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September 8, 2007
In Case You Were Wondering...
Very entertaining comment showed up last night:
"I had a hard time figuring out what this website was about! I was first looking for information about curbing my appetite with vinegar, thought I'd stumbled upon a pro-ana site, then found some good recipes to my surprise, then thought, "this is a hell of a lot of emphasis to put on food and diet" (albeit extremely important I agree but daaaang, this is a lot of talk about food from one person!), and now, I've concluded, I spend so much time obsessing about my weight and food in an unhealthly way (namely in a lifelong struggle with ED), who am I to judge this woman on her obsession? At least it is healthy...I think? Oh well, I dunno, it is all interesting nevertheless."
First, I have no information on using vinegar to curb your appetite. The very thought of vinegar makes me want to:
a) make a kale salad and top it with vinegar and cottage cheese
b) go to Williams Sonoma and spend the money that should go towards paying our bills on every kind of fancy vinegar
c) Play with fruits and veggies and spices, put them into jars with various kinds of vinegar, and make my own fancy vinegars.
Clearly, I am not a role model.
Anyhow, it's always good to remind ourselves of what we're doing ("Who am I? Why am I here?") so a quick review: this blog is about Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition, the only known method of slowing the biological aging process in mammals. It's worked in just about every animal on which it's been tested, so now a few unusual people are trying to see if it works in humans. So far our health, our bloodtests, and our overall vitality seem to indicate that it at least makes humans healthier (when practiced correctly -- it doesn't work to just eat less junk food!) and we'll see, as we get chronologically older, if it works in the long term.
Since it's very hard to do this in a food environment where so much junk food is agressively marketed to us every minute of the day, a few of us have decided to blog about our experience to show how it can be done, get feedback from others and suggestions, and share thoughts and ideas. We have a lot of fun with this.
If it seems like the blog is about food, that's because it is. Sometimes I write about other things, like my work organizing nurses, but mostly the blog is about CR (hence the title) and so that's going to be the focus of many entries.
I like to cook, so I talk about recipes a lot.
Those of us who do CR do several unusual things:
a) consciously choose to restrict our calories below what we would eat if we were just eating whatever we "want"
b) monitor our nutrition using nutritional software to make sure we're getting the nutrition we need from our food (hence talk of RDAs)
c) work with our physicians to get at least annual bloodtests done to monitor our overall heatlh and progress
I also strongly suggest that anyone practicing CR do bone building exercise, like running, lifting weights, or jumping rope, and cardio exercise for your heart, and a good balance and flexibility exercise like Pilates to decrease your risk of fracture due to falling later in life, but that's not an official stance, that's just me. (More on bone building supplements later, I haven't forgotten your question Yvonne, I just need MR to answer a few questions for me before I write about the supplements he designed and he's out of town.)
Some of us do other things, like donate to the Mprize or SENS research to improve the possibility that better, biomedical interventions will come to be that will slow or reverse our aging process far beyond what CR could possibly do.
Those who want more information should go to the website of the Calorie Restriction Society. I can't put in any links because I'm on my dad's computer and it messes with the blogging software, but google it: I did, and it changed my life!
Posted by april at September 8, 2007 8:03 AM