Celebrity AMA #1: Fasting, rapamycin, performance vs. longevity, and more

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
Welcome to a special bonus Ask Me Anything episode, and what we are likely to call Celebrity AMA number one.
In this and future Celebrity AMA bonuses, instead of being asked questions by my head research analyst, Bob Kaplan, I'll be asked questions by guests, either future guests, special guests, or just other guests on the podcast. So for Celebrity AMA one, I'm joined by Olympians Apollo Ohno and Sasha Cohen.
In this episode, we talk about fasting, we talk about the role of nutrition during periods of study. And this is prompted by something that Apollo is about to embark on. We talk about exercise, the ultimate gorge or feast meal. And we talk about watches, which really I think was the question I struggled with the most. From there, Sasha takes over and she asks me about things that excite me the most in longevity. We talk about mTOR and rapamycin, how to measure results when you're doing a lot of interventions, blood tests and supplements, along with a few other things. As a reminder, AMAs are for subscribers only. If you're not a subscriber, you'll only be able to hear a preview of the AMA here. If you are a subscriber and hearing this, it means you have yet to download our members-only podcast feed. With this members-only feed, you'll be able to subscribe to The Drive in your podcast player to get every episode of The Drive without the subscriber callout, plus full episodes of the AMA podcast directly, along with other exclusive content. You can learn more about it at peterattiamd.com forward slash members. To become a subscriber, to have access to the members-only podcast feed, as well as other benefits such as detailed show notes and member-only discount codes and the products I believe in, you can visit peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. We'll continue to pull these questions from the AMA forum and we encourage all subscribers to participate, ask questions, as we hope to get to all of your questions in time through future AMAs. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy Celebrity AMA number one.

**Apolo Ohno** (2:35)
I'm Apollo Ohno, eight time Olympic medalist. Spent about 15 years of my life previously pursuing the sport of short track speed skating.
And I have the pleasure of doing a AMA with Peter Attia, my good friend. And I've got some interesting questions here and hopefully you haven't answered all of them before in the past. I try to do as much due diligence as I could. Would love to expand upon some of these further. So thanks for having me on Peter to interview you.

**Peter Attia** (3:03)
You're having me on, so take it away, man.

**Apolo Ohno** (3:06)
Yeah, let's jump right in. So my first question is centered around women and fasting. And to give it some context, my girlfriend, she has a very difficult time doing water only fasts, gets dizzy, feels like she needs some sort of sugar, some kind of just anything, any type of caloric intake and where I can do seven plus days, kind of no problem most of the time. So what is the difference here?
And is there a separate protocol that you've seen for maybe perhaps clients who are female?

**Peter Attia** (3:36)
I have definitely noticed over the past few years that even when it comes to time restricted feeding, so not even getting to the point of a fast, but just saying not eating for 18 hours a day, that there appears to be a gender difference. I can sort of concoct a bunch of evolutionary answers that may or may not be true. Certainly one of the ones I'll come back to if we have a moment is to talk about the impact of fasting on fertility in women. So my point being is I definitely appreciate what you're saying and we see it clinically with our patients. Now that said, I also have seen many female patients who can fast independent of body habitus because obviously Bianca is tiny and maybe that plays a role. But I don't think that that's it because I think there might be something else going on. So I think, I don't know the answer, but what I would say is it might just mean that for some people they need more time to work up to a fast, which means longer stretches of time restricted feeding.