1: September 8, 2009, is a day that Dr. Peter Attia will never forget.
He had just swum to Catalina from Los Angeles, a twenty-one-mile open ocean swim that took him fourteen hours.
“I was standing on a beach on Catalina Island when my wife, Jill, turned to me and said, ‘Peter, I think you should work on being a little less not thin.’
“Less not thin?” he thought to himself. “My sweet wife said that?”
Her words hit Peter like a thunderbolt. “A minute earlier, I’d been thrilled to have finished this bucket-list long-distance swim,” he recalls.
“Now I was Not-Thin Peter.”
And yet, he knew she was right.
2: “Without even realizing it,” he recalls, “I had ballooned up to 210 pounds, a solid 50 more than my fighting weight as a teenage boxer. Like a lot of middle-aged guys, I still thought of myself as an ‘athlete,’ even as I squeezed my sausage-like body into size 36 pants. Photographs from around that time remind me that my stomach looked just like Jill’s when she was six months pregnant. I had become the proud owner of a full-fledged dad bod, and I had not even hit forty.”
Peter’s wife’s words motivated him to see his doctor.
“Blood tests revealed worse problems than the ones I could see in the mirror,” he writes. “Despite the fact that I exercised fanatically and ate what I believed to be a healthy diet (notwithstanding the odd post-swim cheeseburger), I had somehow become insulin resistant, one of the first steps down the road to type 2 diabetes and many other bad things. My testosterone levels were below the 5th percentile for a man my age.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that my life was in danger—not imminently, but certainly over the long term. I knew exactly where this road could lead. I had amputated the feet of people who, twenty years earlier, had been a lot like me,” he writes.
“Closer to home, my own family tree was full of men who had died in their forties from cardiovascular disease.”
Peter was thirty-six years old. He was standing on the top of a cliff. His risk factors and his genetics indicated he was on a path to an early death from cardiovascular disease.
“What I didn’t yet realize was that my situation was entirely fixable,” he writes.
3: The words of Peter’s wife on the beach that day led him to an epiphany about his chosen career, medicine, and “a new way of thinking about chronic diseases, their treatment, and how to maintain long-term health.”
He calls it “Medicine 3.0.”
The goal is “not to patch people up and get them out the door, removing their tumors and hoping for the best, but rather to prevent the tumors from appearing and spreading in the first place,” he writes.
Rather than treating the heart attack after it occurs, the goal is to avoid that first heart attack. Or to prevent someone from getting on the path to Alzheimer’s disease.
“Our treatments, and our prevention and detention strategies,” he writes, “need to change to fit the nature of these diseases, with their long, slow progress.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How do I think about my health? Are there any moments in my life similar to Peter’s wife’s comment about “Not-Thin Peter”? What specific actions might I take to be more proactive about my health?
Action: Journal about my answers to the questions above. Take action. Today!
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Testosterone is a sex hormone that plays a crucial role in the development and maintenance of male sexual characteristics. It is also found in lower levels in females, where it has important functions as well.