6 ideas I’m applying.

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Overview 

1. Public Commitment I’m Making: 30 Days Without Caffeine

2. Website I’m Loving: Boston Heart

3. Exercise I’m Doing 2-3x Per Week: Make your legs light

4. Contrast Therapy I’m Using: Heat + Cold + Dark

5. Practice I’m Deploying: Using novelty to slow down

6. Quote I’m Rereading: The real value of money

Let’s dive in.

Public Commitment I’m Making: 30 Days Without Caffeine

On quarterly calls with one of my Founding Members and now friend, we often talk about best practices to enforce consistency.

One of which is social stakes.

So I’m committing in front of 1,300+ of you, my amazing readers, that I will go 30 days without caffeine this year.

The details…

Why: I started drinking coffee when I was 16 or so. I don’t know what it feels like to be a functioning adult without having caffeine in my system. I want to rediscover my baseline.

When: In May or June depending on the weather. I enjoy making myself suffer but I’m no masochist. Cutting coffee when I can’t get outside in the warm weather would make this harder than it needs to be. An excuse to delay? Maybe.

How: The Easy Way to Quit Caffeine: Live a healthier, happier life by Allen Carr. This book followed Allen’s wildly successful The Easy Way to Stop Smoking and uses the same approach. From the reviews I’ve heard, both books are extremely effective.

My white whale is to convince my Dad to follow suit.

My brother, Tommy Dixon, just laughed when I told him this ambition if that tells you anything about my family’s heroin-like addiction to black French Press coffee.

If you want to join me, leave a comment on this post and let me know. I can set up a group chat for bitching and moaning accountability and support.

Leave a comment

Also, to my dear pal C.R. who tells me caffeine is a dependency, why don’t you join me and try starting every day without breakfast and a shower?

Website I’m Loving: Boston Heart

Last week I discovered the Boston Heart website.

The “Explore This Test” function is extremely useful. You can search for nearly any test ranging from Lipids, Metabolics, Kidney, Thyroid, and many more.

For each test, they provide a breakdown of… 

• Test Details: What the test is and how it’s performed. 

• Lab Values: How to interpret your results.

• Clinical Significance: What your test results mean based on studies.

• Treatment Options: Lifestyle changes or drugs to discuss with your doctor.

Alternative website link: https://bostonheartdiagnostics.com

A few caveats:

#1 It’s a useful starting place but not necessarily all-encompassing. Seek other resources and do external research.

#2 Not all listed reference ranges are necessarily “optimal.” Some practitioners are more aggressive than others so the optimal level of a biomarker depends on the source. You also have to ask what is being optimized for. Are they optimizing for low risk over the next 5 to 10 years? Or over the next 30, 40, or 50? 

The most aggressive practitioner that I’m aware of is Peter Attia. While Boston Heart considers an apoB of less than 0.6 mmol/L optimal for people without cardiovascular disease (CVD), Attia suggests getting apoB as low as possible as early as possible, aiming for 0.3 mmol/L.

For more Peter Attia recommendations, paid subscribers can download my 67 pages of Outlive book notes. I boiled his 500-page book down to just the actionable insights. All bullet points. With a clickable table of contents to easily navigate. 

Free subscribers can unlock it by upgrading to paid.

Exercise I’m Doing 2-3x per Week: Make your legs light

Two to three times per week after my runs, I do L-Sit Leg Lifts.

Why: They strengthen many muscles at once — abs, obliques, hip flexors, quads, triceps, shoulders, pecs, and lats — one of which is extremely overlooked, undertrained, and very important:

The hip flexors.

Hip flexors stabilize your core when lifting, pushing, and pulling. They draw the knees toward the chest (important for runners and cyclers), help maintain good posture and core stability, and training them reverses the negative effects of sitting. Strong hip flexors can also help you catch yourself before falling. Remember, falling is the #1 cause of accident-related death in those 65+.

How: The L-sit hold, as you can see me demonstrating below, requires you to lift your legs in the air and suspend your body above the ground. In my experience, the factor that limits people from being able to do this is weak hip flexors. To strengthen your hip flexors, start with L-Sit Leg Lifts.

L-Sit Leg Lifts

Here’s the step-by-step breakdown plus a three-frame image and video for visual support: