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Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Do you live longer this way...or does it just FEEL longer?
Posted by Jill | 8:30 AM
On this day before the caloric minefield known as Thanksgiving, Rebecca Traister in Salon takes on a recent New York Magazine article on Extreme Calorie Restriction, based on the premise that the less you eat, the longer you'll live. As is predictable for New York Magazine, this is less about spiritual enlightenment than it is about personal endurance testing:

I’ve been starving for the past two months, actually, and that’s precisely what the party is about: My dinner guests—five successful urban professionals who for years have subsisted on a caloric intake the average sub-Saharan African would find austere—have been at it much, much longer, and I’ve invited them here to show me how it’s done. They are master practitioners of Calorie Restriction, a diet whose central, radical premise is that the less you eat, the longer you’ll live. Having taken this diet for a nine-week test drive, I’m hoping now for an up-close glimpse of what it means to go all the way. I want to find out what it looks, feels, and tastes like to commit to the ultimate in dietary trade-offs: a lifetime lived as close to the brink of starvation as your body can stand, in exchange for the promise of a life span longer than any human has ever known.


I don't know about you, but to me the idea of a half-dozen successful urban professionals playing "Can You Top This" on who can eat the least is just about as close as you can get to Hell on Earth without involving fundamentalist Christian conservatives.

But a look at Traister's article makes me laugh, because of this:

Calorie-restricted dieters cut their food intake drastically, to around 1,200-1,400 calories a day for a woman and 1,800-2,000 for a man, depending on the individual's height and weight. Those meager metrics of tastiness must be further apportioned to constitute 30 percent protein, 30 percent fat and 40 percent carbs. It's an eating regimen that is greatly aided by calculators, computer software and postal scales.


I have lost Z"significant" weight exactly once in my life. It was in 1983, it took place over a period of four months, and it involved an 800-calorie-a-day diet that consisted of a daily food regimen of two liquid Cambridge Diet shake "meals" and one meal of baked skinless chicken and carrot sticks, and a one-hour aerobics class five nights a week. Total weightloss: 13 pounds. I weighed 118 when I started and 105 at the end. I had no tits, and I'd go out with Mr. Brilliant, whom I was dating at the time, and throw food around my plate and cry because I was hungry and didn't dare eat.

The idea of 1200-1400 calories a day constituting "extreme calorie restriction" is laughable to someone like me, who tries mightily, only rarely succeeding, at keeping total calories consumed per day to as close to 1500-1600 as possible and who is still a size 16.

There is some scientific evidence that this kind of calorie restriction does result in longer life, but if that life involves a greater obsession with food than even the most gluttonous overeater has, and if those few years require this kind of ascetic lack of enjoyment, there's some question as to whether it's worth it. None of this research takes into account accidents of birth, either. I had two grandmothers who lived into their nineties. My own mother is 79 years old, a fifteen-year-plus lung cancer survivor, is overweight, and still smokes. And aside from the COPD, she's perfectly healthy. Given that I don't have unlimited financial resources, I figure if I can make it to eighty, I'll have nothing to complain about, especially since both of those grandmothers spent their final years in nursing homes.

One thing I've found about the "Oh, fuck it" method of eating is that over time, you tend to stop the unhealthy habits. I don't gorge on chips, I don't eat fistfuls of chocolate. My breakfast is usually either a banana/yogurt smoothie with flaxseed or oatmeal with almonds and dried cranberries, and a small side of cottage cheese. This isn't because I'm dieting, it's because this is what I like for breakfast. I've even gotten to the point where the chocolates in the office next to mine, because I've realized that cheap chocolate just makes you want more. So after lunch I have a square of the 71% cacao bars they sell at Trader Joe's, and I'm set for the afternoon. The big issue for me right now is cutting back on salt, because hypertension is another one of the wonderful things that tends to happen after menopause.

Many years ago a friend and I used to run support groups out of a local church basement that ran according to the precept that if we could accept ourselves, demystify food, and stop defining our worth as human beings based on what we did or did not eat, we'd be healthier. Some of would lose weight, some wouldn't. But we'd be healthier. At first we did very well, but as the women who showed up realized that we were not a diet group and weren't promising magic, little by little they dwindled until we disbanded completely.

So it isn't just the Christofascist Zombie Brigade that has a vested interest in the perpetuation of self-loathing.

Traister:

Part of what's so damaging about diseases like anorexia and bulimia -- besides the body-image distortions -- is their fixation on control. What could be more tightly controlled than CR?

As Bob Cavanaugh, secretary for the Calorie Restriction Society, wrote in a letter to New York, "CR practitioners must be in the habit of monitoring their micronutrients. Balancing caloric intake with essential nutrition requires diligence." A diet like this sounds like a full-time job, one that could impede the rituals and opportunities of a full life. Restaurant dinners, accepting invitations to friends' houses, traveling to countries where dietary information is in another language -- all made more difficult by a voice in your head ascribing some higher value to keeping calories at an absolute minimum. Forget even the satisfaction of a particular food. What about the contentment of coming home after a busy day, ordering Chinese, putting your feet up and watching a movie?

And who gets to do this thing right? People with access to spreadsheets and dietitians, yes, but also those with the time to shop for specialties and fiddle-faddle with microproteins at every meal. In other words: not people who get 15 minutes for lunch, work night shifts, and just want to sit with friends over a bottle of wine or a six pack on the weekend.

Diligently monitoring and balancing and weighing and considering and adding and subtracting and measuring and constantly, constantly contemplating every morsel that enters your body, including the two Brazil nuts and two-thirds bag of microwave popcorn: How much time do these people have on their hands anyway? Oh right, centuries.

As CR dieter Paul McGlothin asked on "Today," "Who wouldn't really like to experience the joys of life for a little bit longer?" And McGlothin's CR buddy Meredith Averill crowed to Lauer about "planning [her] 125th birthday for absolutely decades now!"

Bully for McGlothin and Averill, though one would hope that neither has the misfortune of getting hit by a bus or contracting a degenerative disease like CR god Roy Walford. Walford pioneered calorie restriction after his years in Biosphere 2, wrote the book "Beyond the 120 Year Diet : How to Double Your Vital Years," and died at 79 from ALS. If these bodies are all juiced to live for more than a century, let's hope they are also hermetically sealed against dementia, stroke, broken hips, and other afflictions that could make all those additional decades more endless hell than ultimate reward.

And while the CR dieter is enjoying all the moral and physical superiority that comes with self-abnegation and endless gnawing hunger, what toll must it take on friends and loved ones? Imagine spending time with people who eat one-third of what you do and make you feel like a glutton on a suicide mission when you spoon yourself an extra helping of squash. In fact, one of the horrifying things about this diet is the creeping realization of how easy it would be to come to see your every tasty snack as a sin against yourself, every culinary concoction a reason for self-flagellation.

I think about the new pizza place near me. It has weathered yellow walls and a chef whose focused attention to the blistering crust and sweet creamy full-fat ricotta on his menu recalls Nicholas Cage in "Moonstruck." I consider the dinner I just ate at an Italian place: short-rib ravioli in a sauce of smoked marrow, Brussels sprouts with a poached egg and pancetta, chicken liver mousse with fig jam, and pickled green beans on toast. I think about the carafes of wine, the first briny sip of a hard-earned martini, the malty cool of a second beer at a sultry summer barbecue.

And I think: From my side of the short-rib ravioli, immortality really is overrated.


Now I think most of these things sound vile, but Traister makes a good point. Is an extended life this controlled, this devoid of enjoyment, worth living? After all, there's a lot of gray area between flaming out at 26 of a drug overdose, and living a completely humorless 125 years. I'll take that tradeoff, thank you very much.

And then there's this:

A 150-year life sounds sort of tiring. Isn't it the sort of thing that makes vampires so grumpy? Imagine living through all those wars, all the tragedies. You think teenagers and their loud music and LOL-isms annoy you now? Imagine if there were 100 culturally unbridgeable years between you and them. Think of all those presidential administrations you'd have to endure! Those of us who, barring illness or accident, can expect to live several more decades are probably already looking down the barrel of a Jenna Bush administration. Do you really need to live through George VI?


That thought alone is enough to make me reach for the lasagna.

Happy erev Thanksgiving, everyone.
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