PROMETHEUS LAIR

Make.Every.Breath.Count

First of, happy new year to you all, regardless of where you are, up in a mountain skiing, on a tropical beach or just in your home town recovering from food, drinks and late nights partying (or playing Monopoly if you are past your 30s).

Make this year great! What I did that helped me through the years (I made a video about it) has been setting ONE GOAL instead of many and break it down in small increments, set a deadline to when I want to achieve it and add another goal as soon as the previous one has been reached.

If you set unattainable ones, chances are you will get bored, frustrated and fail → Add 1% increments to any challenge and by the end of the year you won’t be able to recognise yourself.

What I Recently Learned about Mice

If you recently came back to your hometown and experienced a flood of winter food and delicacy you haven’t been exposed to for more than a decade you might want to reconsider your new year resolution like I did and focus on eating less.

I thankfully balanced out the binging extravaganza with ~14 hours of weightlifting a week, but regardless it has been a lot of overwork for stomach, liver and everything else down the line.

According to multiple studies

(which I found THIS to be the most extensive)
Eating is directly related to lifespan → frequent eating = shorter lifespan 

You won’t look at ‘all you can eat’ buffets in the same way anymore.
You are welcome.

The study is long and complex and of course there are many other factors that proved to play a part in lifespan (including genetics) so if you don’t want to venture into the tldr article, this is a summary: 

Lifespan Extension: The Main Benefit

• Caloric Restriction (CR):

  • Cutting calorie intake by 40% led to the biggest increase in lifespan. This shows CR can be a powerful tool for living longer.

  • However, it came with drawbacks, like losing muscle and weakening the immune system, which made mice more prone to infections. While effective, CR needs careful planning to avoid these issues.

• Intermittent Fasting (IF):

  • Some fasting schedules also helped extend lifespan, but the results depended on genetics and starting body weight.

  • Mice that were heavier before starting IF didn’t see the same benefits, highlighting that baseline health plays a big role.

  • Long intermittent fasting may damage your adrenals, so (women especially because then you will leach from your kids adrenals during pregnancy and pay again after menopause) be mindful and don’t go from 0 to hero immediately.

Genetics Play a Bigger Role Than Diet

• Lifespan is Highly Genetic:

  • The study found that genetics had a stronger impact on how long the mice lived than diet alone.

  • This means dietary strategies need to consider individual genetic differences to work effectively.

  • Methylation matters: you might have bad genes as an unsolicited present from your parents but you have to look at those like dry dynamite. Your environment and daily choices will potentially ignite the explosion OR you can’t go through life without activating anything at all.

Key Signs of Longer Lifespan

The following traits were linked to longer life in the mice:

• Stress Resilience: Mice that kept a steady weight during stressful situations lived longer, showing that handling stress well is important for longevity.

• Stronger Immune Systems: Mice with more lymphocytes (a type of immune cell) lived longer, highlighting the role of immune health in aging.

• Healthy Blood Cells: Consistent red blood cell size (less variation) was another sign of longer life.

• Body Fat: Surprisingly, mice with more body fat later in life lived longer, which goes against the idea that being very lean is always best.

Effects of Specific Diets

• Caloric Restriction (CR):

  • CR was the most effective at extending lifespan but had side effects:

    • Loss of muscle mass, which can affect strength.

    • Weakened immunity, making the mice more vulnerable to diseases.

• Intermittent Fasting (IF):

  • While fasting had benefits, some methods caused problems:

    • Two-day fasting disrupted red blood cell production.

    • IF didn’t work as well for mice that were heavier to start with.

Metabolic Changes Don’t Always Mean Longer Life

• Health Markers Aren’t the Whole Story:

  • Improvements like lower body fat and blood sugar levels didn’t always lead to longer lives.

  • This shows that living longer depends on more than just having good metabolic numbers.

Healthspan vs. Lifespan

• Living Longer vs. Living Better:

  • Some diets help mice live longer but don’t always improve their overall health or quality of life.

  • A good diet should aim for both a longer life and better day-to-day health.

Takeaways for Real Life

1. Caloric Restriction can help you live longer but needs to be done carefully to avoid side effects like losing muscle or weakening immunity.

2. Intermittent Fasting is another option but might work better for people who are already in good health.

3. Personalized Diets are important since genetics play a big role in how effective these strategies are.

4. Balance Health and Longevity: A good approach combines living longer with staying healthy and strong.

Do with these information what you consider to be best for you.

Books I’m reading

The Diary of a CEO: Sometimes we are presented (directly or not) with wildly successful people even younger than us. Steven Cliff Bartlett is one of those people. This book is filled with the value from his experiences and learnt lessons from creating one of the top podcasts in the world and interviewing hundreds of the most successful people on the planet.

Also, I’m a sucker for journals, and I highly recommend you to put your hands on the Diary he created. To make the subconscious conscious and setting goals with an increasing increment in difficulty is what made me transform beyond recognition in the last decade.

What I’m watching

I love animation, BUT with an increasing amount of life sucking movies (the ones that make you feel I was stolen 2 hours of my life) with some of them being filled with subliminal messages, it’s hard to find a good story that sucks you in for a couple of hours.
With Studio Ghibli being on top of the list, today I want to point the flashlight to a trilogy that I just discovered few weeks ago (living under a rock, I know):

How to Train Your Dragon: the story, the voices, the animation and the emotional hooks. Sublime. I introduces my gf to it and we binged #2 and #3 in one day (I filled her in in 5 minutes on what happened in the first episode).

Music I’m listening to

If you are not Italian you might not be familiar with Franco Battiato, but I consider this one of the best songwriters and Artist my country has seen. I invite you to translate the words of this masterpiece: La Cura (the Cure)

Tools I’m using

Without proper training, you lose 1% of your lung capacity, each year.

The 1st of January 2013 I experienced my first panic attack of many that year, then I discovered meditation and breath work.

Years later I experienced a feeling I recognised immediately. It was around 1am and after 10 minutes of breathing through what felt like being teleported into a sea at the mercy of a violent storm, I swam out of it. One breath at the time.

I still remember the feeling my facial muscles pulling a smile when I realised I got out of it on my own, followed by a rush of heat and energy.

Just breath. From that moment I saw breathing as a forgotten superpower.
This is a tool that will help you flying in a world where most people crawl:
Power Lung

And no, the one above is not an exaggeration.

Quote that stuck

“One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself; you will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself; the height of your success is gauged by your self-mastery, the depth of your failure by your self-abandonment. Those who cannot establish dominion over themselves will have no dominion over others.”

― Steven Bartlett, The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life