Stop looking inward (my aches! my pains! my plummeting estrogen levels!) and backward (OMG my 20s were so awesome, and so very long ago).

Start looking outward and forward. Wow. It’s a beautiful world.

by Peter Attia, MD

Dr. Peter Attia is an oncology surgeon, a data guy, and an extreme athlete with trauma in his past. That all plays into his approach to longevity: lots and lots of screening, monitoring, and “training” for old age as if you were training for a sporting event.

The chapters on exercise and nutrition were fantastic. My favorite quote: “Cardio or weights? Low-carb or plant-based? Olive oil or beef tallow? I don’t know. Must we really take sides?” This is NOT a book telling you the One True Secret to long life; it all depends. Some certainties though: Exercise is the best medicine. If your metabolism is not functioning well, make it a priority to get that under control. Screen for everything, screen early, screen often.

Then come chapters on sleep and emotional health. I had really been looking forward to the chapter on sleep, as it’s kind of a bugaboo for me. I had grown to feel I could trust his opinions, and I wanted know what he thought about better sleep through pharmaceuticals. He had stated in an early chapter that he had nothing against using medications in general where appropriate, such as statins; so it felt promising that I wouldn’t get some knee-jerk anti-medication attitude.

I started reading the chapter one night shortly before bedtime, and didn’t get up to any of the advice; just lots of emphatic “Sleep is crucial! Quality, uninterrupted sleep! It’s a must! You risk Alzheimer’s if you don’t get it!” Nice scary nightmares to put a random chronic insomniac to sleep with.

The next night I delved in further. Alas, he’s anti-Ambien. Ambien sleep isn’t REAL sleep and yadda yadda yadda. However to give him credit, he had positive things to say about trazodone.

The whole sleep chapter was disappointing and did not feel nearly as data-driven as the previous chapters. It just felt like he got it in his head that sleep was very important to health and decided it warranted a whole chapter on a par with exercise & nutrition, but he didn’t want to put any work into it.

For the emotional health chapter, I commend him for telling so much of his personal story. This chapter was driven by his own experience and that was OK.

I guess the real overarching theme of the book, though, was that everyone is different, and you must find what works for YOU. Your exercise ability, your own metabolic reactions – these are going to determine the “right” exercise and diet for you. He could have been a LITTLE more understanding about chronic insomnia, though, and respected that different things work (and don’t work) for different people. As I said, a bit of a bugaboo for me…

Thank you, God, for another crack at a summer day, because frankly yesterday we were gypped out of a Saturday.

Things that make me happy!

Summer

Sunflowers

Books I’m excited about

Provisions for the week

Of course what made you happy yesterday won’t necessarily make you happy tomorrow. You’ve got to find what makes you happy over and over and over again.

I had Barbie. I had the Barbie Townhouse. The elevator was very cool.

But I have next to no memories of playing with Barbie.

I have memories of the various Fisher Price dollhouses and playing with them, particularly with my little sister, who called the little dolls “Peoples”. I have memories of my friend’s dollhouse and having a blast playing with it with her, right before we got too old for such things.

Those dollhouses all had family units, lots of characters to play off each other. Barbie was just Barbie. I know this is going to sound anti-feminist – but it should, as I had an anti-feminist childhood. But what did you DO with a character who was just a single woman? Did I have any role models of single women? Zip, nada. I know Barbie had Ken and maybe friend-Barbies. But still, I think that was the reason Barbie wasn’t so much fun. I had no idea what to do with a single woman in a townhouse, once she’d gone up and down the elevator a few times.

Peak Life.

14th Star – Railcar Refresher – made with yuzu, really interesting (and good)

Goodwater – German Wheat – loved

Mill River – Watermelon Gose – mmm!

Switchback – Katie’s Love Poem – ‘a traditional Grodzsikie’ – what the hell is that? Polish wheat. We both liked

Switchback – Smoked Oyster Stout – mostly smoke, I really liked the smokeds this session

Lawson’s Finest – Elderberry Gose – loved

This is a very scenic bit of landscaping we’ve added to the front yard this year. You just throw some aspen logs down and let the weeds grow up between them.

This evening I had the classic rock station on playing “Lyin’ Eyes” by the Eagles, which is really a crossover country song. I had this very brief period age 17 or 18 when I liked to listen to the country music station in the kitchen. I used to stand there washing dishes and listen and imagine my future, someday, with my own little kitchen, busy domesticating for my future family. I was so eager to begin my adult life at 18! I imagined I’d get married right after college, of course to my current boyfriend, and we’d live somewhere that wasn’t Staten Island; I imagined it being Wichita, and I imagined lots of kids. Poor me! I had seen so very, very little of the world, literally and figuratively. How could I have formed any realistic vision? I did the best I could with limited information.

Anyway there I was tonight, washing lettuce leaves at the sink of my own little kitchen, listening to a country song while domesticating for my own family of one spouse and five goats. “All my dreams have come true!” I thought.

I can still sing for your a few bars of several top country hits of 1986-1987.

It’s funny how in my childhood home there was this pleasant little window above the kitchen sink, just like I have now. Well, I guess most homes have a window above the kitchen sink; but it helped with the memory.

So I’m only half-joking when I said my dreams had come true. They had. Just the details changed. Because people don’t change, only the details do; and the details naturally change based on all the contingencies of life. All the wacky things that had to align that had me marry the person I did and end up in this house with this crazy hobby of angora goats. I didn’t realize at 17 that this is the nature of life, and that the visions I was forming were just my current wild-ass guesses at the future, not to be set in stone. I took everything so seriously. I could not stray. I’m not sure if I could go back in time if it would do any good; I can’t see myself listening to me. I had to get whacked upside the head by real life to shake me out of my rigidity.