Eating Less May Extend Your Lifespan -- But Is it Worth It?

It's my understanding that perhaps only age-related deaths might be put off by being so thin. I have read elsewhere that when it comes to surviving diseases, those with just a little more to love, say higher healthy range of weight to 25 lbs or so extra, have the best outcomes. I am actually where I should be weight-wise for this calorie reduction thing, but I think if I live longer it won't be because of my weight, but because of the great eating and exercise habits I maintain that keep me this size.

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I suspect it comes down to body type.

Cutting back is probably an excellent idea for bigger folks.

But I'm one of those thin guys who eats like a horse and still doesn't gain weight. If I cut my calories by 30%, I would quickly disappear. This is probably true of anyone with a naturally thin frame, dontchya think?

If you're interested in the whole body-type approach, check out ayurvedic (traditional East Indian) medicine, which is based on three different body types.

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I have alot more energy on a lower calorie life style, so I eat alot of veg and less meat to enjoy life now. I see all my overweigh friends and relatives, much younger than me, and they cannot do much more than sit. So if you are sitting for your life, is it life/ Your choice! it is the children they overfeed, they should have a better choice.

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I've read more detailed studies of calories restriction - some studies have been conducted on humans - as well as one of Walford's book, and although life extension could certainly be an outcome, so can depression and lack of sex drive. Most likely, some calories restriction is good, but the typical lab study on animals uses a diet designed to keep study subjects' weight 30% below litter mates, which is untenable in humans.

While very low weight is associated with loss of sex drive and depression in humans, numerous qualities are associated with increased mass, such as intelligence, popularity, happiness (some studies), and longer life; a few recent studies have shown all-cause mortality to be lower in the moderately overweight.

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The final paragraph says it all. What's the obsession with prolonging our lives at all costs? The medical industry has an obvious interest in keeping us alive to rack up more medical bills, but why do the rest of us seem to take for granted that a long life is inherently better than a short one?

I avoid smoking, drinking, and overeating because those things make me feel crappy and bloated. But others find the indulgent lifestyle enjoyable. Apart from their impact on the environment--which probably works out the same since they'd die sooner--who should care whether they live past 60, so long as their families have a nice insurance policy on them? It sounds like the mice and the monkeys won't miss having us around to lock them up and screw with their diet.

On the other hand, if a life of minimalism or self-denial works for you, that's cool too, even if the science says you won't necessarily live longer. In the case of the Olsen twins, I think they like how it makes their heads look big.

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Sorry but the thought of eating less just doesnt do it for me.

RT
Online Privacy when it Counts

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... you wouldn't really live longer.

It just SEEMS longer!

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Eat more fat! Stay away from low calorie, low cholesterol...blah, blah, blah. Since the proceeding has been introduced, America and now Europe has become obese. It's all corporate bullshit, to get the populations to spend billions. Only God knows when you're going to go. You can't extend your life, especially when a truck runs you over.

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For example, I rarely eat meat these days. However, there's a difference between the typical factory based meat most people eat versus the pasture raised meat that used to be the norm until 50 years ago. My grandmother used to brag about doing well with eating steak only once a week and having the good feeling about it. Today, most people would feel like having another steak the next day. Why's that? It all has to do with the destructive nature of putting quantity before quality that makes up this unfettered/disaster capitalism. Just pump up the volume even if it means sacrificing essential vitamins and minerals, drug it even more, sell it "cheap", and generate more sales out of it. No doubt it keeps people coming back for more of the same mediocre quality versions.

Note, this is just one example but this just as easily be applied to the vegan meals and the rest of the junk food out there.

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and it stinks of conspiracy.

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There is no real proof calorie restriction can extend lives. As the author points out, just as many calorie restricted monkeys died as non calorie restricted monkeys. The researchers just did not count their deaths in the study because they weren't age related. But increased risk of other types of death could have been side effects of calorie restriction.

CR also decreases immunity to infectious diseases. Another researcher found CR mice got the flu more often. Search "dieters more vulnerable to flu." These studies are done in controlled environments where they are not exposed to disease. I also wonder if the researchers didn't unconsciously give them more attention, since they have both financial and emotional interest in the outcome. It was not a double blind study, they could see which poor creatures were emaciated.

As usually, many posters feel a need to express their stereotypes about fat people. Mother Nature meant for people to be come in different shapes and sizes (that is how the species survives) and no one should be forced or stigmatized into starving themselves. Calorie restriction and dieting produces extreme grouchiness. These monkeys didn't have to drive in traffic jams, have noisy neighbors blaring bass or anal bosses. What kind of society would we have if everyone was so fixated on CR they let it eclipse every other aspect of life??? Oh, maybe the one we have now!

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Restriction of caloric intake in experimental animals has, thus far, been the only means of life-span extension.

And, in other examinations of the mysterious obvious, it turns out that eating like a hog will grant you that lifespan.

Who'da thunk it, pardner?

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First of all if I weighed 10% less than I did in college I wouldn't have an ounce of muscle on me. I can't see that that would be healthy.

Second, food isn't just energy for many people, its a way of life. I love to cook and I love to eat and have to exercise a lot to make up for it but believe me it's worth it. I don't think cutting out food from a culture is a good idea.

When eating is treated properly as nourishment and a time to share with family and friends and not simply shoving the cheapest, fastest food down your throat on the way to the mall, then obesity is not an issue.

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She ate whatever she pleased and alot of it. The Polish diet was all about fat. I remember watching her cook all sorts of things with no regard to calories. She was overweight but agile, a very good dancer. She lived to be 92 and enjoyed all of it. I'm not recommending her diet, but I'll take whatever was in her genes that let her eat the way she did. I think that's part of why some people can eat junk, smoke cigarettes, get no exercise and live a very long time. ANNA

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It is a sin to be obese. Gluttony and religion do not mix. It is a contradiction to be gluttonous and religious at the same time. Religious leader should use their sermons to emphasize the Godliness of being slim. There was a time when the obese were whipped as a punishment for Gluttony. That time might return to religious circles.

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Who knows? I'm 5'9, 150 lbs. If I weighed 20 lbs. less I don't think I would be worse off. But I cannot resist eating for long when I am hungry. That, to me, is the big mystery. I eat really healthy and work out every day. But I do not understand how people force themselves not to eat when their stomachs are like rawr rawr rawr. Especially late at night? Do they just tell themselves, "now look, you've had your calories for the day, stomach, so please be quiet"? That does not work for me.

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And didn't much care for it.

10% less of my college weight would put me at around 107 - at 5'6".

If someone told me that was my ideal weight, they'd be barking mad. I can't imagine ever wanting to weigh less than 130-135.

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1. When I first tried hashish, in 1969, quite without intending any weight reduction, I found after some months that my weight had gone from 160 to 132. Untrustworthy scaleage may have exaggerated the difference somewhat. Though I have not deserted the herb, my weight has returned to around 160.

2. I wonder if some will find the above to be good news, because it suggests a caloric restriction need not mean a funless life! The widely overlooked benefit or purpose of cannabis is, after all, to quicken the mind's ability to discover interesting things about whatever one is doing-- whether eating ("munchies") or other things that one does instead of eating ("sublimation").

3. At the risk of offending a few parents concerned not to lose control over their children, cannabis may have been part of what enabled me to discover, as a general principle, that the most advantageous things to do to guarantee health and long life are precisely those things they warn you NOT to do, such as eating out of the "garbage" ("Johnny don't touch that!"), "picking" (i.e. moistly massaging and ensalivating) your nose, and eating, or carefully and enjoyingly tasting, the "dirt" which gathers in places like the grooves of your fingers.

4. Last first: thumbsucking, which I myself stupidly worried about discouraging in one of my children (I regret it), is really a start on, or an aborted form of, "pica" which consists of tasting dirt which contains many fine traces of things which are educational to our digestive and immune systems. ("Pica" allegedly is named after the Magpie which the ancient Romans noticed eating dirt. Birds use dirt, and stones, to help digest food in one of their many stomachs, but I digress.)

5. Instead of stopping with just one thumb and overdoing that as a comfort thing, go ahead and suck and tongue-abrade all ten fingers (that's why the typewriter guys use the term "pica" to mean ten per inch), "twiddling" the tongue round and round each finger because the grooves run in that direction. Subtle transformative drugs in your skin actually predigest the dirt in your finger skin grooves so that it is ready to be ingested in this manner.

6. Further note that your own saliva is a safer things to use to clean both nostrils (use Designated Finger (DF), or the smallest finger on either side), eyes, and ears than any Propa & Ganda Co. soap or over-the-counter crap. All such "gleanings" are valuable for digestion and immunity.

7. The payoff-- any time you sense you are hurriedly overeating, whether from nervousness, guilt, brainwashing from ads or any other social malengineering corporate or hyperparental, by resorting to "Pica" you can satisfy all these psycho "appetites" while effectively drawing a line under dinner.

8. Have plenty of unthreateningly clean zip-lock bags around to slip the overtempting foodleftovers into (or those you salvage from garbage at the festival) as additional insurance against use-it-up-now guilt-overeating impulses.

9. Promise yourself earnestly that about an hour after termination of eating you will permit yourself a toke or two of delicious skunkweed as further double bottom line pledge of abstinence from further run-on eating, based on Qur'an-Compliant Riefer Moderation Regimen of (a) up to two 25-mg. one-hitter tokes per two days and (b) no tokes within one hour after or four hours before eating (Our Four Hour Tour, courtesy of Apple Records or successors).

10. Assume and expect that you will sublimate your appetite from corporate-promoted food-eating over into creative brain- and handwork, and measure your "happiness" not by the "heaviness" of food-filling (a self-fulfilling fallacy) but by social and planetary productiveness. (Example: get your anvil pruner, ratchet pruner, saw and hatchet and go out gathering trillions of dead sticks .

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When you routinely fast so your kids and other family members can eat because you cannot afford sufficient food for a family of four because rich people just don't pay enough to meet the standard cost of living, you have an automatic caloric restrictor.

Frankly if I die "early" due to my weight it'll be a fucking relief.

I'm wary of any "diet" that makes benchmark claims like 15% of what you weighed in college (how classist, first of all) and second of all, if I did that I'd be dead already. Never mind the flawed "science" found on the webpage for CRON. Jeebus, there's always some group of nutjobs willing to offer a one-size-fits-all solution to horseshit.. and it usually comes from the same ilk... the owning class. Too much money too much free time... at others' expense.

Rich people need an enema.

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Then you are missing out on what life is really all about.

If you want to say that living longer is not what it's about, tell that to your family. Perhaps you might consider that your family will be stronger and closer if you live long enough to stick around and contribute.

Your children will live with the heartache forever if you die early. When you die of old age, there is no heartache because everyone knows that you lived your life in full.

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I have seen videos of old monkeys on calorie restricted diets and their control group. The difference was startling and immediately obvious. The control group looked burnt out with scraggly gray fur, little energy and hunched over posture, while the CR monkeys looked middle aged and vital.

I trust what I see until I learn otherwise.

Also, many of the arguments being put forward by both the author and commenters for not dieting strike me as absurd and simply irrational.

First, the author's suggesting that a CR diet would consist of bird food is ignorant, since nuts are high in fat and not much else. Eating greens would be healthy, filling and low in empty calories.

Second, the repeated argument that dieting is worse than death is childish. It is true that breaking an addiction to sugar and fat is difficult, but so is breaking an addiction to heroin or cigarettes.

There has to be some adult supervision and self-education involved, and I suspect that that frightens many people away. But the foundation of the self-education process is learning new ways to shop and cook to make food fun and enjoyable while still being healthy.

I like as a starting point the recipes and sources of foodstuffs found in Dr. Esselstyn's book "How to prevent and reverse heart disease". To my knowledge, Dr. Esselstyn is the only researcher to have documented reversing heart disease in heart patients in late stages of the disease, or any other stage for that matter.

peace,
Paul

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Yogis seem to know our body better than our doctors and scientists, since they can do things doctors considered (and some stubbornly still consider) impossible, like voluntary use of muscles considered involuntary, like the heart rate, among other things.

I know from experience that after a few minutes of practice of meditation my heartbeat is cut in half, from 80 to 40 something per minute, and the usual 18 or 20 breaths per minute are reduced to 5 or 6, all of this without forcing the body, it just comes by itself in a natural way.

Therapeutic fasting is probably the single most effective way to improve and maintain health. Yogananda recommended to fast one day per week and 2 or 3 days once a month. I weight 57 kgs. (I am 169 cm tall), at 65 I still work many hours per day, and have never been sick. It works.

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No article on calorie restricted diets is complete without some mention of the nutritional intake and the vigorous lifestyle of the Hunzakuts who are among the longest lived people on the planet.

http://www.alkalizeforhealth.net/Lhunzadiet2.htm

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When I said that "after a few minutes of practice of meditation my heartbeats/minute are cut to aprox. half and breathings/minute to aprox. one fourth" I forgot to say that I have practiced meditation for aprox. one hour/day (7 days/week) for the last 11 years, which totals aprox. 4,000 hours. It is no magic tool, for meditation you need an effort and patience. You do not see the results immediately, but you see them sooner or later.

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And because there are dozens of things people call meditation, including some that are no meditation at all, (like the so-called "dynamic meditation" of Osho Baghwan, which rather seems mass hysteria to me), perhaps I should add that I practice techniques similar to the ones I have read in the books of Yogananda, breathing exercises based on Pranayama, the science of breathing.

And as to diet, I am almost vegetarian but not completely. I eat eggs and milk products, simply very seldom meat and fish. I just never eat too much, otherwise I feel heavy. Yoguis say one third of the stomach should be full of air.

To help with hunger feelings I simply eat something light, like fruit, or drink something, which may be milk, gazpacho, coffee, coke or a beer (not 5), whatever is not heavy and gives me the feeling of a full stomach.

Of course if your stomach is too big because of too much eating for long then you have a problem. It will not be easy to reduce its size, but it is not impossible.

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But if you're not fat, does it make sense to starve yourself from thin to bony?

As opposed to, say, if you are fat, then it does make sense to starve your way thin? That kind of mentality right there is one the primary reasons why most dieters regain any weight lost and then some.

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Will you live a lot longer? Maybe, maybe not. But we can guarantee that it will seem a lot longer.

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perhaps buy online

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Ari's story is too similar to Roger Cohen's editorial in the New York Times from Mid-July. Ari may have forgotten that he read it!

He has a point about immune weakness during fasting, although I have fasted for a total of about 500 days in my life with no problems, I believe writers who point this out are basically right. What he may not write a piece about is the later findings of this Wisconsin experiment, in which I have every confidence will tell us that fasting or calorie restriction is effective in lengthening life. My trusted authors say, don't eat to live, live to eat.
Enjoy your food because you know it's good for you. Fasters and CRON followers really enjoy their food because we don't take it for granted! -Tom McElheney

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i have been seeing a lot of articles like this recently and i understand that obesity is a problem in this country, but i dont think that those who are reporting this stuff are remotely aware of the insidiousness of the message to those who take 'eating less' to heart; those with anorexia.

The message of 'eating less' to an anoretic means a piece of gum and a glass of water equals lunch. Did you know that when you "eat less' for long enough, you lose your period. When you lose your period for long enough you get osteoporosis. When you 'eat less' for too long your internal organs are stressed and begin to shut down, including your heart.

'Eating less' in this context ends your life early.

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