I mean, there was weight loss, but but there wasn't a lot of data supporting other good outcomes of it. So that combined with his N of 1 experience where he lost muscle mass, that turns out to be confirmed in the data, right?
00:36:45
Speaker
Studies of the alternate day fasting diet, which was popular you know a while back, found that that people lost more muscle on that. And people, you know, maybe maybe the the really, the quote, intermittent fasting has less of a negative consequence, but it has less of a positive consequence too. right So there are good things that happen with fasting, but the muscle mass loss um is something you really have to think about.
00:37:12
Speaker
And most people, you know, aren't training two hours a day. So they can be really affected by it. But people in severe... metabolic dysfunction or somebody who just absolutely can't lose weight, is tremendously overweight, you know they can think It might work and in special circumstances.
00:37:31
Speaker
I think it's it's a relevant point across all this because it really is this managed portfolio, right? Of, yeah well, if you're working out too much and it's stealing from your sleep or you're fasting too much and it's stealing from your lean mass and you have to think about these things together because it's not a single data point. It's not a single pillar. It's your overarching health and health span yeah that really has to come together as a whole.
00:37:53
Speaker
And it's not one size fits all either. Yeah, we're gonna tell everybody to go out fast. And so I was kind of like, it's, Not everybody needs to fast, like obviously. Well, Bill, like a your work has been tremendous, right? i obviously love your books and I'm not the only one, both New York Times bestsellers.
00:38:10
Speaker
They're changed life, right? I got it for my dad. It's on his nightstand. Almost anyone I talk to is like, oh, I'll live, right? That does the first thing out of their mouth when I talk about what I do for a living. So it's incredible that the impact that something so...
00:38:24
Speaker
in many ways, technical, right? Like it's not an easy book. It is a big book that gets into like heavy stuff in intelligent ways, but has really captured the, the cultural imagination, ah for the past few years. And it's, it's amazing like what it can do for society. So thank you for your work. You you've covered a bunch for someone who's may just be getting started saying like, there's so many things and each of these books have so much that may be intimidated or overwhelmed. Is there a place you would suggest people get started?
00:38:59
Speaker
Yeah. Well, thank you for all all of that. Um, you know, it is, it is long and technical and and overwhelming. and And I think one of our blind spots, um, like if we had to rewrite it or come out with a new edition, I think would be to focus more on people who are starting people who need to change, break,
00:39:17
Speaker
adopt new habits, that kind of thing. a quick, there's there's one one sort of hack that that I hesitate to call it a hack, but but one thing that that I tell people to do, and that is like sign up for something, commit to something, and it can be an event, it could be a competition, it could be, say, a mile swim somewhere, open water mile swim somewhere.
00:39:47
Speaker
It could be a 10K run. Something that seems it could be, you know, people overemphasize the marathon. It could be a 100-mile bike ride or something. Something that that feels outside of your comfort zone. Something that you if you had to do it today, you maybe couldn't do it.
00:40:05
Speaker
So you have a goal and you set it out there few months. And then that then requires you, ah because we are motivated by fear of failure,
00:40:16
Speaker
yeah Yeah. Right. So that then requires you to to come up with a plan and not just for the requisite training you need to do, but also that starts to ripple out and affect ah what you eat ah when you get up in the morning, when you go to bed.
00:40:36
Speaker
right? How much you drink. It's a really good point. it's It's the one thing you can change that will change all these other things that matter. It's this one leverage point. That's a really good, good point. Make a commitment. It could be just like, all right, uh, I'm going join a run club.
00:40:50
Speaker
And so I have to show up every, um, you know, Tuesday night and I don't want to be the slow one, right? You don't want to be d DFL. So you need to start That then becomes something, you don't go, you're not going to to the bar on two. Well, you might go to the bar after the run club, but you know, you're not, then you're not a social connection. So it's so good. Yeah. Yeah.
00:41:11
Speaker
yeah Yeah. So committing to something and it can be a a social thing. It can be like in the UK, um, they have these groups of, of I'm coming back to swimming for you. Yeah. The wild swimmers. Yeah.
00:41:24
Speaker
And they, they meet and you know, they're, they're not swimming for too long, right? Cause it's bloody freezing, but they're hanging out. And, you know, you're swimming a little bit. mean, you're getting social, you're getting in nature. You're yeah, it's, I really like that commit in, in like time balance. So this specific thing, whether it's on Tuesday nights, I'm doing this or this specific event, but having something specific and set to a time.
00:41:48
Speaker
And then I really like how your, your point is it touches all these other things to make that happen. That's, that's really great one. Yeah. Your diet gets better. Your sleep has to get better.
00:42:00
Speaker
like i'm I'm training for something called the Pan Mass Challenge. It's a cancer fundraising bike ride in August. And so I have to ride more. So that means I have to work a little more effectively. That means i have to screw around less, you know, not be on this thing.
00:42:17
Speaker
This thing stays in the house and I'm in my office, ideally. Yeah. Well, Bill, i this has been fantastic. Again, and thank you for all your work today. i know we talked about before, we didn't reference, like you have another upcoming book um that I'm very much looking forward to reading as well. But thank you for everything you've already put out into the world and all you do.
00:42:38
Speaker
Thank you for having me, Andrew. And the next book, I think, will be um a nice ah evolution ah of some of what we've talked about. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of the Home of Healthspan podcast.
00:42:51
Speaker
And remember, you can always find the products, practices, and routines mentioned by today's guests, as well as many other Healthspan role models on Alively.com. Enjoy a lively day.