A Manifesto for Fitness and Longevity

This essay is made possible by the brilliant work of Dr. Peter Attia. His recent book, Outlive, provides countless insights — transforming my approach to fitness and a healthy life. This post contains my key takeaways, plus other helpful tools I’ve found. If you want to get shredded, get stronger, be healthier, or increase well-being, his book is for you.

Macros:

We all know the basics — a calorie is a calorie, carbs & protein contain 4 calories per gram, and fat has 9 calories per gram. Alcohol (ethanol) contains 7 calories per gram. While it’s a good start, these figures aren’t what they seem.

Let’s start with calories per gram. Protein and carbs seem identical, but this isn’t true.

Enter the thermic effect of food, or TEF.

The “thermic effect of food” is the amount of calories burned by processing it. Different macros need different amounts of energy to be processed.

Fat is the easiest to process, losing only 0–3% of it’s total energy. This is annoying because fat has the most calories per gram. If you ate 100 calories of butter, you absorbed at least 97 of them.

One gram of carbohydrates loses 5–10% of its energy to processing.