A longevity researcher says everyone’s too obsessed with living forever. Here are his 2 anti-aging habits instead.

• Dr. Steven Austad is the scientific director of the American Federation for Aging Research.
• Austad believes too many people are obsessed with longevity, focusing on dubious trends.
• Austad follows 2 habits for his health: heavy exercise and time-restricted eating.

Dr. Steven Austad, the scientific director of a nonprofit researching healthy aging, never fretted too deeply about his own longevity.

“I used to train lions for a living,” Austad told Business Insider. “It was not something that you would do if you were thinking about living a long time.”

Prior to his career at the American Federation for Aging Research, Austad was a biologist who focused on field work in places like Venezuela and East Africa. He became interested in aging research not because he wanted to crack the code to living forever, but to learn why healthy cells age at all. When he entered the field, he said many researchers had the same question, and were not necessarily motivated by extending their own lifespans.

Things have changed since, as more people pursue anti-aging trends — often, Austad said, with dubious science backing the claims. “I’m not one of those people who spends an hour a day in a hyperbaric chamber or gets infusions of some weird protein-vitamin cocktail,” he said. “But in fact, I’m quite healthy, despite the years I spent in the field, and I had malaria.”

For example, Austad doesn’t take supplements, citing a lack of strong-enough evidence of their guaranteed longevity benefits, and he enjoys a glass of wine here and there. “If you spend all your time thinking about how long you’re going to live, you kind of forget to live,” he said.

Austad shared a few simple longevity habits he’s followed for years, which he said are both science-backed and “basically the things that my mother probably told me.”

He exhausts himself at the gym

When Austad was a field biologist, he traveled to Papua New Guinea. Upon landing, his group had to climb to the top of a mountain. The village headman gave Austad’s bag to his 12-year-old daughter to carry, because Austad would “slow them down too much.” Offended at first, Austad was grateful to be baggage-free an hour later. He was also stunned by the girl’s level of fitness.

“To me, that was a window into what our bodies evolved to be like,” he said. The villagers never had osteoporosis or other conditions caused by sedentary lifestyles.

It’s a huge reason he prioritizes serious exercise almost every day of the week.

“I am kind of a gym rat,” Austad said. Because of an old lion injury on his knee, he bikes for his cardio, ranging from 40 minutes to an hour and a half. He also prioritizes strength training, alternating areas of his body and always including some core exercises.

“I probably spend one to two hours a day in the gym, which it’s a big commitment for someone who’s in academics,” he said. “I basically physically exhaust my body into submission.” Being athletic since youth, he said he always loved the feeling extremely tired at the end of a workout.

Research shows many benefits of exercise. “It used to be that we thought this exercise good for your heart and lungs, good for your muscles, keeping your bones strong,” Austad said. “Now we know there are cognitive benefits, there are immune benefits, there are all kinds of benefits that we never appreciated.”

One of the biggest ones for him is quality sleep, so much so that he sets strict boundaries around his workout time. “I don’t have great sleep unless I physically exhaust myself, and I just figure I have to live with that.”

He only eats twice a day

Austad was practicing time-restricted eating, a form of intermittent fasting, before it became trendy in the longevity space. It felt like his “natural rhythm” to eat a late breakfast around 11 a.m., skip lunch, and finish the day with dinner around 6 or 7 p.m.

“Now, recently it’s come out that there are all kinds of health benefits associated with that kind of timing, and I’m kind of embarrassed that I didn’t appreciate that earlier,” he said.

Intermittent fasting schedules vary and can potentially be risky, according to some studies. Austad’s schedule aligns with his circadian rhythm, which researchers believe can improve metabolic health.

He also generally follows the Mediterranean diet, eating lots of fish as his protein source, cutting back on red meat, and eating a diverse range of fruits and vegetables. “But again, I don’t obsess,” he said.

He recalled speaking at a calorie restriction conference and attending the banquet after. “It was basically leaves and nuts and zero-calorie dressing,” he said. “Even if it made you healthier, and I’m not convinced that it does, it’s just too much for me.”

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