A groundbreaking manifesto on living better and longer that challenges the conventional medical thinking on aging and reveals a new approach to preventing chronic disease and extending long-term health, from a visionary physician and leading longevity expert
“One of the most important books you’ll ever read.”—Steven D. Levitt, New York Times bestselling author of Freakonomics
Wouldn’t you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health.
For all its successes, mainstream medicine has failed to make much progress against the diseases of aging that kill most people: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and type 2 diabetes. Too often, it intervenes with treatments too late to help, prolonging lifespan at the expense of healthspan, or quality of life. Dr. Attia believes we must replace this outdated framework with a personalized, proactive strategy for longevity, one where we take action now, rather than waiting.
This is not “biohacking,” it’s science: a well-founded strategic and tactical approach to extending lifespan while also improving our physical, cognitive, and emotional health. Dr. Attia’s aim is less to tell you what to do and more to help you learn how to think about long-term health, in order to create the best plan for you as an individual. In Outlive, readers will discover:
• Why the cholesterol test at your annual physical doesn’t tell you enough about your actual risk of dying from a heart attack.
• That you may already suffer from an extremely common yet underdiagnosed liver condition that could be a precursor to the chronic diseases of aging.
• Why exercise is the most potent pro-longevity “drug”—and how to begin training for the “Centenarian Decathlon.”
• Why you should forget about diets, and focus instead on nutritional biochemistry, using technology and data to personalize your eating pattern.
• Why striving for physical health and longevity, but ignoring emotional health, could be the ultimate curse of all.
Aging and longevity are far more malleable than we think; our fate is not set in stone. With the right roadmap, you can plot a different path for your life, one that lets you outlive your genes to make each decade better than the one before.

Since the beginning of medical history, women’s unique physiology and needs have gone almost ignored as women were treated as “little men”. It’s only recently that research has begun to examine the differences. The first in the realm of sports nutrition wasn’t done until the 1970’s and even today women are studied perhaps 20% as frequently as men. Even under these circumstances, in almost any physiological system that has been examined, a difference is usually found.
A woman’s nutritional requirements, how her body utilizes nutrients after a meal or during exercise, how and where she stores fat, her response to stress, how her body adapts to dieting and weight loss and even how she metabolizes caffeine all differ from a man’s. Sometimes it is a subtle differences but, in many cases, the difference can be extreme. So why are they still so often ignored?
In the realm of dieting, fat loss and muscle gain, approaches developed by male coaches for male athletes are often either ineffective or, in some cases, outright damaging. Certainly there are commonalities that always apply but a woman’s unique physiology must be taken into account for optimal results. Women also face issues such as menstrual cycle and hormonal dysfunction or bone loss that men simply never face. There is also the vast amount of misinformation about how women should eat or exercise. Nutritionally deficient diets are often coupled with ineffective exercise programs and endless numbers of women don’t get the results that they should or could with a better approach.
Arguably the primary consideration for women is the menstrual cycle, the roughly 28 day cycle where her hormones vary drastically from week to week, altering her physiology along with it. To that there is the frequent presence of what I call hormonal modifiers, situations that alter a woman’s physiology in some way. Examples include hormonal birth control, Poly-Cystic Ovary Syndrome, sub-clinical hyperandrogenism (elevated testosterone levels) and menstrual cycle dysfunction including amenorrhea. The age-related hormonal changes that occur during peri-menopause and menopause add a further layer of complexity.
The Women’s Book Vol 1: A Guide to Nutrition, Fat Loss and Muscle Gain sets out to address the above issues and more. In it, I look at the specifics of a woman’s physiology, not only how it differs significantly from a man’s, but how it’s unique characteristics affect how an optimal nutrition, fat loss diet or muscle gain approach should be set up. At over 400 pages virtually no topic goes undiscussed and the book represents a complete resource for women’s unique needs.
While much of the information is related to exercise or training, this is not just a book for the lean female athlete or dieter. I have striven to make it not only as comprehensive as possible by discussing not only the hormonal modifiers listed above but attempting to include a variety of distinct training goals such as general health and fitness (including bone health), the serious trainee, and physique competition along with strength/power, endurance and other performance sports.
Hence the title: The Women’s Book.
Disclaimer: The book does not discuss nutritional needs for pregnancy or breast feeding, Eating Disorder recovery or medical conditions as these should be addressed with a medical professional.