The book
Strong at 75
A memoir of the years that brought me to seventy-five, and of what I learnt once I started asking questions.
at 75
Strong at 75 is not a diet book, and it is not a training manual. It is a memoir, and it begins long before seventy-five: in Kuala Lumpur, England and Melbourne, in work and migration, family and grief, drinking and decades of failed diets.
It then follows what happened after I stopped drinking at the end of 2024 and, a month later, began strength training: the training itself, the changes to how I eat, the fasting, and the questions those changes raised about the advice I had been given for most of my life.
The science is in the book because I needed it to understand what had happened to me. It supports the story rather than replacing it, and throughout I have tried to show where the evidence is firm, where it is contested, and where my own experience is simply that of one man.
I spent a lifetime questioning other people’s numbers. It took me far too long to question my own.
Jacob Thomas
Three threads
What the book is about
A life reconsidered
The man I was before seventy-five, the decisions that shaped him and what they cost — told without tidying the story up.
A different approach to ageing
What changed after seventy-five, with an honest account of what each change did, and did not do, for me.
Following the evidence
What I found when I read the research behind familiar advice on diet, cholesterol and blood tests, and set it beside my own results.
Publication
The manuscript is under revision. Publication details will appear on this page once they are settled. If you would like me to let you know when the book is available, or you are a publisher, reviewer, health professional or researcher who would like to discuss it, please write to me.