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May 11, 2006
What Is Crazy?
MR describes CR as a "crazy diet" in jest, but I asked him to stop saying that because even though he's joking, I think it gives the media an excuse to make us sound much weirder than we are. The entire definition of "crazy" bears some examination in the context of CR. People have said that it's "crazy" to weigh and measure everything you eat, or to refuse to go out to restaurants, or to maintain a lower body weight than what most people would consider normal. So that must make a lot of us, for one reason or another, crazy.
I find that people often use to word "crazy" when what they mean is "not to my taste." My favorite definition, however, is one that I've heard many times but never quite nailed down the author of the saying:
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again yet expecting different results.
When it comes to health and nutrition, a lot of people do the same thing over and over, yet expect different results. They go on crash diets without changing their underlying attitudes towards food, then they're shocked when they gain all the weight back. They eat nutrient-free gak and then are surprised that they're hungry a short while later. They fill their bodies with poison, then they express indignation that their health declines and their bodies age.
I'd like to propose a different definition of crazy: Crazy is acting in ways that don't match your goals.
For instance: if your goal is to extend life as much as possible through the only currently available intervention that has been shown to extend life in mammals, you would CR as intensely as you can. You'd be absolutely sure that you were getting adequate nutrition, you'd keep your calories as low as you could tolerate, and you'd minimize your risks by wearing your seatbelt, doing bone-building exercise, and looking both ways before your cross the street.
If you found that keeping your calories consistent day to day by weighing and measuring your food helped you to maintain the lowest number of calories, you'd be crazy to do otherwise, because then your actions wouldn't match your goals.
Of course, making your actions match your goals requires figuring out what your goals are. Whole shelves of self-help books have been devoted to helping people figure out what they actually want... the best spiritual traditions, in my opinion, give people the tools to answer that very perplexing question. The Robin Williams character in the movie Dead Again had this rather memorable line:
"Find out what you are and be that."
I have struggled with my own goals and priorities because some of the things that are important to me are in direct conflict with each other. I want to slow my biological aging process as much as possible so that I can catch that train to escape velocity, and so that I don't look like crap when my boyfriend is still sexy and gorgeous cause he ate more orange peels and drank fewer margaritas. Yet, I also want to go out with my friends to nice restaurants and enjoy the food, wine, and atmosphere. It's easy to do both at my current, moderate level of CR, and I get many health benefits, including lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure, never (never ever ever!) getting sick, and loving the way I look and feel. But it's almost impossible to take my calories lower without becoming both more consistent in my day to day calorie intake and more strict about nutrition. I've gone this far by eating a very low calorie, high nutrient quotidian diet most days, then going out for a lighter than pre-CR but unmeasured meal at a restaurant once or twice a week. The unmeasured meal usually contains at least some foods that aren't nutrient dense and/or that have sugar or saturated fat. For example, yesterday after lunch out with some co-workers we split a Starbucks chocolate chunk cookie. No big deal, at my moderate level of CR. But to go lower would mean that I would really need to replace those chunky chocolate calories with something that has nutrition. Would I miss the cookie? Maybe. Would I miss the experience of partaking in shared food with co-workers? Maybe. What's more important: the cookie, the co-workers, or the chance of making it to the dawn of radical anti-aging biomedicine? You can't know what actions match your goals until you become very, very sure what your goals are.
One thing I've always admired and envied about MR is that he knows what he wants and makes his actions match his goals, in spite of obstacles that most people would find impossibly daunting. I find self-discipline and clarity attractive. Especially in combination with orangeness.
What's crazy, in my opinion, is living life without a clear sense of what you want or how to get there. The process of figuring out who you are and then being that isn't easy, and I suspect that most people never really even try. But the alternatives are, in my opinion, crazy.
Posted by april at May 11, 2006 12:05 PM
Comments
My recent thoughts about where I was going with my life couldn't be put together more accurately. I had been feeling it for the past year that my job was not what I wanted to do in my life, but I finally found the courage to quit today. I may not have any money but I have taken a huge step by that towards what I want from life, which is to be a successfull fiction writer. From now on, I can devote myself to writing what I want to write about fulltime. It's risky but at least I won't be sorry for never trying later in life.
Posted by: zeynep at May 11, 2006 12:21 PM
Excellent piece, April! I could rattle on for pages with recent anecdotes about this precise topic but will instead just leave you with this: I believe the quote about insanity can be attributed to Einstein. :-)
Posted by: Judith at May 11, 2006 1:16 PM
Wikipedia attributes the quote to Benjamin Franklin:
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insanity
Posted by: Nancy Stack at May 11, 2006 4:02 PM