My plan to live 150+ years (in good health!)

Inspired by Transcend by Ray Kurzweil (Head of R&D at Google) and by this article from Serge Faguet, I started researching more about health optimization for longevity. After reading several books and blogs (particularly Peter Attia’s blog), taking multiple online courses and talking with health specialists, I came up with a plan. This is what I lay out below.

My goal: living in good health, i.e. in full capacity of my brain and body to a very advanced age to eventually reach the Singularity and be able to enjoy all the pleasures and experiences life has to offer with people I care about.

The way I want to tackle this problem is both top-down and bottom-up. Let me explain:

The starting point: What are the most common death causes? (Top-down)
(I look at causes of death in France because that’s where I am from but I also looked at western European countries and it’s pretty similar.)

So what I want is to address each of the above death cause, understand its ins and outs and do what I need to do to avoid it.

If you don’t want to invest much time and money, I think just addressing the above risk factors would increase your survival chances by ~a lot. Some are very easy to address: Smoking is a super dumb shit, drinking too much alcohol as well (but how much is too much heh?); high BMI and LDL are very dependent on dietary risks and fitness.

Then: What are the most common markers that indicate someone has an healthy and not-screwed-up life ? (Bottom-Up)

These are usually divided in multiple categories which are linked to each other but also relates to each of the death causes:

1. Sleep
2. Gut health
3. Cardiovascular health
4. Fitness
5. Nutrition
6. Lifestyle
7. etc

I am 26 years old, so I still have plenty of time to find out about most issues and address them. For this reason I have devised a multiple year plan. For each of the coming year, I chose a subject that I want to address and understand deeply, test it and see what I can do to improve/solve any issue.

2019 — Devise a plan and identify genetic risk factors

2020 — Sleep

2021 — Gut Health

2022 — Cardiovascular health

2023 — Cancers

2024 — Eyesight

2025 — Brain health

Other subjects that I am tackling on daily basis and that are very intrinsically linked to health in general and to each of the above subjects are: mindfulness, nutrition, fitness, lifestyle

I have written down a protocol to address each of the above items:

1. Identify the subject, educate myself about it through books, blogs and online courses.
2. Understand what are the main problems in this area and why there are important, so that I am spending time on a subject that matter
3. Search the possible root causes of the issues and how it happened if possible
4. (Very Important:) Find a way to measure/quantify the problem over time (blood tests, amount of deep sleep etc)
5. Research solutions:
   5.1. Via Negativa: what can I stop doing/eating (partly/fully) to solve the problem ?
   5.2. Via Positiva: what can do/add to my life to solve the problem ?
   Starting with via negativa is important because they usually have less harmful side effects, are easier and cheaper to implement.
6. Chose a potential solution, do it, and measure before and after or at regular intervals to see if this actually solve your issues.
7. Make sure to test/add the solutions one by one and to measure their effects so that you can find what actually solves your issues. For each of the via positiva solution, make sure to look into the potential side effects / interactions with other things you do/take in life.

In the following articles I will address in more details each subject, from what I’ve learnt to what I’ve tried and how I quantified its effects, while linking interesting resources.
Thanks for reading and if you have any question don’t hesitate to ask in the comments.