It’s easy to say that we must push ourselves if we want to achieve worthwhile things—and it’s also easy to push ourselves into an early grave by overreaching. So, how to do the former, without doing the latter?

That’s what this book’s about. The author, speaking from a background in the science of sports psychology, applies his accumulated knowledge and understanding to the more general problems of life.

Most of us are, after all, not sportspeople or if we are, not serious ones. Those few who are, will get benefit from this book too! But it’s mostly aimed at the rest of us who are trying to work out whether/when we should scale up, scale back, change track, or double down:

• How much can we really achieve in our career?
• How about in retirement?
• Do we ever really get too old for athletic feats, or should we keep pressing on?

Magness brings philosophy and psychological science together, to help us sort our way through.

Nor is this just a pep talk—there’s readily applicable, practical, real-world advice here, things to enable us to do our (real!) best without getting overwhelmed.

The style is pop-science, very easy-reading, and clear and comprehensible throughout—without succumbing to undue padding either.

Bottom line: this is a very pleasant read, that promises to make life more meaningful and manageable at the same time. Highly recommendable!

Click here to check out Do Hard Things, and get the most out of life!

We’ve previously reviewed Dr. Longo’s “The Longevity Diet”, and whereas that one was about eating, this one is (superficially, at least) about not eating. Nor is this any kind of dissonance, because, in fact, it’s important to do both!

That said, he discusses not just fasting per se, but also the use of a personalized fast-mimicking diet, to accomplish the same goal of not overloading the metabolism—as overloading the metabolism results in metabolic disease, and cancer is, ultimately, a metabolic disease of immune dysfunction with genetic disorder*—which makes for quite a deadly trifecta.

*not in the sense of “hereditary”, though certainly genes can influence cancer risk, but rather, in the sense of “your gene-copying process becomes disordered”.

The first three chapters (after the introduction, which we’ll comment on shortly) are devoted to explaining the principles at hand:

1. Fasting cancer while feeding patients
2. Genes, aging, and cancer
3. Fasting, nutrition, and physical activity in cancer prevention

In those chapters, he details a lot of the science for exactly how and why it is possible to “feed the patient and starve the cancer” at the same time.

After that, the rest of the book—another nine chapters, not counting appendices etc—are given over to fasting and nutrition in the context of nine main types of cancer, one chapter per type. These are not hyperspecific, though, and are rather categorizations, such as “blood cancers”, and “gynecological cancers” and so forth. It’s comprehensive, and while it could be argued that it may mean chapters feel irrelevant to some people (à la “I have never smoked and have no pressing concern about my lung cancer risk” etc), the reality is that it’s good to know how to avoid them all, because if nothing else, it’d be super embarrassing to get a cancer you “thought you couldn’t get”. So, it’s honestly worth the time to read each chapter.

In the category of criticism, he did open the introduction with a handful of anecdotes to defend the consumption of (well-established group 1 carcinogens) red meat and alcohol as “secondary concerns that might not be such a big deal”, even discussing how surprised his colleagues in the field are that he has this view. Suffice it to say, it’s contrary to the overwhelming body of evidence, and reads suspiciously like a man who simply doesn’t want to give up his steak and wine despite his own longevity diet forswearing them.

The style is self-indulgently autobiographical and very complimentary, and (in this reviewer’s opinion) it can be tedious to wade through that to get to the science, but at the end of the day, his self-accolades might be needless fluff, but they don’t actually remove anything from the science in question.

Bottom line: as you can see, there are good and bad things to say about this book, but the information contained in the good makes it well worth reading through the stylistically questionable to get it.

Click here to check out Fasting Cancer, and starve cancer cells while nourishing your healthy ones!