The dark side of health optimization
Why I stopped trying to optimize my health like Peter Attia
1.
Peter Attia was my idol.
I did three-day water-only fasts, started running for at least three hours per week in 45-minute sessions, improved my grip strength by setting 10 alarms a day to pause whatever I was doing for a set of pull-ups, and pestered my doctor for blood tests he’d never heard about. I even paid $150 for an annual membership to access Attia’s show notes, premium articles, and extra podcasts.
Nothing in my environment passed under my scrupulous eye without being labelled as harmful or helpful to my lifespan.
Peter was infallible in my eyes. Someone to be imitated without question. I did as he did. Believed as he believed. When he stopped fasting, I stopped fasting. I didn’t just want to learn from him, I wanted to be him. I started with the first episode of his podcast, The Drive, and made it a goal to plough through all 300+ sequentially. I was determined to be as optimized and knowledgeable as Attia.
But that changed in the most unlikely way.
After reading one of my Attia-inspired newsletters, my Dad started listening to Attia’s podcast. The next time I saw him, he gave me his unsolicited take on Peter: “Listening to Attia is like having a personal trainer who measures your heartbeat in nanoseconds, bans you from eating blueberries without a full metabolic panel, and calculates the optimal chewing speed for maximum nutrient absorption.”
I perked up and got defensive. I told my Dad he wasn't listening carefully enough and that Attia had to be that nuanced to provide accurate information to his listeners.
A massive grin overtook my Dad’s face: “He’s out of his mind! I feel bad for the podcast guests he interrogates like a drill sergeant, demanding specific study results and P-values of a test they ran 20 years ago.”
I tried to come to Peter’s defence again but uncontrollably bursted out laughing instead. We both cracked up at the absurdity of it all. When I say absurd, here’s an example of what I mean: in his book, Outlive, Attia dedicates 880 words—for context, this post is ~1,300—to explain how to perform his favourite exercise, the Step-Up.
Through words still punctuated by our laughter, my Dad finished: “This guy is good but he’s waayyyyyy down the rabbit hole. So deeply neurotic his enjoyment is completely shot. Where is the love?”
The truth in my Dad’s wisecracks led me, for the first time, to see faultlines in the man who had become my God.1 And to start questioning the rigid, at-all-costs health optimization practices people like me, inspired by figures like Attia, are taking in an attempt to live forever.
But I didn’t change all at once.
2.
I still wanted to be like Attia.
I continued to devour his content and follow his optimized ways with near-religious devotion. It took me over two months and 70 pages of notes to read his book. Plus I had started a newsletter and blog called Longevity Minded with the aim of making longevity simple, practical, and actionable. I was developing a reputation with family and friends as a longevity guru. I had skin in the game.
Taking a sledgehammer to the Attia-shaped longevity shrine erected in my brain would be too painful. It would be changing a core part of the person I was becoming by emulating Peter.
So for months, I ignored it.
But my Dad had dislodged a brick at the bottom of my foundation. I never used to question a word from Attia’s mouth. Now I stopped taking notes on parts of his podcasts I didn’t agree with. Instead of writing articles that simplified and condensed his content into its most practical and actionable form, I began infusing my writing with my own anecdotes—some of which highlighted where his perspective was flawed.
My faith in Peter was crumbling.
3.
Peter Attia is an impressive man.
Medical degree from Stanford.
Five years at Johns Hopkins Hospital where he received prestigious awards.
Two years as a surgical oncology fellow at the National Cancer Institute.
New York Times best-selling author and host of one of the most popular health podcasts.
He’s completed ten-plus hour swims in the open ocean.
He even quit medicine for a stint to work at McKinsey, a top consulting firm, before returning to healthcare.
But, that’s just the good side.
In between tips about improving VO2 max and blood glucose optimization, Peter would share stories from his life. With my eyes wide open after my Dad’s humour-infused intervention, I started to see a different side of the man I was striving to become…
After his month-old son suddenly stopped breathing one night and nearly died, he didn’t come home for ten days because he was on a business trip on the other side of the country.
He’s been institutionalized at a recovery centre, where the other patients are addicted to drugs, alcohol, or sex, on two occasions for workaholism and his underlying rage, neuroticism, and emotional instability.
And recently, he was hanging out with Kevin Spacey, who was acquitted of sexual assault charges last summer.2
I don’t write this to highlight one man’s faults or to say he’s a bad person—we all have our skeletons.
The point is this:
You cannot adopt a singular piece of a person. You can’t cherrypick virtues while ignoring faults. If you want to be like someone, you have to take all of them.
I wanted my physical health to be as optimized as Attia's without adopting his manic obsessive nature, neuroticism, short temper, perfectionism, and neglect of other important things in life, such as family.
When I was hellbent on optimizing my health, I made the incorrect assumption that I could become the good side of Attia while leaving the bad behind. I thought a lifestyle geared towards perfect longevity, how Attia seemed to be living, without making sacrifices was possible.
But I was wrong.
4.
In the period of my life when I was solely focused on organizing my days towards living longer, I forgot who I was.
I exercised three times a day, passed on outings with friends to not disrupt my sleep schedule, ate disgustingly bland but nutritionally optimized foods, spent hours crafting emails to doctors around the world (to prove my doctor wrong), and argued with anyone who was not living as optimally as I was.
I forced myself to suffer through tediously uninteresting podcasts with titles like “HDL, reverse cholesterol transport, CETP inhibitors, and apolipoproteins,” pausing and rewinding every thirty seconds to take notes and write down action items to follow up on.
I harassed my family to exercise and sleep more, avoid certain foods, and get blood tests. My mind became a furnace of anxiety as I worried about the health impact of everything: bread, butter, sunscreen, air quality, vaccines, drinking water, and cortisol spikes from worrying this much.
To prove my extensive longevity expertise, I casually integrated medical terms into my vocabulary without care as to whether anyone understood what I was saying: hypertension, apolipoprotein B, atherosclerosis, familial hypercholesterolemia, and hyperbetalipoproteinemia.
If someone innocently asked me, “Will my blood sugar rise if I eat rice?”, I’d have replied, “HA! Do you mean to ask if a postprandial blood glucose spike and subsequent insulin response will occur if you ingest and metabolize that bowl of simple carbohydrates?”
I started optimizing and stopped living. I became insufferable to myself and others.
5.
I tried to siphon the good parts of Attia, his virtues, while leaving behind the bad. But I inevitably ended up with all of him.
Looking back, the reason why is obvious:
The character traits that make a person admirable are the same traits that fuel their faults.
In Attia’s case, the traits that make him a successful doctor and businessman with a lifestyle perfectly geared towards longevity—work ethic, ambition, perfectionism, and conscientiousness—are the same traits that sent him to an addiction institution.
To optimize your health as much as Attia does, you have to become a certain type of person. And being that person has major downsides.
You can’t take the superhighway to immortality without paying its hefty toll.
With love,
Thank you
and for your edits and feedback on the early drafts of this piece.Subscribe for new essays every Thursday:
What I’ve been up to:
I’m living at a cottage on the lake, but I’ve been on the move: camping with friends, hanging with my Dad in Toronto, and celebrating my girlfriend’s birthday with her family.
Applying to jobs, working on business ventures, and plotting big changes to the newsletter and blog… more on that in the coming weeks.
Taking my exercise outdoors:
Quote I’m pondering:
Neil Gaiman in his novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane:
“We picked some pea pods, opened them and ate the peas inside. Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good when they were freshly-picked and raw, and put them in tin cans, and make them revolting.”
The last two weeks:
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Jokes are only funny because they’re laced with truth.
Peter scrutinizes studies for a living and constantly says things like "absence of evidence doesn't equal evidence of absence." Yet he decided it was a good idea to hang out with an acquitted sexual offender and post about it on Instagram.
Jack, I feel this post down in my bones.
For me it's not so much Attia specifically but the treadmill (ha!) of trying to keep up with entire wellness / longevity space. It's never enough. There's always something new to chase or that we're doing wrong and will definitely kill us this week. Until it's something else next week.
That's all by design, of course, to hold your attention and keep you spending.
The vast majority of us fail the basics -- cardio, strength training, a reasonable diet. If you get those down you're so far ahead of others. I don't feel burned out about working those basics in my life at all, but I'm 100% burned out on this hyper-optimization that is always changing and always just out of reach.
Total optimization is out of reach, of course. "No one here gets out alive," as Jim Morrison said.
"But my Dad had dislodged a brick at the bottom of my foundation." This is what the best Dads do. They take that brick away, but what isn't so obvious is that they then lay it down in a new spot to give you a head start when you're ready for a next new foundation.
You are absolutely living up to your promise for honest and useful stories being shared Jack. I don't know who would fund the research since there would be nothing to sell based on the result, but I'd be willing to bet that self-honesty is a significant factor of longevity. And even if not, you improve the quality of life for yourself and others by promoting this kind of self-awareness.