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July 18, 2005

Life Would Be Better if It Were Blueberries

Okay, I finally got around to finishing the entry I started in response to the comments the other day. Sorry it took so long, but here 'tis.

Thanks to all for the interesting comments! Liz had the best one:

Secretly, I've always thought broccoli would be better if it was blueberries, but it never occurred to me to say so on a billboard.

Glad to see that Scott is still reading... and that Liz is on the verge of converting him to CR! Scott says:

I'm highly impressed by your fellow CRONer Elizabeth, who seems to properly strength train, too. She is perhaps the best complete-package CRONer I've seen (from a food AND exercise perspective), and will likely enjoy the most healthy lifespan.

I, too, am highly impressed with Elizabeth, not just because she's got a great diet and a gorgeous body, but because she's a fabulous writer!

However, from the perspective of life-extension (that's living longer, folks, dramatically longer), I'd have to regretfully suspect that Liz won't be the winner of the how long can you live contest.

Now before you freak out, a) I do not wish Elizabeth ill, or want her to die b) Scott didn't say LONGEST lifespan, he said most healthy lifespan. My guess is he's going to say those are two different things, but for all the reasons that MR discussed in his recent guest entry, I'm going to say that you're not having a healthy lifespan if you're dead.

There are a few reasons why I don't think Liz will, in the end, live longer than me, or MR, or many of the other CR practitioners of whom Scott apparently approves less.

1. She started later.

Starting CR late is great, and much better than never starting it at all. But the animals who get the longest lifespans start CR right after weaning! Why didn't my mom think of that??? Now of course they have side effects that most humans would find intolerable, like smaller body size, but the point remains: the earlier you start, the longer you live.

However: recent findings that MR talks about in a paper that I can't seem to link to but that I can send you if he says it's okay seem to indicate that late onset CR, if the late onset mice are fed the same number of calories as the early onset group are fed, can yield similar extension in remaining lifespan. Now that would be cool! [MR: if I totally screwed that up, please fix it. I only re-read the paper once, as opposed to my usual ten to twelve times for a scientific article. I was really busy painting the house. I did the best I could. And you wouldn't want your office to be hot pink just because I was re-reading one of your articles ten times, now would you?] That being said, I'm not going to take a chance and wait till I'm 40 or 50 to start. Besides, I'm in such better health now, I wouldn't want to spend the next ten or twenty years feeling the way I did pre-CR! And the conventionally held view is the earlier the better, so Spindler's dancing mice aside, I'm going to keep my calories low.

2. Exercise doesn't cause lifespan extension. There are tremendous benefits in terms of obesity avoidance and bone health and such from exercise, but extension of maximum lifespan is not one of them.

Of course, what makes the most sense for Liz is whatever Liz wants to do! If that means devoting the rest of her however long life to turning broccoli into blueberries, than that's what she should do! She discusses the choices she makes about her CR and her bodybuilding in a great post on her blog today.

Liz actually has among the lowest calorie counts of CR practitioners I've heard of, and I don't think she would be able to go much lower even if she cut back some on the muscle mass. Liz has got it going on, CR wise, due to her 1100 a day. No one who is honest about their calorie count (and very few people are, my friends... not that I'm saying people are liars, I've blogged a zillion times about calorie creep that happens if you EVER eat out or fail to measure.) Liz's food is the easy to measure kind, and if she's counting and counting right, then she's one of the most hardcore CR women out there.

But let's say that we have a hypothetical Liz, who is 20. Let's call her Beth, so we won't confuse her with the real live Liz. Beth is 20, she's full grown to whatever height she's going to be, and she's having so much fun that she wants to live as long as she possibly can. So she's making some decisions about her life.

She finds out about CR. She decides to do it. Slowly over a period of a year or two, she loses weight very gradually and uses nutritional software and a postal scale to weigh and measure her food exactly. She continues to lower her calories while keeping up an exercise regimen of running about twenty minutes a day and some weight lifting for bone health. She eventually hits amenorrhea due to low body fat or whatever, and she doesn't mind because she doesn't want kids anyway so not being able to get pregnant at this particular moment is actually a plus. She has sex every day because she read in GQ, a most reliable source on the topic, that having sex every day adds eight years to your lifespan. Her partner, while skeptical of the scientific validity of the study in question, is happy to go along with the program.

Beth's trainer at the gym suggests that she train for a weight lifting competition, and Beth says, sure, why not? So she begins to train, but quickly realizes that if she's going to build more muscle and burn more calories, both through the exercise itself and because muscles burn more calories just hanging about, she's going to have to eat more.

Beth's main goal is the longest, healthiest lifespan possible. She started young. She is religious about her very low, carefully monitored calorie intake and nutrition. She rarely skips a day of having sex, and if she does due to travel or whatever, she is careful to make up for it the next day.

Beth decides to stick with her good-enough-for-bone-and-cardio-health exercise routine, but not to go for the power lifting competition. Cause she'd have to eat more Calories, and in the end, lower calories, not bigger muscles, are what seem to be causing the lifespan extension.

Now I'd just like to make it clear that I am not Beth, and Beth is not me, no matter how similar we may appear to be on the surface. Beth, like Cindy, the made-up protein guzzling ad lib woman from a few months back, is a fictional character, created to prove a point.

The point is, if life-extension, that is, living as long as possible, is your goal, you must exercise enough to make your bones and your heart happy, but beyond that, you're wasting your calories.

Now I personally find plenty of ways to consume more calories than I really need to without exercising a ton, and skipping a power lifting competition is no sacrifice for me. But for some CR practitioners, like Kenton the CR'd surfer boy, it's a serious concern. We all have a variety of goals, and sometimes our goals are in competition with each other, so we compromise. I thought Liz had a great explanation of how she balances her goals of weight lifting and calorie lowering. My struggles are a little less heroic: Goal 1: Live as long as possible. Goal 2: Create a low carb margarita. Compromise!

I think the most important thing is that we pursue our goals with as much knowledge as possible. We can get tremendous support and advice from each other, even when our goals are different. For example, MR has helped me improve my diet and supplement plan, and he isn't in the slightest bit interested in a low carb margarita. We compromise.

And just fyi, that GQ article is for real. I didn't make it up. And if I were you, I wouldn't take any chances.

Posted by april at July 18, 2005 4:26 AM

Comments

Posted by: Elizabeth at July 18, 2005 2:12 PM

Posted by: Scott Miller at July 19, 2005 12:09 PM

Posted by: Scott Miller at July 19, 2005 3:10 PM

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