AMA #44: Peter's historical changes in body composition with his evolving dietary, fasting, and training protocols

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to a sneak peek, Ask Me Anything or AMA episode of the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full, along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created. Or you can learn more now by going to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the Ask Me Anything episode.
Welcome to AMA number 44 I'm once again joined by Nick Stenson. In today's episode, we do something a little bit different. I recently had a DEXA scan and some blood work done.
And I decided that we would go back and look at the past, I don't know, 10 to 12 years of my DEXA scan results through a variety of changes that I've made, but specifically with respect to nutrition and exercise. So we focus really on how my nutrition and exercise has changed over the past 12 years and how that has impacted at least one metric for the purpose of this discussion, which is body composition. So as our subscribers, you have told us that you find great value in patient case studies, and we figured for this time, let's use Peter as the patient. So in this AMA, we go through my DEXA reports for the past 12 years or so, along with my most recent blood test, and we talk about all of the changes that have taken place.
So when I went into ketosis for a prolonged period of time, came out of ketosis, spent a lot of time doing time-restricted feeding, spent a lot of time doing periodic prolonged fasts, high protein, low protein, all sorts of things. We also talk about the evolution of my training when I was primarily an endurance athlete versus now when I'm primarily strength training, but obviously still doing what I consider an appropriate amount of endurance training.
So while this is a bit of a different episode, my hope is that you'll find a lot of insight in here because even though we're using me as a case study, a lot of what I talk about is, I believe, applicable to all of you because I know it's applicable to all of my patients. And these are the types of discussions that I have with my patients every day as we review their DEXA scans and of course their blood work. Now if you're a subscriber and you wanna watch the full video of this podcast, which is actually gonna be pretty helpful because we are showing a lot of the images and the percentiles of changes in things like body fat, visceral fat, ALMI, FFMI, those sorts of things. By all means, make sure you check out the video of this podcast, which you can find on the show notes page. If you're not a subscriber, you can watch a sneak peek of the video on our YouTube page. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy AMA number 44

**Nick Stenson** (2:50)
Hey! Peter.
Welcome to another AMA. How you doing?

**Peter Attia** (2:52)
I'm doing well, but you look awfully cold.

**Nick Stenson** (2:55)
It is negative degrees right now.
It's not good. It's that time of year. I feel like we've got nothing but snow for the past two weeks, so it's just a matter of survival at this point. There's nothing you can do. I mean, I know you miss it, and that's kind of why you want to go back to Canada. It's just the weather, so it's fair, but you can always come to Minnesota, can come live out here.

**Peter Attia** (3:16)
I think the whole time I was growing up in Canada, I kept wondering, why did people live there prior to the industrial age, prior to heat and things like that?
Did it not occur to them that, hey, I can just walk south for a couple of months, and I'll be in a place where, yeah, it's hotter in the summer, but I don't risk dying in the winter. Anyway.

**Nick Stenson** (3:36)
Well, on that note, we're gonna do a little something different for this AMA. We kinda had a little something else planned.
And then recently, in the past week, you've gotten some labs and DEXA results back, and you found them really interesting, and we were talking about them internally. So we kinda decided to pull an audible and instead kinda talk through those, because I think what we've heard from our audience is, whenever we can do case studies and see like real world results and then how people tweak it, they've always found that really helpful. And this time the patient's gonna be you. So hopefully it's even more interesting. And on the cold, which we'll get to in a second, I think the rate you're going, you could survive in the cold a lot longer than you maybe could have 10 years ago. Ouch, Ouch.