This is the fifth article in a series about longevity. The first four covered autophagy, mTOR vs AMPK, the resilience vs slowdown debate between Attia and Longo, and why biological age tests aren’t ready for prime time. They built up the mechanism, the debate, and the skepticism. This one shows what I’ve actually done with all of it.

This is what I do. It’s not advice. It’s not optimal. It’s a working version of a personal experiment I’ve been running on myself since I turned 48, and I’m publishing it because the most useful health writing I’ve ever read came from people sharing their actual routines, not from generic playbooks. The point isn’t to copy this. The point is to see what one coherent application of the framework looks like, then build your own.

The starting point

A year ago I was 48, overweight, and out of shape. Not catastrophically so. The kind of “out of shape” that creeps up on most people in their 40s if they’re not paying attention. I had a high-stress job, two kids, all the usual middle-aged reasons to not exercise, and a body that had stopped negotiating gently.

So I started reading. The protocol you’re about to read is what came out the other side of that reading. It’s also not finished. I think of it as a living book that I keep editing as new evidence comes in, as my goals change, and as I learn how my own body responds. My current goal is improving strength and lean mass while bringing my resting heart rate down and my HRV up. Six months from now the goal will probably be different and the protocol will adjust with it.

The day starts the night before

Sleep is the foundation. Get it wrong and everything else underperforms. Even your eating: a randomized trial found that extending sleep by over an hour in habitually short sleepers reduced spontaneous caloric intake by more than 200 calories per day.^[1] I take it seriously.

At 8pm, lights start coming down across the house. I put on blue light blocking glasses. I read a book for at least 30 minutes, sometimes more. Around 8:30pm I take magnesium citrate and glycine, both of which have decent evidence for sleep quality^[2,3] and which I notice when I skip them. By 10:30pm I’m in a cooled bedroom, ready to sleep. The room is cold because deep sleep happens at lower core body temperatures, and a cooled mattress (or even just a cold room) is one of the highest-ROI sleep interventions.

I’m not religious about the bedtime. Some nights it’s 11pm. Some Friday nights it’s later. But the routine around it is the thing that protects sleep quality more than the absolute clock time. The wind-down beats the bedtime.

Morning

I wake up early. First task is getting my daughter on the school bus. Coffee comes next: an Italian espresso with a few drops of milk. The one coffee of the day. I’m fasted and stay fasted through training.

The morning supplement stack:

• Creatine, 10g. I take more than the standard 5g muscle dose because the recent neurological literature suggests brain creatine saturation requires higher intake. Studies on cognitive performance, mood, and recovery from sleep loss have used doses in the 10 to 20g range,^[4,5] and the safety data at chronic 10g looks fine. As a vegetarian, I’m also working from a lower dietary baseline than meat eaters.
• Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint stack. I take the Blueprint stack daily, which covers 36 ingredients: creatine, CaAKG (calcium alpha-ketoglutarate), taurine, glycine, glutathione, L-theanine, and magnesium from the Longevity Mix, plus NR (an NAD+ precursor), spermidine, fisetin, CoQ10 (ubiquinol), luteolin, lithium orotate, a full B-vitamin complex, and a handful of minerals. The cost is real, roughly $50-75 a month depending on subscription. The formulation is well-thought-through and saves me from buying a dozen separate products. I’m agnostic about whether any single ingredient is meaningfully helping me, and I treat the whole thing as an n=1 experiment I’m comfortable running.
• Vitamin D3, 4000 IU total, split into two doses. Even in Dubai, getting enough sun is harder than people assume. I deliberately avoid direct sunlight during peak hours, both for skin cancer reasons and because in summer the city is an oven, and the rest of the day is mostly spent indoors at a desk. Supplementation is the reliable way to keep levels where I want them. The Blueprint stack already includes 2000 IU, but I take that fasted in the morning, which is a poor delivery vehicle for any fat-soluble vitamin. So I take a second 2000 IU at lunch alongside my omega-3, where the dietary fat actually gets it absorbed. The second dose also includes K2 (MK-7), which Blueprint doesn’t have and which matters: vitamin D drives calcium absorption from food but doesn’t direct where it ends up. K2 activates the proteins that route calcium into bones and teeth rather than letting it accumulate in arteries. Pairing D and K2 is increasingly considered best practice, especially at higher D doses.^[6,7] I check my blood levels annually and target the 40-50 ng/mL range.
• Vitamin B12, additional 500 mcg. The Blueprint stack contains 125 mcg of methylcobalamin, which is fine for a meat eater but probably low for a strict vegetarian. Oral B12 absorption is inefficient (only about 1% absorbed at higher doses),^[8] so vegetarian-targeted supplementation usually runs 250 to 1000 mcg daily to compensate. Subclinical B12 deficiency is one of the most missed things in vegetarian diets, and the consequences (cognitive, neurological) can be irreversible over years. I top up with an additional 500 mcg of methylcobalamin daily, which puts my total intake comfortably in the safe range.

I drink a lot of water, then it’s time to train.

Training

60 minutes, Monday through Friday. Weekends off, generally.

The split: 30 to 45 minutes of resistance training plus 30 minutes of conditioning. When I’m in Dubai, the resistance work is programmed by my coach (more on him in a moment). When I’m traveling, I run my own programming through the RP Hypertrophy app, which lets me autoregulate volume based on recovery and progressive overload across mesocycles. The conditioning rotates across the week: HIIT twice, dedicated VO2max work once, mobility and flexibility twice. So the actual week looks roughly like:

• Monday: 30/45 min lift + HIIT (often Tabata-style: 8 rounds of 20 seconds all-out, 10 seconds rest)
• Tuesday: 30/45 min lift + mobility/flexibility
• Wednesday: 30/45 min lift + VO2max work (intervals at near-max heart rate, longer durations than Tabata)
• Thursday: 30/45 min lift + HIIT
• Friday: 30/45 min lift + mobility/flexibility

About the resistance training: my actual in-person coach is Uros, a personal trainer in Dubai I train with almost every morning when I’m there. He taught me the basics when I first got serious about this and has been a steady presence ever since. He’s a motivator on the days I need one, and he programs with my age in mind. The way he trains me at 49 is fundamentally different from how he trains my kids, who also work with him sometimes. Different goals, different bodies, different programs, different rates of progression. That’s something the apps and the YouTube channels don’t always communicate clearly: a good coach who actually watches you move is essential, especially early on when you’re learning what hard feels like and how to keep your form when you’re tired. If you’re starting out, the highest-leverage thing you can do is find a good coach for the first few months. The online content works much better once you have the foundation.

When I’m not training with Uros, I run my own programming through the RP Hypertrophy app, built by Dr. Mike Israetel’s team at Renaissance Periodization. His YouTube channel has been the single most useful online resource. On it you’ll find hypertrophy programming, progressive overload, mesocycle design, exercise selection, and above all recovery management at a level of detail that’s genuinely rare in the fitness space, all in a tone that’s somewhere between “graduate-level exercise science” and “deeply unserious dirtbag.” The app gives me the programming structure; the channel lets me understand the why behind each piece. If I had to pick one fitness creator to recommend to someone serious about training, it’s him without hesitation.

I train fasted. This is a personal preference, not a recommendation. For me it works: I have energy, my lifts keep progressing, and the metabolic alignment with my eating window is clean. For other people, training fasted tanks their performance, leaves them lightheaded, or makes the session feel like a chore. There’s nothing wrong with eating before training if that’s what your body needs. The autophagy and AMPK benefits I’m chasing matter less than consistency, and a fed workout you complete beats a fasted one you bail on. Try both, see what works for you, don’t be religious about it. The HIIT days line up with my fasted state as described in the mTOR vs AMPK article: low amino acids keep mTOR quiet, glycogen depletion keeps AMPK elevated, and the workout produces a stronger autophagy signal than fed exercise would. The mobility days are recovery, not stress. They’re there to absorb the impact of the harder sessions and keep tissues happy.

At 49 I deliberately prioritize movements and exercises that minimize injury risk. Machines and cables over heavy free weights for most lifts. Dumbbells over barbells when the loading is comparable. Controlled tempo over lifting to prove a point. I’m willing to push harder when I’m training with Uros, because he can actually watch me and correct my form in real time. When I’m on my own, I default to the safer movement patterns. I still chase progressive overload, but the cost of an injury at 49 is much higher than at 29. A torn rotator cuff or a herniated disc could derail months of training and undo years of gains, which is the opposite of the longevity goal. A younger person can probably afford to be more aggressive with heavy compound lifts and accept the occasional setback. At my age the trade-off looks different: slightly slower progress in exchange for showing up consistently for the next 20 years is the right deal. The best exercise is the one you can still do at 70.

After training

20 minutes in the sauna at 90 to 95°C. Heat exposure has a separate set of benefits from training (cardiovascular adaptation, heat shock proteins, possibly autophagy),^[9] and the post-workout window is when I have the time and tolerance for it.

I rehydrate with one liter of electrolyte water. This is one of the few specific product categories where it’s worth being picky: most supermarket electrolyte drinks are sugar bombs in disguise. I look for products with a real sodium dose (1000+ mg/L), meaningful potassium and magnesium, and essentially no sugar. The good brands exist. They’re not always the loudest ones.

Then breakfast: 0% fat Greek yogurt with a scoop of protein powder mixed in, plus berries and/or nuts. This is the meal that breaks the fast and kicks mTOR back on for muscle protein synthesis. It’s also the meal where I make sure I’m getting at least 30g of protein in one shot, because the recent literature is increasingly clear that single-meal protein doses matter for triggering MPS in adults.^[10,11]

Work hours

I use a standing desk. Most of my working day is on my feet, which sounds like a small thing but adds up to hours of low-level movement that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

When I’m in Dubai and the weather cooperates, I walk around the Marina after every meal. A 10-minute walk after eating has a substantial effect on postprandial glucose,^[12] which I know because I sometimes wear a CGM (continuous glucose monitor) when I want to understand how my body responds to specific foods or to check whether my overall metabolic response is improving or drifting.

The CGM experiments taught me three things that now shape my eating: (1) starting meals with vegetables and fiber blunts the glucose spike from anything that follows, (2) standing or walking after meals matters more than I expected, and (3) some foods I assumed were “healthy” produced larger spikes than I would have guessed. Fruit juice is the most obvious example: even fresh-squeezed, no added sugar, “it’s just fruit.” It spikes glucose harder than most actual sugary drinks because you’ve stripped the fiber and concentrated the sugars from several pieces of fruit into one glass that you drink in 30 seconds. I now treat juice as roughly equivalent to soda. Whole fruit is fine; the fiber matrix changes everything. The CGM isn’t part of my daily routine, but pulling it out periodically as a diagnostic when I want to investigate a specific question has been one of the higher-leverage interventions I’ve made.

Lunch

Vegetables first, always. Broccoli, salad, whatever fiber I have around. Then protein: eggs, cheese, lentils, beans. Bread always strictly homemade.

I’m 100% vegetarian. No meat, no fish. The protein sources are eggs, dairy, and legumes, which between them cover the amino acid spectrum well enough as long as I’m paying attention.

After lunch: 1.5g combined EPA/DHA from a quality omega-3 supplement. The dose is on the higher end of the recommended range, and the reason is simple: I don’t eat fish, so my dietary baseline is essentially zero. Most general omega-3 recommendations assume the person eats at least some fish or seafood, which gets them partway there from food alone. A vegetarian starts at zero and has to make up the entire gap through supplementation. (For the more careful readers: I’m using an algae-based EPA/DHA product, not fish oil, since fish oil isn’t really vegetarian.)

The rest of the day

I cycle in roughly 4-week blocks between muscle-building (caloric surplus) and fat-loss (caloric deficit) phases. The cycle is loose, not rigid. During build phases I’ll have a second meal in the afternoon. During cut phases I’ll skip it and ride out hunger with a small handful of macadamia nuts or a teaspoon of psyllium husk in plenty of water if I really need it.

When I need an additional protein hit in the afternoon (usually during build phases, or on days when breakfast feels too far away from lunch), I make a quick mix: a scoop of protein powder, homemade almond milk, and a spoonful of pure cocoa powder. The almond milk is just raw almonds blended and strained with water. It takes 5 minutes, costs almost nothing, and is markedly better than anything pre-packaged from a supermarket. The cocoa is there because it tastes good, but also because the evidence on flavanol-rich cocoa is genuinely interesting: it has been associated with modestly lower LDL cholesterol, real antioxidant activity, and some signals around improved insulin sensitivity and endothelial function.^[13] I’m not claiming it does any one thing dramatically, but unsweetened cocoa is one of the few foods where “I add it because it tastes good and is probably also good for me” actually holds up.

The cutoff for food is 5pm. That puts me at roughly 17 hours of continuous fasting most nights, well into the time-restricted eating zone I covered in the autophagy article.^[14,15] It’s aggressive but I’ve adapted to it and it works for me.

Hydration

Dehydration is one of the most underrated problems in any longevity protocol. Even mild chronic dehydration raises resting heart rate, suppresses HRV, makes sleep worse, and degrades cognitive performance throughout the day. Which means dehydration shows up immediately on my Oura ring data when I let it slip.

My target is at least 3 liters of water a day, with at least 1 liter of that coming from electrolyte water (usually the training liter). The remaining 2+ liters are spread across the rest of the day, more in summer or on days when I sweat heavily. In the evening, after 6pm I tend to drink less to avoid disturbing sleep.

The electrolyte share matters because plain water alone, in volumes this high, dilutes sodium and can actually make hydration worse, not better. The point isn’t to drink as much water as possible. It’s to maintain electrolyte balance while replenishing fluid. Especially as someone who trains fasted in the morning, does sauna sessions, and lives in a hot climate, this is non-negotiable. Getting it wrong has a real cost: HRV suppression on the same day, worse sleep that night, harder training the next morning, compounding over a week into a meaningful loss of performance and recovery.

What I track

Daily, with minimal effort:

• Weight (morning, after bathroom, before water)
• Fasting glucose (a cheap glucometer, one finger prick)
• Blood pressure (a €40 cuff, one reading)

These take 90 seconds combined and they give me a high-resolution picture of how my body is responding to whatever I’m currently doing. Weight catches drift. Fasting glucose catches metabolic issues early. Blood pressure catches the slow-moving stuff. Together they’re more useful for week-to-week tracking than any expensive wearable.

Continuous: I wear an Oura ring. I mostly use it for sleep tracking and HRV trends. I don’t look at every metric every day. What I actually use: weekly HRV trend (rising = recovering well, suppressed = back off intensity), total sleep duration, time in deep sleep. The rest is noise I ignore.

As needed: a CGM (which typically lasts about 10 days), when I have a specific question about how my body is responding to something.

Two or three times a year: comprehensive blood panels. Lipids with ApoB, HbA1c, fasting glucose and insulin for HOMA-IR, hsCRP, full thyroid, kidney and liver function, plus the vegetarian-specific additions: B12, ferritin, vitamin D, homocysteine. I plan to add the omega-3 index test next round to confirm my supplementation is reaching good levels. The labs are the slow-moving counterpart to the daily measurements: they catch the things that drift quietly over months rather than days.

Weekends

Looser days. We go out with friends, we end up in restaurants, we have pizza. I tend to eat more on weekends and stay social later. The protocol bends for life, not the other way around.

Some weekends I go running with friends. It’s the social and aerobic-base layer that doesn’t fit the structured weekday training. Some weeks it happens, some weeks it doesn’t.

Fair warning: cheat days can erase a week of progress if you’re not careful, but you also can’t live like a robot. The answer is moderation. Pizza, yes. Six beers and a dessert, no. The point isn’t to be perfect on weekends. It’s to not undo the weekday work.

What I don’t eat

• Sugar
• Candies
• Cakes (except for actual celebrations, birthdays, holidays)
• Desserts in general
• Soda (and fruit juice, as covered earlier)
• Alcohol (including beer and wine)
• Tobacco

After a few months of cutting added sugar, most desserts taste cloying. At restaurants the social cost is low, while the metabolic benefit (steady glucose, no afternoon crashes, stable energy) is high.

I cook from raw ingredients whenever I can, use high-quality olive oil generously, and avoid most packaged foods. Cooking from scratch is a deliberate part of the protocol, not an aesthetic choice. And it’s also fun.

The one prescription I take

I take low-dose tirzepatide (Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 agonist). I started more than a year ago when I was overweight and with a metabolic profile heading in the wrong direction.

GLP-1s are drugs with a low risk profile and extremely high potential. They’re probably the discovery of the decade. And they’ve improved the health and lives of thousands of people.

Unlike rapamycin, NMN, NR, metformin, and other compounds whose studies are few, mostly on animals, and whose results look vague, tirzepatide, semaglutide, and soon also retatrutide have demonstrated health improvements that go beyond insulin resistance, across the entire metabolic profile.

GLP-1s are prescribed for established indications (obesity, type 2 diabetes) with some of the strongest human RCT evidence of any drug class in the last decade. The SELECT trial in 2023 showed semaglutide reduces major adverse cardiovascular events in non-diabetic obese patients by 20%, which is a bigger effect than statins.^[16] There’s now solid data on kidney outcomes, sleep apnea, even alcohol use, and active research on possible effects in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. This isn’t a speculative longevity drug. It’s a well-validated medication for a clear condition that turns out to do more than was originally promised.

My current dose is 5mg of tirzepatide per week. Standard practice is to take it as a single weekly injection. I’m currently experimenting with splitting it into two 2.5mg doses about three days apart, with the goal of maintaining a smoother peak-trough curve across the week, reducing side effects and rebound hunger compared to a single weekly spike. The drug has a half-life of around 5 days,^[17] so a once-weekly schedule produces meaningful variation in drug levels. This dose-splitting is off-label. I’m not titrating up. I’m not chasing additional weight loss. I’m trying to find the most stable maintenance pattern.

The drug helped, especially with appetite regulation in the early months. But tirzepatide doesn’t lift my weights, doesn’t cook my meals, doesn’t go to bed at 10:30. The protocol is what makes the results sustainable. The drug is a tool inside the protocol, not a replacement for it. Most of the people I’ve seen succeed long-term on GLP-1s have done some version of this: paired the medication with serious training, adequate protein intake, improved sleep quality, and real behavior change. The people who took the drug and changed nothing else mostly regained the weight as soon as they stopped.

If you’re meaningfully overweight or obese, with cardiometabolic risk factors, there’s a solid evidence base that justifies a real conversation with your doctor about GLP-1s. There are real side effects (GI mostly, some lean mass loss risk), and long-term data is still accumulating. The longevity conversation has been weirdly silent on what is probably the most important pharmacological advance for cardiometabolic health in 30 years, and that silence is starting to feel ideological.

Resistance training and high protein matter more on a GLP-1, not less. Reduced appetite makes it harder to hit protein targets, and the metabolic adaptation that comes with weight loss puts lean mass at risk if you’re not deliberately protecting it. The boring fundamentals carry more weight, not less, when there’s a drug in the mix.

What I don’t do (and how I think about experimenting)

Before listing things I’ve left out, a broader point. I’m genuinely in favor of n=1 self-experimentation. I think the future of medicine is going to be customized down to the individual, and the best way to learn how your own body responds to anything is to try it carefully and pay attention (formulate a hypothesis, test it, measure the results). The dose-splitting I’m doing with tirzepatide is one example. The CGM rotations, the 4-week cycling, the cocoa addition, even the long fasted window are all small n=1 experiments. What I don’t trust is unaware experimentation. The difference between informed self-experimentation and biohacker theater is whether you understand what you’re testing, what measurements you need to take, and how you’d identify when something works or doesn’t.

The other thing I try to avoid is obsession. I’m not doing this to follow anyone’s protocol or to chase the optimal stack. I’m doing it to improve my life. That changes how I evaluate things. As long as an intervention is compatible with how I want to live and provides real benefit, I’ll stick with it. The moment it starts feeling like a cage, or competing with what actually matters (work, family, friends, the things life is actually for), it’s the intervention that has to go, not the life. The protocol is in service of the life, not the other way around.

With that framing, here’s what’s not currently in my stack and why.

• No biological age tests. Covered in the biological age article. This one is a technical objection, not a personal preference. The noise in the current tests is larger than the effects people claim to see, which means a single test result tells you almost nothing useful. When these tests improve, I’ll revisit.
• No rapamycin or metformin specifically for longevity. Both are interesting and both are off-label for this purpose. The recent RAPA-EX-01 trial (covered in the mTOR article) is further evidence that animal studies don’t translate directly to humans. I might revisit rapamycin or metformin when stronger human data exists. (The GLP-1 question is genuinely different and I covered it in the section above.)
• No expensive longevity clinics or membership programs. Cost-benefit doesn’t work for me.
• No cold plunges. I tried cold exposure for a few months and couldn’t tell if it was doing anything beyond making me cold. Dropped it. The supporting evidence is thin, and life is short.

The honest summary: I’m allergic to being sold certainty by people who can’t deliver it, but I’m not allergic to experimentation. Most of these items aren’t “rejected on principle.” They’re “currently not in my stack because the personal cost-benefit hasn’t compelled me.” Reasonable people in similar situations make different choices. The thing I would push back on is taking any of these compounds because an influencer said so, without understanding what you’re testing or how you’d know if it’s working.

The foundation the protocol is built on

None of what’s written above works if it depends on willpower. Willpower is a finite resource that runs out in an afternoon. Habits, by contrast, are infinite, because once they’re formed they run themselves. The actual skill of building a routine like this isn’t picking the right exercises or the right supplements. It’s learning to have control over your own habits: choosing which ones are worth keeping and which are better dropped.

Two things have made this work for me, beyond the generic advice that fills the habit-formation books.

The first is stacking habits to anchored moments of the day. I don’t try to remember to take supplements at 7:23am. I take them when I make my coffee. Glucose, weight, and blood pressure get measured right after I wake up, because waking up is already a fixed point. Reading happens at 8pm because that’s when the lights in the house come down. Magnesium and glycine come at 8:30 because they’re sitting next to the reading chair. The protocol is anchored to four natural moments (wake up, around lunch, after work, before bed) and I attach new habits to the ones that already exist. A habit that floats free, unanchored to anything, almost always fails.

The second is bundling habits with things I actually enjoy. I often listen to podcasts. So I save my favorites for cardio sessions: tablet propped up, earbuds in, suddenly 30 minutes of treadmill or bike feels like the part of the day I look forward to rather than the part I dread. The cardio isn’t the reward, the podcast is the reward, but the cardio is the price of admission. Audiobooks during walks. A specific coffee right after the morning measurements. The activity I’m trying to install becomes the gateway to something I’d be doing anyway.

A few smaller things that have helped:

One at a time. It took a year to develop the protocol you’ve just read. I didn’t install all of it in January 2024 and miraculously keep it. I added one piece, lived with it for a few weeks until it felt automatic, then added the next. Trying to install 12 habits in a week is the most reliable way to install zero.

Environment over willpower. I sleep in a cool room because the bed does the cooling on a timer. I don’t eat sugar because there isn’t any in the kitchen. I read at night because my phone charges in another room while the book is on the nightstand. Most of the protocol is environmental design with a thin layer of behavior on top.

Never miss twice. Missing one training session is fine, life works that way. Missing two in a row teaches your brain that the habit is optional. I’m not religious about most things in this protocol, but this rule is one of the few I do enforce.

Pick habits that accumulate. Reading 30 minutes a night accumulates. Scrolling for 30 minutes a night doesn’t. Lifting accumulates. A protocol element that you can’t tell is doing anything probably doesn’t. When you’re picking which habits to invest formation effort in, pick the ones with real downstream effects and ignore the rest.

For readers who want to go deeper on this, Atomic Habits by James Clear is the most useful book I’ve read on the topic. Most of the principles above are some flavor of his framework applied to a longevity protocol. You don’t need to read it to build a routine, but it helps you avoid many of the most common mistakes.

A clarification

I prioritize work, family, and friends over the protocol. The protocol exists to serve the rest of my life, not the other way around. If a family dinner runs late, I sleep less. If we travel, the routine breaks. If my daughter wants piadina on a Sunday, we have piadina.

This is the part of personal-protocol writing that usually gets left out, because it doesn’t make for clean Instagram content. But it’s the actual answer to the question “how do you live like this?” You don’t. You live a normal life and the protocol bends around it. The consistency matters more than the perfection, and the consistency is sustainable precisely because I don’t try to be perfect.

If I could pass on one thing from this article, I’d want it to be this. The people I know who have ruined their relationships chasing optimization didn’t lose those relationships because of the lifting or the fasting. They lost them because they made the protocol the point. The protocol isn’t the point. The point is the life you want to live in your 70s, and your 50s, and tomorrow morning when your kid wakes up.

What I’m keeping tabs on

The things I’d genuinely update on:

• More human data on rapamycin, especially longer trials with mortality and disease endpoints rather than muscle outcomes
• Sinclair’s Phase 1 readout on the ER-100 reprogramming trial
• Better, lower-noise biological age tests, if they ever arrive
• Continued long-term data on the fasting-mimicking diet
• Any large RCT comparing high-protein/strength-focused vs lower-protein/restriction-focused approaches in middle-aged adults (this would be the most directly useful study for the question I’m actually trying to answer)

Until any of these meaningfully move, I’m staying in the Attia-aligned resilience camp, with periodic nods to the slowdown camp through fasting and autophagy timing.

Closing notes

This protocol has changed me physically and mentally over the last year. I’ve lost weight, gained strength, and my baseline biomarkers (resting heart rate, blood pressure, fasting glucose) are all optimal now. More importantly I feel different. Sharper, more energetic, more present in the rest of my life.

But it’s a working version, not a finished one. Some of what’s in here will look wrong to me in two years. Some of it I’m probably already wrong about today. And that’s fine, as long as the approach remains the right one.

If you’re starting from where I was a year ago (overweight, sedentary, middle-aged, vaguely worried), the most useful advice I can give you isn’t to copy this protocol. It’s to start studying, start moving, start sleeping better, and let your own protocol emerge from your own evidence. This is mine. Yours will look different. That’s the right outcome.

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