This is the first in a series of blogs I intend to write covering my thoughts while reading through Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia. Check back for more posts in the series!

I have had an interesting relationship with health and wellness. My father is 65 and close to the peak of physical health for non-professional athletes. He can run circles around me at 31 and has been able to for years. The pantry in my house in high school was filled with sprouted bread and alternative nut butters before most people knew of oat milk. You'd assume that growing up in this environment that I would have gained similar habits, a shining example of lifelong health. You'd be wrong. While I gained a lot of the knowledge about health and wellness from being around my father I picked up almost none of the practice.

I was a smoker for 7 years, drank my fair share in college, wasn't particularly active, and didn't pay much attention to my diet for most of my life after leaving for college. At 31 this has left me overweight, with metabolic dysfunction, and at high risk for heart disease.

This in this last year from 30 to 31 I am coming to terms with the fact that I'm getting older and need to change my lifestyle if I want to keep doing the things that I do enjoy for years to come. I have started to seek out information starting with mental health and philosophy and expanding into physical health. Most recently I have started reading Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia.

As an engineer and someone who has been interested in science for his whole life this book has been fantastic. It has done an exceptional job at presenting technical medial and biological information in an approachable way. In some cases providing concrete biological reasons for why things like exercise is good for you at a cellular level. The content in this book has begun to create connections between seeming disparate areas of study regarding life. Bringing together the physical and mental for me in ways that haven't "clicked" for me in the past.

The most succinct of these being that life needs to and should be kind of hard.

We as humans developed over hundreds of thousands of years in quite a harsh environment. We developed to not only survive but to thrive in this harsh environment creating tools that grant leverage to our natural abilities and confer us with abilities that we could never possess on our own. In our modern times at the peak of our ability to create life altering tools our genetic development is working against us. All of the physical and metabolic traits that benefited us in the past are now the sources of the diseases that kill us the most. Quite ironic of mother nature.

To cope with this ironic fact we need to consciously inject difficulty and hardship into our lives ourselves. Our bodies and mind crave this hardship and respond spectacularly when put in those situations. Difficulty and hardship in this sense doesn't need to be extreme but can come in the form of quite small every day decisions. Things like going for an hour walk every day or choosing to ride a bike to run an errand rather than drive. Rejecting extreme convenience where sensible in favor of the slightly hard or uncomfortable option.

Do the hard thing, your future self will thank you.