About P. D. Mangan

In his mid-fifties he was a mess. Chronic fatigue. Frail, weak, and getting worse. The part that took the longest to understand was that he was doing everything right.

He followed the guidelines. Ran twelve to fifteen miles on Sundays like a good patient. Listened to his doctors, trusted the medical establishment, and did what the public health authorities told him to do. He was not lazy and he was not cutting corners. If anything he was an A student.

It didn’t work. He got sicker. Not a little sicker either. He was falling apart.

So he went looking for his own answers. He is a microbiologist by training and has also studied biochemistry and pharmacology, which meant he could read the research himself. When he did, what he found shook him. Almost everything he had been told about managing his own health was wrong, and the playbook he had followed for decades rested on questionable science and, more often, on questionable readings of the primary sources.

It also became clear that the people and organizations writing the guidelines did not have incentives that lined up with his.

So he rebuilt, block by block. He stopped running. A few months in, he started lifting. He had his bloodwork done and worked out what the numbers actually meant, which is where the iron came in.

Within months the fatigue that had plagued him for years was gone. Within a year he was stronger past fifty than he had been in his twenties.

He is 71. He has never used performance-enhancing drugs, testosterone replacement, or peptides. He trains about sixty minutes a week in total, dramatically less than he used to, and he is in the best shape of his life.

He says that last part for one reason only. There was a point when he was ready to accept that feeling terrible was simply what getting older felt like. It isn’t.

The work

He has written about health and fitness for more than twenty years, and is the author of Dumping Iron, published here in full. In 2021 he published a peer-reviewed paper on iron and aging in the journal Aging. Since 2015 he has coached private clients one-on-one, more than 1,700 of them across 71 countries, getting them lean, fit and strong on about an hour of training a week without starving themselves. He writes daily on X, where more than 850,000 people follow him.

He is still writing, still lifting, and still reading the papers.

P.S. If you have been doing everything right and still aren't getting anywhere, you are not the thing that's broken. The method is. This is where he would start.