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May 15, 2005
What Is Healthy?
Prepare yourself for a rant.
What do you do to prepare yourself for a rant? If I had known, the first time I read RANT: Moderate CR, that I would be having a rant experience, I would have had a stiff drink first. I barely felt like I could drive for hours after reading it, and that was stone cold sober. I think that's when I knew for certain that MR was the man for me... any man who can write an email message that knocks me off my feet for several hours when I haven't had a drink in days is too good to let slip by.
So if you need to, mix yourself up a stiff drink. Here's one I would recommend:
Lowish Carb Margarita-ish Object:
1 shot Grand Marnier
.5 shot tequilla (don't buy the cheap stuff, you're only allowed to have one)
Juice of one lime (FRESH!)
Diet tonic water
Mix. Drink. Now you're ready to read a rant.
Now y'all (there's my Southern girl coming out) know that I get a little stressed out when I argue with either of my MR's, the Tall or the Small. Remember that time Tall MR totally got on my case for fasting and eating Chilean Sea Bass? Not pretty. Anyway, this time I've gotta argue with my CR mom, Little MR.
[That's Mary, for those of you who just joined us or have been living under a bloggie rock.]
Here's her quote from a few days ago:
If I was as passionately distressed over aging as April and MR, I would be unable to cope with it at my age. I see aging every day in the mirror. Some acceptance is necessary, in order to enjoy my life.
You have to enjoy every day, and you know your time is almost certainly limited. As you get older, the trade-offs between quantity and quality of life become so very obvious. At 30, immortality seems so much more possible. I beg your tolerance for my minor fatalism, April. When you are 20 years further down the road, perhaps you will understand that my attitude is "healthy".
Now to begin with, I agree with most of that. You do have to enjoy every day. I make tons of compromises... I drank a Cosmopolitian on Friday night! And I am one of the lucky ones whose QOL seems to be only enhanced by CR. Even now that I've discovered that hunger exists, CR is still on balance so much fun for me.
Also, Mary can't be seeing too much aging in the mirror, cause she's really gorgeous. If you're a girl and you need any motivation to cut your calories, the promise that you will look as good as Mary does in twenty years is more than enough motivation to drive on past that Dunkin Donuts, refraining from picking up a bagel with cream cheese.
That being said: uh-oh. Someone used the word "healthy" to describe not a food, but an attitude.
Mary has no way of knowing this, but I actually have had a rant about the use of the word healthy for years. My theory is that "healthy" is the new "virtuous," and that these days people use "healthy" to describe things that are actually normal, or endorsed by society, the powers that be, the capitalist system, etc. For example, if you're a girl of about 29, you hear a lot about how it's not "healthy" that you're not interested in dating, and that it's certainly not "healthy" that you would rather stay in on a Saturday night reading print-outs of rantings about some wacky low calorie diet by a 123 pound man in Canada instead of going out. And it's certainly not "healthy" if you put your work as an organizer above "having a life" -- you know, getting married, having kids, cultivating your garden.
First, I despise gardening. Can someone else please do the gardening? I can not be bothered.
Second, Mary never said anything of the sort, and would have probably encouraged me to hold out for the skinny Canadian boy had I ever confessed, pre-CRS Conference, to my mad crush on Genius List-Boy.
My point is that "healthy" is rather arbitrary, when it is applied to attitudes. Sixty years ago, the idea that I would want to pursue a career and not want to have children would have been considered very unhealthy! However, a bagel with cream cheese would have been just as unhealthy then as it is now.
I am all for people dealing with the reality of aging however works for them. But my orientation on the world is that if I see a problem, I do something about it.
Now any CR practitioner, no matter what they say, must feel the same way, cause you don't cut your calories unless you believe that you can make a difference in your own aging process. So while Mary may be living with some acceptance of aging, she's clearly a whole lot less accepting than 99.999999999999999999999% of the population!
To me, there's a difference between the acceptance that one must have to function, and satisfaction with the status quo. Just because I spend almost every waking hour and ounce of my life energy fighting something, be it aging or economic injustice, doesn't mean that I'm miserable! As an organizer, I've had to come to terms long ago with the fact that the world is not as I would like it to be, and that often it will seem like my efforts are not accomplishing as much change as I would like. The same is true of CR. As Tall MR has said about a zillion times, CR is crude, weak medicine. He and Aubrey need to push those scientists to discover the real means to reversing aging... write, my angel, write!!! And you, my dear bloggie reader, need to donate to the Mprize! Go ahead, click Contribute!
But that doesn't mean that I sit by for one second letting nature take its course. Sure, I make compromises. And I enjoy every second of my life. All day, sometimes 12 or 14 or 16 hours a day, I fight injustice. And 24 hours a day, I fight aging with the only weapon I have... Calorie Restriction.
For me, this struggle is very real. It's not an academic question about whether or not CR will work in humans. It's about not wanting to leave MR on earth without me to hold him as he falls asleep and make him delicious little creations with hazelnut oil. It's about not wanting to miss the dawn of radical life-extending biomedicine. Not wanting to miss the day when once again the disempowered stand up for themselves. Not wanting to miss a really great vintage of Pinot Noir!
Why, oh why, would I want to give up one minute of life?
It is quite possible to be dissatisfied with the status quo, to fight it with all my life energy, and yet to be happy while doing so.
In fact, I think I wouldn't be happy any other way. When I'm not sure that I'm doing the absolutely most important thing I could be doing, using my energy, time, talents, money, etc., in the best way possible, I get a little wiggy. That's the main reason why I went back to organizing: I realized that I could free up the cash it took to pay me to fund life-extension research, while continuing to contribute as a volunteer for the Mprize and returning to the work that has made my life worth living: organizing.
To be happy doesn't mean to accept that which should not be. Those of us who are lucky enough to have enough to eat and a warm place to live to some extent choose our own happiness: I have lots of friends who have gone down the path to much more material wealth than I have, and yet don't seem to be all that happy.
Tall MR and I have chosen paths which entail constant struggle with things we consider to be unnecessary and wrong: aging and economic injustice. We may seem a bit extreme, and I won't argue with anyone who says we're pretty darned weird, but we're awfully happy. And if you were able to eat MR's low carb CR friendly Zoned pizzas, you'd be really happy too.
Healthy, to me, is about being consistent in what you want and what you do. One of the things I most admire about both of my MRs is that they live lives consistent with their values. They make different choices at times, but they're both making choices based on the information they have and the results they want. So many people live in a fog where their intentions and their actions don't match. I'll freely admit that I've spent a fair amount of time in that space myself. Now that I do CR, I am indeed happpier.
Plugging away every day at something that takes a whole lot of work and comes with no guarantee of success isn't easy. That's true for CR and for being an organizer. I live on hope, but I also live on the concrete evidence I see every day. I look younger, my blood pressure has gone down, I have more energy and need less sleep. I see nurses improve their working conditions, and I know that patients are safer because of the work I do. Sure, it's a slow, sometimes (usually) agonizing process, but it's working, piece by piece.
I could be wrong. Perhaps CR won't work, Aubrey is wrong, and I'll be dead at ninety instead of on the cover of Vogue. Maybe I'll spend my entire career organizing and leave the world with just as much injustice as I found it.
But I will have had fun trying. And I will have lived every day burning with a passion to try and make things better.
I wouldn't trade the life I have for anything. CR, with all its hassle and weirdness, has given me so much more than it's taken. And organizing, even when it's hard, is for me the difference between being part of the problem and part of the solution. I tried to walk away and I can't. Apparently, there's something I can't leave behind.
It may not work out in the end. I may not live longer than my obese smoker friends. I may never win another union election again. But I will continue on, living on dreams and the belief that things can be better.
And I hope you will too, because hope is a lot more fun than despair.
At the risk of quoting Depeche Mode:
Reach out and touch faith.
Posted by april at May 15, 2005 8:16 PM
Comments
Brava! Excellent rant. Hope the haircut turned out well.
Posted by: Elizabeth at May 15, 2005 7:29 PM
yup
"healthy" works much as "sensibility" or "propriety" did a century ago. masks and normalizes hierarchical value systems as "natural," although they are, quite "cultivated"
.you seem to have a touch of social-anarchist in you - (i mean, in the Chomsky-ish sense)...
i relate.
... keep writing....i'm enjoying your blog...christina
Posted by: christina at May 15, 2005 8:57 PM
ok
i can't resist this one.
i notice you have google adds on your blog. i also notice their particular use of "healthy."
my question is who profits from those ads? how are you implicated in the economics tied into the discursive construction and uses of "healthy"?
i'm not attacking... but like you, i wonder about things.
cheers
christina
Posted by: christina at May 15, 2005 9:08 PM
I hate using the word healthy that same way, too. That's why I put it into quotes. I have the same reaction to "well rounded". I also always hated it when my mother thought I should be "more well rounded". I am not well rounded in any way, and never have been or will be. Neither are you. We are both pretty intense in our own special ways, aren't we?
Yes - an excellent rant. Your energy always comes through.
I think I am a little morose about aging these days. My husband's parents and my mother are all reaching that tragic final phase. As you say, it is heartbraking in so many ways to see them falling apart. And they are accepting of their fate, as they must be. Fighting hard against it at your age is so very sensible - and really very wise, since everything you do will really make a difference. At my age, it becomes a lot of work. And you can see that you are beginning to lose the battle. But, you are right - I am far from accepting it for myself at this point. I know there is a possibility for me that I can live much longer than 80 or 90.
Posted by: Mary at May 15, 2005 9:14 PM
Hi Christina!
Excellent question on the Google ads.
The Mprize profits from the ads. We decided to put them up as yet another way of generating revenue for the prize, so we can get to that cure for aging faster. I decided that my readers are smart enough to see that they're ads and click or not click as you choose.
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Posted by: April at May 15, 2005 11:15 PM