There was another recent study that made the front page of HN (would have to search to find it) that found two "peaks" of aging, at 44 and 60. As someone in my late 40s, I certainly identified with that.
I was in fairly good shape and feel like, despite some grays and some crows feet, my body was relatively the same from my early 20s to my early 40s. 44 really did hit me like a ton of bricks though - working out got considerably harder, and my face started to show more permanent signs of aging, like loss of facial fat and neck banding. Can't say I was thrilled to later discover I was "right on schedule".
chasd00 · 10h ago
I’m 49 and haven’t noticed much. I’m in better shape now than in my 20s and 30s so that could be obscuring things. It does take longer to recover from an all nighter at work than it use to so there’s definitely that.
teapot7 · 4h ago
I'm closing in on 62 and I've been saying for a while now that as soon as I turned 60 my body sent me a note saying "That's it - I'm done now. The rest is up to you".
I feel validated by this study.
bdcravens · 10h ago
44 was around the time I started to experience random things hurting for no reason, so that definitely tracks.
I'm 30. I feel 70. No clue why. I take vitamin supplements, I exercise, I try to sleep, I had basic blood test. Nothing.
elcritch · 9h ago
Well stop using body cavities as a reactor would be a good first step. :p
More seriously could be signs of depression. I felt way worse when I was depressed. Also could be something like chronic fatigue syndrome too.
P.S. get your vitamin-d levels checked. It’s a super common deficiency.
anal_reactor · 7h ago
When I think of the joy that I experienced from my body cavity and what "nothing" I feel now... gah. It's like a light gone.
I think I've always been low-key depressed but there was always this ray of hope. But now it's dawning upon me "this is it, that's life, take it or leave it" and that's just terrifying and demotivating. I feel like I have to accept that things I wanted so bad just won't happen. And with each passing day my exhaustion keeps getting worse so I feel like the number of things that bring me joy keeps getting smaller.
dnissley · 9h ago
How's your diet? Do you get plenty of vegetables? Cruciferous especially. Do you avoid fried foods? Alcohol? Caffeine? Sugar? Consuming enough high quality protein?
How's your sleep? Do you avoid eating within a couple hours of bedtime? Are you waking up to pee in the night?
rz2k · 5h ago
> Cruciferous especially.
Unless it’s gout.
anal_reactor · 7h ago
I used to eat a salad every day until recently when I decided I can't be bothered to visit work canteen anymore. They gave shit food but I'd always take an extra big salad of raw vegetables. Recently my diet got worse. I used to love cooking, but now I can't be bothered, so it's instant ramen, milk with buckwheat, or potatoes + egg + bacon + fried vegetables. Not sure what "high-quality protein" is.
I had a period when I'd drink a litre of vodka every weekend, but now it's like "one beer to chill after work". Weed is my vice though, I'm stoned every weekend. I try to cut though because the amounts I used to consume now make me tired, so I'm aiming for smaller doses.
I try to eliminate caffeine, but I keep learning about new sources of it. It's literally today that I learned just how much caffeine cola has.
Sugar is my vice definitely. I cycle every day, so I burn it. When I don't cycle I hit the gym.
Sleep... it happens often that I schedule time to sleep, I put away my phone, but then I just don't fall asleep, I just lie there awkwardly in bed. Or I wake up and then can't go back to sleep. I feel like the quality of my sleep isn't there really, which is why I decided to cut caffeine in the first place. But then I sometimes have a streak where I can sleep and function well. One thing is that I tend to get sleepy in the afternoon. If I go to bed and manage to get one full cycle of sleep, I won't feel completely miserable. I don't have big meals before bedtime but often I keep snacking on something.
Whether I wake up to pee depends on how much liquid I drink before. I'd say 50/50.
SamPatt · 7h ago
I've been where you're at, and speaking frankly, if you don't make some changes, it'll only get worse. It sounds like you're tinkering at the edges but that can only get you so far.
Ramen, bacon, beer, cola, weed...
Maybe cut back or eliminate those for a few weeks and see how you feel? It's obviously way easier said than done but I can almost guarantee that cleaner living will bring back some of the lost energy, and once you've got more energy it gets a lot easier to get (and stay) on track again.
Best of luck.
anal_reactor · 7h ago
Seems like I'm doing the journey the other way around. I don't see much point in maintaining healthy lifestyle if the effort of doing so is higher than the reward. If I'm tired either way, then why bother.
kelnos · 10h ago
Well, shit, I just turned 44 a few weeks ago. Great, that's what I have to look forward to this year...
senectus1 · 6h ago
I turn 51 this year.
I am also in denial. its not just a wet place in egypt.
Worth noting the restricted range of the model sample: 76 people ages 14-68.
mellosouls · 13h ago
I've only opened these comments in the hope somebody here will debunk these findings or at least point out they are dubious... :(
snowwrestler · 13h ago
You’re not going to find a reliable “debunking” in HN comments of a scientific paper published in Cell.
But this paper is about analyzing tissue samples from internal organs. Which is generally not what people feel when they “feel” aging. In fact most internal organs can’t be felt at all (no nerve endings), which is how people get surprised with Stage IV cancer diagnoses like pancreatic cancer.
What people generally feel are their muscles and joints are weaker and more painful. Or their eyesight gets worse. Or their digestive system works worse. And the truth is, there is a lot a person can do to adjust or mitigate these things, through simple lifestyle changes like diet and exercise.
So there is your ray of hope: you can do things differently to feel less old. Plenty of examples in the comments here.
That said, you are 100% for sure going to age and die, and there are also things you can do to help accept and prepare for that. Your body will change; your mind can change too.
Lyngbakr · 12h ago
> And the truth is, there is a lot a person can do to adjust or mitigate these things, through simple lifestyle changes like diet and exercise.
This is spot on. I'm 46 and I've been fortunate to be healthy and in decent shape my entire life; however, a check up that was fine but trending in the wrong direction prompted these lifestyle changes.
I lift run or lift daily, have reduced my carb intake significantly, stopped drinking, perform a short yoga routine each morning, and spend some time on the cushion each evening. I only wish I'd done this earlier because I feel so much better than I ever have.
boppo1 · 6h ago
Say more about carb intake and cushion time. What % of calories?
bob_theslob646 · 7h ago
Why did you reduce your carb intake?
antonvs · 13h ago
> In fact most internal organs can’t be felt at all (no nerve endings)
That might be technically true, but I think it's worth noting that many internal organs can produce pain, e.g. kidneys, gallbladder, pancreas, prostate, urethra, stomach, intestines, bladder, heart.
drgo · 2h ago
We get plenty of sensations from our internal organs; just ask anyone who had kidney stones. The sensations may or may not feel like pain, but the internal organs are definitely not silent. The issue of referred pain is mostly related to organs sharing nerve supply at the spinal level, e.g., the liver and the left shoulder.
spwa4 · 12h ago
Only through chemical means which triggers relatively far away neurons to produce pain. This has the consequence that the pain is not felt at it's source.
E.g. a doctor will become very nervous if you report dizziness with a pain moving from your chest into your left shoulder or neck. Such pain originates along the path of the vagus nerve, which includes your lungs and heart (and half the digestive organs, and even the womb, kidneys and gall bladder sometimes). It's very tricky to diagnose, and usually extremely serious (as in ignoring it may cause death).
antonvs · 11h ago
You're correct, but I've personally experienced the kind of referred pain you're describing, for both (at different times) prostate and kidneys, and doctors (and now me!) are pretty able to identify that and treat it.
evo_9 · 13h ago
Agree - I’m 58 and still do the same workout I did in my 30s and 40s including 3 sets of 15 to 20 pull-ups depending on the day. I also still skate (hockey) 2 -3 times a week with a bunch of retired pros (echl, nhl, etc) and typically put up a bunch of points every skate (possibly slightly more assists now but I attribute that more toward enjoying that more these days and not needing to be so flashy)
FpUser · 11h ago
>"3 sets of 15 to 20 pull-ups depending on the day"
It is always 20 for me. 4 sets. I am 64. I used to do 30 when I was a teen but I was much lighter then. also lots of swimming, cycling, hiking canoeing etc. etc
RickJWagner · 7h ago
That’s awesome. I’m 60 and find pull ups are getting harder. I’d be delighted to get 20 in a set.
FpUser · 7h ago
Prolly because I was doing those all my life. Funny that even after more than a year long break at 50+yo due to trauma it only took me a 1.5 month to recover from 5 to back to 20. I guess once you do something long enough body just gets accustomed.
MaxPock · 12h ago
You are reaping the benefits of having an active fitness regime in your 30s .
The average 50 year old who starts exercising today will never get to your fitness level .
anon373839 · 10h ago
I don’t think I’m convinced of that. Most fitness measures saturate as you approach a limit. For example, you can build muscle mass rapidly in the first couple of years but it slows dramatically as you approach your genetic limit. It only takes a few years of consistent training to get to that asymptotic level. So on that measure, you can basically “catch up” to your hypothetical “always trained” self.
While you might not be able to get to the exact same level of fitness as if you had trained for years, I think you can get fairly close. And without a doubt, you can drastically improve from wherever you’re starting.
Fire-Dragon-DoL · 10h ago
Ah, interesting that explains why my gains are way slower this year, which is my third year of being consistently 5 days/week in the gym.
I do have a question: is there benefits in pushing harder if my goal is just health, or should I keep my training as is to limit injuries?
What about the relative fitness of the average 50 year old who starts exercising today vs the one who doesn't when they both turn 65?
QuantumGood · 11h ago
Rowing machines seem to be one of the best approaches to attempt it, though.
Teever · 8h ago
Are you still taking rapamycin and if so what are your observations from taking it for the past few years?
pinkmuffinere · 13h ago
I'm 30, so maybe still too young to have a meaningful perspective, but I take comfort in the fact that I will always get to choose what I _try_ to do. I can't control my body's state, but I can insist on doing exciting / eventful stuff until my body gives in. My friend's grandma (80+ yo) just flew from Bay Area to Paris on her own, to catch up with old friends. I'm pretty sure her doctors would advise her not to do that trip, but she is doing what she wants. I admire her for making the choice to assert her free will, despite the increased risk; I aspire to be like that.
OneMorePerson · 10h ago
It is interesting how the perspective of society can set an expectation of not doing certain things. Of course its personality and body/health dependent but I've seen 95 year olds still doing daily light farm work and totally independent until the day they passed away, or seen 75+ year olds out there on some pretty challenging hiking trails. There's no reason why an average older person can't still do a ton of things.
antonvs · 13h ago
I mean, I'm 61, working at a smallish SaaS company that "just growed" from a startup, having fun. I write code, which is the work I enjoy most, I do architecture and explain to the kids why we're doing what we're doing. My health is fine, but I exercise regularly and eat reasonably healthy.
Re my health, I kinda feel like Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman: "What, me worry?" I worry more about the state of the US than I do about my own health. We're all going to die - I've lived a lot longer than many people. I've outlived Steve Jobs by 5 years at this point. Suck it, Steve! (And Jim Morrison? 34 years. Looooser!)
If you do cardio - even just walking/hiking - and weight training, you're going to be healther than 95% of people, and live longer with better quality of life. It's not that difficult.
As you age, if you're reasonably sane, you start letting go of the idea that you can or should live forever.
kelnos · 10h ago
> As you age, if you're reasonably sane, you start letting go of the idea that you can or should live forever.
I'm (only?) 44, and I still can't quite make peace with the idea of death. I'm not really afraid of it, but I can't stand the idea that I'm going to miss out on so many cool events in the future.
I want to see us colonize our solar system, maybe learn how to travel to other stars. I want to see what a post-scarcity economy might be like, if we as humans aren't too selfish to distribute wealth fairly. I want to see where medical/biological technology takes us, whether that's human cybernetics, whole-brain uploads, immersive virtual worlds, ... hell, the cures for so many diseases could be just around the corner. Man, so many possibilities, and I'm sure I'll be gone (long gone, even) before any of them becomes reality. And it's just a huge bummer to me that I won't get to experience any of it.
But hey, who knows, maybe we'll destroy ourselves via climate change, nuclear war, genocidal AI, or whatever within my lifetime. Or we'll keep sliding toward a dystopian future where 0.0001% of people live like kings and queens, and the rest of us live in miserable conditions, constantly surveilled, oppressed at every turn.
deadbabe · 11h ago
From what I gather, the good news is there is a way, but the bad news is if you haven’t been keeping an active and healthy lifestyle your whole there is nothing you can do, you simply can’t cram decades worth of exercise and nutrition benefits into a few short years all at once and expect to reap benefits.
HPsquared · 11h ago
It's a bit like changing the oil on a car engine. You need to keep up with it. Sure, some neglect is partially recoverable but generally it's "wear and tear". You only have so many telomeres and many processes are irreversible.
squidbeak · 11h ago
> the bad news is if you haven’t been keeping an active and healthy lifestyle your whole there is nothing you can do, you simply can’t cram decades worth of exercise and nutrition benefits into a few short years all at once and expect to reap benefits.
I think this is bullshit. A poor lifestyle over decades will have consequences but there definitely are benefits to be had in taking up exercise and healthier eating whatever your age.
kelnos · 10h ago
Sure, if you're 50 and haven't been taking care of yourself at all, starting right now is better than never starting. But there's likely going to be some ceiling you hit, a ceiling that would have been higher had you been taking better care of yourself your whole life.
> I think this is bullshit.
At the risk of being "that guy": can we keep the temperature down? That kind of reaction feels unnecessary and is the way we get people polarized about things. (Not saying I'm not guilty of this from time to time, but I'm trying to be better!)
chasd00 · 9h ago
What is the “ceiling” though? Sure, you’re not going to walk on to an NFL team but you will def. feel better from a more active lifestyle and healthier diet even at 50+
deadbabe · 10h ago
Sure, and starting to save for retirement at the ripe old age of 60 is better than nothing, but you’re still fucked at that point.
77pt77 · 13h ago
Would it make you feel better if the cutoff was 40?
drgo · 2h ago
I think this study adds to growing evidence that aging doesn’t progress linearly. There’s less evidence supporting a specific inflection point for aging. If aging is like any other biological process, it’s likely to vary a lot between individuals depending on genetic, lifestyle and environmental factors and within an individual between different tissues. Until we develop accurate measures of tissue aging, there’s much we can do other than live as well as we can and as hard as possible.
piombisallow · 15h ago
It's very likely that aging is driven by some kind of scheduled gene program. It makes perfect sense to phase out individuals from a group-level selection point of view.
Qem · 14h ago
Perhaps not a phase-out program, but a progressive shut-down program, as a trade off between peak performance and total lifespan, where the characteristic patterns of ageing is what allowed humans to live much longer than other animals around the same size. Similar to the idea in this comic: https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/the-suit
By this logic, as a hedge against sudden death around ~50, the human body start cranking down the output of its diverse subsystems by then, to maximize operacional life, just like NASA engineers from time to time turn off instruments in the voyager to keep it operational against the odds. This is what we call ageing.
pinkmuffinere · 13h ago
I think this argument only makes sense on the surface level. If it was the case that humans hit some hard limit to growth (perhaps running out of 'room' to grow, or losing the ability to process new energy, etc), then I think it could make sense to do this sort of 'graceful decommissioning' behavior, which we'd come to know as aging. But is there a hard limit we hit, aside from the aging process itself? None is obvious to me.
What limitation is our body pushing off by 'choosing' to age, instead of continuing as normal?
Edit: Regardless of the validity of the argument, I loved that comic, thanks for sharing.
PaulHoule · 13h ago
It's commonly thought that if your cells kept dividing the way that they do when you're young and they accumulated genetic damages you'd get cancer more often.
Teever · 8h ago
That isn't a satisfying answer because humans can obviously generate germline cells that don't suffer from this issue.
So the question becomes why can't somatic cells repair themselves to be as healthy as germline cells?
AFAIK most cells can only divide a limited number of times, because the dna gets shorter with every copy. There is a finite bit of padding at the end (that you're born with) and once that's used up through too many copies, the cell can no longer divide (supposedly).
journal · 10h ago
but we can just make another human with new cell timespans? something doesn't add up. also, men without kids age slower but die early while men with kids age faster and live longer.
asdfasdf1 · 7h ago
telomeres
rootingforroots · 13h ago
Left me shivering.
NoOn3 · 15h ago
Maybe. But why in this case do we not see bugs and failures in this program, i.e. no one lived 5 times more than the average or did not live forever at all, for example? I'm not making a statement, just a guess.
hyperman1 · 15h ago
You could say this woman is immortal. Or at least her cancer is.
I'm not a biologist. But it seems to me that this is at the level of one cell. Yes, a cell can become immortal, but cells live much less than a whole person. Over the course of a person's life, many many cells change. And the program for human life, rather than individual cells, is perceived differently.
csallen · 14h ago
Lots of models could explain this. For example, let's say it's not just one program, but thousand of programs running in your body, trying to get you to age or die. The chances that all of them bug out would be astronomically low.
dotancohen · 3h ago
But there have been astronomically high qualities of humans produced, none of which have shown this phenomenon.
tgv · 15h ago
Because the whole system is quite resilient and self-repairing, and probably requires a great deal of consistency between the various genes? Aging is quite fundamental to life, and a "bug" in that area would almost certainly cause severe problems in other areas, probably death. Cancer might be an example. And systems of many components tend to narrow the standard deviation of the composite.
But that's just guessing. The article might not even have found something profound, but a life-style effect. On the one hand, we're living long (historically speaking), on the other hand, we have unnatural habits.
rowanG077 · 10h ago
aging doesn't seem fundamental to life to me. There is known complex life that doesn't age. I expect age is a huge driver of evolution in many cases so it makes sense that most life has it.
0xcafefood · 13h ago
If you want to see that idea explored in art, I highly recommend the movie "The Man From Earth."
kkoncevicius · 14h ago
Such arguments go both ways. For example, if aging is accumulation of damage and not programmed, then why don't we see lucky people who live 5 times longer. Also how come the patterns of aging are so similar between individuals and even between different species (wrinkly skin, grey hair, fragile bones).
blargey · 13h ago
How do you propose someone would "luck out of" the wear and tear your body undergoes just to function? It's accumulation of damage to the very systems that work to prevent and repair damage, leading all organs to accumulate the damage they would have hidden by fast repair in "youth". It's unavoidable and accelerating by definition, and that reflects what we observe in aging.
The "patterns of aging" you describe are, again, definitionally just what happens when the same organs built and functioning the same way across species undergo their respective failure modes. It makes more sense for all skins to exhibit the same signs of aging if they're all just wearing out the way "skin" does, rather than being attacked by species-specific "age limiter" processes artificially enforcing lifespan limits. Why would something like skin even need to decay at all, when it's basically unrelated to aging-related death?
abeppu · 14h ago
But aren't there a lot of processes that could drive accumulated damage that are hard to avoid (so you can't realistically get lucky)?
E.g. if metabolic processes produce harmful products in low quantities that build up ... How would you possibly survive many decades without doing at least a certain amount of metabolizing food etc?
crinkly · 12h ago
Think this is a statistical thing. Your body is made of lots of cells. But one exceptional one wouldn’t outlive the whole system’s failure. You’d need a hell of a lot of cells to survive that long.
piombisallow · 15h ago
Height is controlled by genes too and you don't get people shorter than 0.5 m or taller than 3 m
Because the odds of something 5x the average that's more or less normally distributed are really, really low.
It's the same as how although you can occasionally get a "natural" person over seven feet tall, it's very rare. Most really tall people have gigantism or some other form of pituitary abnormality, and I believe every recorded person to break eight feet has had such an abnormality.
It's like asking why we've never had someone with 500 IQ. There's a hard limit where anyone with enough of a mutation to enable that would probably also not survive long at all. And indeed with the height thing we see a lot of super-tall people dying younger due to cardiovascular strain and other issues. You get the picture.
elchananHaas · 15h ago
It's because age isn't normally distributed. The annual odds of dying go up by a factor of 2 every 8 years. This gives tighter bounds on age than a normal distribution would give.
oneshtein · 14h ago
Because those will need 5x more time to become adults.
kkoncevicius · 15h ago
This would be an optimistic scenario and introduce a possibility for the "scheduled gene program" to be controlled or turned off. The current thinking in the field seems to favour the idea that aging is a complex combination of programmed changes, stochastic damage, as well as various adaptations to help cope with the damage.
piombisallow · 14h ago
Menopause is also an obvious planned partial shutdown (vs males who can reproduce when they're 80) and we're no closer to "curing" it, turning it off.
rowanG077 · 10h ago
I don't think there is much interest in stopping menopause. So you are right we can't cure it. But I don't think that's a good indication.
munchler · 15h ago
Is there convincing evidence for group-level selection in evolution at all? I read enough Dawkins back in the day to be skeptical of such claims.
notahacker · 13h ago
Depends what you mean by "group-level". A large part of Dawkins was pointing out that many of your individual genes had a very large stake in wanting your nieces and nephews to survive, as there was a high probability those genes were also present in the niece and nephew.
Which is actually a pretty good reason for something like menopause to get programmed in. A proto-human capable of getting pregnant into her 60s would produce more offspring, but if accumulated damage meant they (and she) rarely survived the pregnancy, that could be less beneficial to the family group (including numerous relatives other than direct descendants) on average than having her switch the capability off and live another generation (but not many more generations, because then there's a lot of infertile people competing for food, and your tribe only needs so much accumulated wisdom)
mewpmewp2 · 15h ago
Intuitively it seems like a logical selection to happen though. One of the reasons why all of the hierarchies have evolved, why some are leaders, why some are inventor minded, and why most people are like most people.
piombisallow · 14h ago
Yes, it's widely accepted that you have variable proportions of individual vs group level selection depending on circumstances.
grishka · 11h ago
My hypothesis is that it's just the continuation of the development program that starts with conception. It just turns self-destructive at some point, because natural selection didn't do anything about that because when humans were living in caves, no one lived to these kinds of ages anyway.
So, to rejuvenate the body, you would have to find where the current state of that program is stored, and overwrite it to a younger one, as if using a debugger. So far there are two promising developments about that: Michael Levin's research about bioelectricity, and Harold Katcher's research about exosomes (he seems to have abandoned it, but other people are picking up).
petters · 13h ago
I don't think it makes perfect sense. For one, group selection isn't widely accepted by evolutionists.
piombisallow · 12h ago
Yes it is: "Group selection, which was once widely rejected as a significant evolutionary force, is now accepted by all who seriously study the subject." (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3110649/)
jebarker · 14h ago
Life expectancy much longer than 40 is a modern thing for humans though. So where would the over 40s schedule have come from? Or do you mean the schedule basically says: once you hit 50 start falling apart?
adamors · 14h ago
No, it’s not a modern thing, you’re conflating average life expectancy at birth with how long people lived in general.
> Back in 1994 a study looked at every man entered into the Oxford Classical Dictionary who lived in ancient Greece or Rome. Their ages of death were compared to men listed in the more recent Chambers Biographical Dictionary.
Of 397 ancients in total, 99 died violently by murder, suicide or in battle. Of the remaining 298, those born before 100BC lived to a median age of 72 years. Those born after 100BC lived to a median age of 66. (The authors speculate that the prevalence of dangerous lead plumbing may have led to this apparent shortening of life).
Wouldn't those still be modern humans? Have we undergone significant evolution since then? I would think the earliest relevant comparison would be much earlier.
barrkel · 14h ago
Life expectancy in the past was heavily depressed by high child and maternal mortality. For those who survived into adulthood (say, 20), dying in one's 30s or 40s was not the norm. Most lived into at least their 50s, and many reached their 60s or beyond. Hard labor and disease made very old age rarer than today, but old age itself is not a modern phenomenon. Skeletal remains and records confirm its presence throughout history.
thfuran · 12h ago
Not even 20s. Childhood mortality by five was once near 50%
kkoncevicius · 14h ago
The average life expectancy was low because of more deaths during childhood and wars. But the natural lifespan was more or less the same as it is today. For example, take a look at famous philosophers or politicians from Ancient Greece. Majority of them lived to about 70-80 years of age.
jebarker · 14h ago
Good point. I realize that I was thinking of average life expectancy and that was biased by high child mortality until recently
abeppu · 14h ago
People keep repeating this, but my understanding is that low overall life expectancies historically were substantially about high infant mortality. If you made it out of childhood, your chances of living to be "old" were decent. It's not that the program used to say to start decaying at 40, it's that other exogenous forces would stop a lot of people from getting to that part of the program.
dyauspitr · 14h ago
Life expectancy was heavily skewed by under 5 mortality rate. There were a lot of people living to old age.
beej71 · 16h ago
This certainly matches my personal anecdata. :(
wiz21c · 16h ago
it's worse than that, I can feel it :-) I'll be old when I'll be old. Not before ! :-)
wonderwonder · 15h ago
I felt incredibly old from ~36 - 42.
Then I started seriously working out, took control of my diet (it had very much always controlled me) and started aggressively pursuing a "better living through chemistry" approach to life.
I feel 25 years younger now. My BP and cholesterol are under control and I roll out of bed actually feeling rested (probably due to not snoring anymore).
SoftTalker · 15h ago
I started weight training at about age 54. I had never done any form of regular exercise in my life. Attempts here and there, but nothing ever stuck for very long. I am stronger now than I ever have been.
YZF · 14h ago
Same here. Started lifting weights around the same age. I am stronger than I have ever been.
I also run and so far I am able to keep improving my 10K results over the last decade. Probably these aren't my best ever but there is no barrier that I can feel other than putting in the training volume.
wonderwonder · 14h ago
Its incredible isn't it? There is almost no point at which one just has to give up and say "Well I guess this is my life now". The body always responds positively to exercise and weight lifting.
01100011 · 14h ago
I weight trained until having a toddler and a new house at 50. 3 months later and I get up from a chair like I'm 75 and all my joints hurt.
jimbokun · 14h ago
Well start weight training again!
Your toddler needs healthy parents.
wonderwonder · 10h ago
Happened to me too. First 10 years I was a wreck.
Would recommend getting back on the horse asap, its a long way back if you leave it for to long.
embwbam · 15h ago
I’ve been athletic most of my life. At 42 I feel much older than at 32. Chronic injuries add up! Be careful out there everybody
zemvpferreira · 15h ago
Have you happened upon Keith Barr’s work on tendon repair? Up to a few years ago tendon injuries were thought to be mostly unfixable (you could strengthen what was left of an injured tendon at best) but Barr’s work is proving otherwise. And using a very low risk isometric exercise protocol.
It won’t make you feel 32 again but it might help you get rid of a lot of lingering aches and pains.
wonderwonder · 14h ago
I combined vitamin C with a daily dose of collagen and it did wonders for my tendons when combined with stretching exercises. My Achilles went from constant pain and at least a couple hours every morning of hobble walking to no pain and just feeling like normal. The doctor recommended surgery and even then made no promises. I still can't run for any real distance but the quality of life difference of just being able to walk without pain and do heavy calf lifts in the gym is immense.
Note: I also aggressively supplemented with BPC-157, GHK-cu and TB-500 to get to where I am.
zemvpferreira · 14h ago
How good! Have you tried isometrics at ~30-50% of maximum exhertion instead of stretching? Seems to be about the right dose to promote tendon repair. 3 months to a year will do ya.
(Full protocol if you haven’t seen it is a ~30 second isometric repeated 4 to 5 times, twice per day)
Edit: I’ve not seen any other treatment published w/ peer review etc etc that demonstrates actual tendon repair. If anyone has seen others I’d love to read through the literature.
contingencies · 13h ago
Glad you found some relief. But take note everyone! Running is probably not that good for you if you plan to live longer than average-lifespan-in-the-past! Cycling, swimming, walking are all low on joint damage. Running isn't.
crb3 · 9h ago
That's Keith Baar; I looked it up.
Keith Barr focused on musical technology at MXR, Alesis and eventually Spin Semiconductor. His legacy is MXR pedal effects like the Phase-90, the MidiVerb digital reverb series and the Spin FV-1 digital reverb chip.
brandall10 · 14h ago
Had a series of injuries from about 25-35, then changed things up due to concerns about aging. Lighter weights, actually following proper training plans/shoes for running, etc. No injuries since and I'm about to hit 50. Aside from raw strength, don't think I feel any different now than at my athletic peak in my early 20s.
Having lived in San Diego most of my life, I've routinely met people in their 60s doing Ironmans. When you're around that enough, it's clear the difference is training smart than simply training hard.
_DeadFred_ · 13h ago
The loss of twitch/fast muscle makes it feel much different for me. Even if I work out and have strength, it's not to same kind of strength I had at 30 even if it's the same/higher weight amounts.
wrs · 12h ago
Same here, though I think I started a bit younger. Now 58 and in the best shape of my life! The trainer who set up my program asked what my fitness goals were, and I said “I just want to be able to stand up from a chair when I’m 90”. He said, “we can do that”.
_DeadFred_ · 13h ago
If you don't already make sure to include optimizing for twitch/fast muscle development. I've noticed it's the hardest loss to overcome for me in my 50s.
SoftTalker · 5h ago
I have thought about adding power cleans. I started with Starting Strength so squats, bench, deadlift, and still mainly do those lifts, press, and some other accessory lifts. All barbell or dumbbell. Never added the power cleans though.
bilsbie · 13h ago
I had a similar experience. It really felt like my body became way more sensitive to my diet in my 40s.
I feel great when I eat clean.
worldsayshi · 13h ago
I think there's a bunch of anecdata telling that once you start going with a healthier diet you tend to react strongly to eating less healthy food or alcohol.
munksbeer · 13h ago
How did you get the snoring under control?
wonderwonder · 13h ago
I lost 30lbs. Gone, I sleep like a baby and more importantly so does my wife
elcritch · 9h ago
Thanks, it’s good to hear that losing weight helped so much.
Mistletoe · 13h ago
Can you give more details about what you did?
wonderwonder · 13h ago
First thing I did was just get out of the house and go to the gym. I work remotely, it became a trap where I spent all my free time sitting in front of the computer. Prioritizing at least an hour a day 5x a week was huge. I just made the time.
I did that for about 2 years with good results. I was 240lbs. I looked big at 6’1 but had lots of fat. I snored all night long, affecting my wife’s sleep as well. About 1 year in I got on trt. Huge changes as far as energy levels, sex drive and confidence. Numbers soared at the gym but I was still 240lbs. Still stress eating after 8pm, easily 1200 calories in sugar a night.
In January I got on Glp-1 and am now 209lbs at 46 years old with a 405lb bench. I just stopped eating after 6pm on it. Weight came pouring off. I never experienced any of the side effects people mention. I can eat a whole large pizza if I want without issues, i just don’t.
I’ve since upped the testosterone im on so one can fairly say im on steroids (i am) plus I am an aggressive user of various peptides. I get my blood work done at regular intervals and feel good.
I just decided to take control of my body and do what works for me and not worry about what the medical establishment tells me to do but to do it with proper insight via regular blood tests.
Just got back from a family vacation and after the pool one day my wife asked if I knew that everyone stared at me when I walk past. Felt good. Funny thing is that at 6’1, 209lbs im not that big, im just lean whereas most people are overweight.
I don’t recommend my regime to anyone i just recommend throwing away preconceived notions of what you can and shouldn’t do and to get after being the you that you are proud of.
potamic · 1h ago
How long do you intend to be on trt? I hear the body returns back to its previous low levels on stopping.
jgalt212 · 15h ago
All the recent pop sci I've read is the accelerated aging periods in one's life during our 40s and 60s.
Mine started late-thirties. Stomach doesn't handle spices as it used to. Any bravery at dinner time means poor sleep and tiredness for a day or two. Bumps/strained things take days to stop hurting.
JKCalhoun · 11h ago
No harm in adding probiotics to your daily diet. Kefir, Kombucha, Kimchi are a few.
exe34 · 3h ago
Will look into that thanks!
ck2 · 15h ago
Wait until you get long-covid, it really stomps on the aging accelerator
msie · 17h ago
Ugh, I can feel it!
slantaclaus · 15h ago
*aging
exegete · 12h ago
“Ageing” is in the original title and is also correct.
I was in fairly good shape and feel like, despite some grays and some crows feet, my body was relatively the same from my early 20s to my early 40s. 44 really did hit me like a ton of bricks though - working out got considerably harder, and my face started to show more permanent signs of aging, like loss of facial fat and neck banding. Can't say I was thrilled to later discover I was "right on schedule".
I feel validated by this study.
More seriously could be signs of depression. I felt way worse when I was depressed. Also could be something like chronic fatigue syndrome too.
P.S. get your vitamin-d levels checked. It’s a super common deficiency.
I think I've always been low-key depressed but there was always this ray of hope. But now it's dawning upon me "this is it, that's life, take it or leave it" and that's just terrifying and demotivating. I feel like I have to accept that things I wanted so bad just won't happen. And with each passing day my exhaustion keeps getting worse so I feel like the number of things that bring me joy keeps getting smaller.
How's your sleep? Do you avoid eating within a couple hours of bedtime? Are you waking up to pee in the night?
Unless it’s gout.
I had a period when I'd drink a litre of vodka every weekend, but now it's like "one beer to chill after work". Weed is my vice though, I'm stoned every weekend. I try to cut though because the amounts I used to consume now make me tired, so I'm aiming for smaller doses.
I try to eliminate caffeine, but I keep learning about new sources of it. It's literally today that I learned just how much caffeine cola has.
Sugar is my vice definitely. I cycle every day, so I burn it. When I don't cycle I hit the gym.
Sleep... it happens often that I schedule time to sleep, I put away my phone, but then I just don't fall asleep, I just lie there awkwardly in bed. Or I wake up and then can't go back to sleep. I feel like the quality of my sleep isn't there really, which is why I decided to cut caffeine in the first place. But then I sometimes have a streak where I can sleep and function well. One thing is that I tend to get sleepy in the afternoon. If I go to bed and manage to get one full cycle of sleep, I won't feel completely miserable. I don't have big meals before bedtime but often I keep snacking on something.
Whether I wake up to pee depends on how much liquid I drink before. I'd say 50/50.
Ramen, bacon, beer, cola, weed...
Maybe cut back or eliminate those for a few weeks and see how you feel? It's obviously way easier said than done but I can almost guarantee that cleaner living will bring back some of the lost energy, and once you've got more energy it gets a lot easier to get (and stay) on track again.
Best of luck.
I am also in denial. its not just a wet place in egypt.
Study: https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00749-4
But this paper is about analyzing tissue samples from internal organs. Which is generally not what people feel when they “feel” aging. In fact most internal organs can’t be felt at all (no nerve endings), which is how people get surprised with Stage IV cancer diagnoses like pancreatic cancer.
What people generally feel are their muscles and joints are weaker and more painful. Or their eyesight gets worse. Or their digestive system works worse. And the truth is, there is a lot a person can do to adjust or mitigate these things, through simple lifestyle changes like diet and exercise.
So there is your ray of hope: you can do things differently to feel less old. Plenty of examples in the comments here.
That said, you are 100% for sure going to age and die, and there are also things you can do to help accept and prepare for that. Your body will change; your mind can change too.
I lift run or lift daily, have reduced my carb intake significantly, stopped drinking, perform a short yoga routine each morning, and spend some time on the cushion each evening. I only wish I'd done this earlier because I feel so much better than I ever have.
That might be technically true, but I think it's worth noting that many internal organs can produce pain, e.g. kidneys, gallbladder, pancreas, prostate, urethra, stomach, intestines, bladder, heart.
E.g. a doctor will become very nervous if you report dizziness with a pain moving from your chest into your left shoulder or neck. Such pain originates along the path of the vagus nerve, which includes your lungs and heart (and half the digestive organs, and even the womb, kidneys and gall bladder sometimes). It's very tricky to diagnose, and usually extremely serious (as in ignoring it may cause death).
It is always 20 for me. 4 sets. I am 64. I used to do 30 when I was a teen but I was much lighter then. also lots of swimming, cycling, hiking canoeing etc. etc
While you might not be able to get to the exact same level of fitness as if you had trained for years, I think you can get fairly close. And without a doubt, you can drastically improve from wherever you’re starting.
I do have a question: is there benefits in pushing harder if my goal is just health, or should I keep my training as is to limit injuries?
I'm 36, so not related to the article yet.
Re my health, I kinda feel like Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman: "What, me worry?" I worry more about the state of the US than I do about my own health. We're all going to die - I've lived a lot longer than many people. I've outlived Steve Jobs by 5 years at this point. Suck it, Steve! (And Jim Morrison? 34 years. Looooser!)
If you do cardio - even just walking/hiking - and weight training, you're going to be healther than 95% of people, and live longer with better quality of life. It's not that difficult.
As you age, if you're reasonably sane, you start letting go of the idea that you can or should live forever.
I'm (only?) 44, and I still can't quite make peace with the idea of death. I'm not really afraid of it, but I can't stand the idea that I'm going to miss out on so many cool events in the future.
I want to see us colonize our solar system, maybe learn how to travel to other stars. I want to see what a post-scarcity economy might be like, if we as humans aren't too selfish to distribute wealth fairly. I want to see where medical/biological technology takes us, whether that's human cybernetics, whole-brain uploads, immersive virtual worlds, ... hell, the cures for so many diseases could be just around the corner. Man, so many possibilities, and I'm sure I'll be gone (long gone, even) before any of them becomes reality. And it's just a huge bummer to me that I won't get to experience any of it.
But hey, who knows, maybe we'll destroy ourselves via climate change, nuclear war, genocidal AI, or whatever within my lifetime. Or we'll keep sliding toward a dystopian future where 0.0001% of people live like kings and queens, and the rest of us live in miserable conditions, constantly surveilled, oppressed at every turn.
I think this is bullshit. A poor lifestyle over decades will have consequences but there definitely are benefits to be had in taking up exercise and healthier eating whatever your age.
> I think this is bullshit.
At the risk of being "that guy": can we keep the temperature down? That kind of reaction feels unnecessary and is the way we get people polarized about things. (Not saying I'm not guilty of this from time to time, but I'm trying to be better!)
By this logic, as a hedge against sudden death around ~50, the human body start cranking down the output of its diverse subsystems by then, to maximize operacional life, just like NASA engineers from time to time turn off instruments in the voyager to keep it operational against the odds. This is what we call ageing.
What limitation is our body pushing off by 'choosing' to age, instead of continuing as normal?
Edit: Regardless of the validity of the argument, I loved that comic, thanks for sharing.
So the question becomes why can't somatic cells repair themselves to be as healthy as germline cells?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5586376/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
But that's just guessing. The article might not even have found something profound, but a life-style effect. On the one hand, we're living long (historically speaking), on the other hand, we have unnatural habits.
The "patterns of aging" you describe are, again, definitionally just what happens when the same organs built and functioning the same way across species undergo their respective failure modes. It makes more sense for all skins to exhibit the same signs of aging if they're all just wearing out the way "skin" does, rather than being attacked by species-specific "age limiter" processes artificially enforcing lifespan limits. Why would something like skin even need to decay at all, when it's basically unrelated to aging-related death?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_people
And another was 76cm high:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_dwarfism
It's the same as how although you can occasionally get a "natural" person over seven feet tall, it's very rare. Most really tall people have gigantism or some other form of pituitary abnormality, and I believe every recorded person to break eight feet has had such an abnormality.
It's like asking why we've never had someone with 500 IQ. There's a hard limit where anyone with enough of a mutation to enable that would probably also not survive long at all. And indeed with the height thing we see a lot of super-tall people dying younger due to cardiovascular strain and other issues. You get the picture.
Which is actually a pretty good reason for something like menopause to get programmed in. A proto-human capable of getting pregnant into her 60s would produce more offspring, but if accumulated damage meant they (and she) rarely survived the pregnancy, that could be less beneficial to the family group (including numerous relatives other than direct descendants) on average than having her switch the capability off and live another generation (but not many more generations, because then there's a lot of infertile people competing for food, and your tribe only needs so much accumulated wisdom)
So, to rejuvenate the body, you would have to find where the current state of that program is stored, and overwrite it to a younger one, as if using a debugger. So far there are two promising developments about that: Michael Levin's research about bioelectricity, and Harold Katcher's research about exosomes (he seems to have abandoned it, but other people are picking up).
> Back in 1994 a study looked at every man entered into the Oxford Classical Dictionary who lived in ancient Greece or Rome. Their ages of death were compared to men listed in the more recent Chambers Biographical Dictionary. Of 397 ancients in total, 99 died violently by murder, suicide or in battle. Of the remaining 298, those born before 100BC lived to a median age of 72 years. Those born after 100BC lived to a median age of 66. (The authors speculate that the prevalence of dangerous lead plumbing may have led to this apparent shortening of life).
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
Just one source
I feel 25 years younger now. My BP and cholesterol are under control and I roll out of bed actually feeling rested (probably due to not snoring anymore).
I also run and so far I am able to keep improving my 10K results over the last decade. Probably these aren't my best ever but there is no barrier that I can feel other than putting in the training volume.
Your toddler needs healthy parents.
It won’t make you feel 32 again but it might help you get rid of a lot of lingering aches and pains.
Note: I also aggressively supplemented with BPC-157, GHK-cu and TB-500 to get to where I am.
(Full protocol if you haven’t seen it is a ~30 second isometric repeated 4 to 5 times, twice per day)
Edit: I’ve not seen any other treatment published w/ peer review etc etc that demonstrates actual tendon repair. If anyone has seen others I’d love to read through the literature.
Keith Barr focused on musical technology at MXR, Alesis and eventually Spin Semiconductor. His legacy is MXR pedal effects like the Phase-90, the MidiVerb digital reverb series and the Spin FV-1 digital reverb chip.
Having lived in San Diego most of my life, I've routinely met people in their 60s doing Ironmans. When you're around that enough, it's clear the difference is training smart than simply training hard.
I feel great when I eat clean.
I did that for about 2 years with good results. I was 240lbs. I looked big at 6’1 but had lots of fat. I snored all night long, affecting my wife’s sleep as well. About 1 year in I got on trt. Huge changes as far as energy levels, sex drive and confidence. Numbers soared at the gym but I was still 240lbs. Still stress eating after 8pm, easily 1200 calories in sugar a night.
In January I got on Glp-1 and am now 209lbs at 46 years old with a 405lb bench. I just stopped eating after 6pm on it. Weight came pouring off. I never experienced any of the side effects people mention. I can eat a whole large pizza if I want without issues, i just don’t.
I’ve since upped the testosterone im on so one can fairly say im on steroids (i am) plus I am an aggressive user of various peptides. I get my blood work done at regular intervals and feel good.
I just decided to take control of my body and do what works for me and not worry about what the medical establishment tells me to do but to do it with proper insight via regular blood tests.
Just got back from a family vacation and after the pool one day my wife asked if I knew that everyone stared at me when I walk past. Felt good. Funny thing is that at 6’1, 209lbs im not that big, im just lean whereas most people are overweight.
I don’t recommend my regime to anyone i just recommend throwing away preconceived notions of what you can and shouldn’t do and to get after being the you that you are proud of.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/08/massive-biomo...