Want to lose weight, get healthier, and live to be oh... 160? Spit out that left over Halloween candy and start counting calories.
No, really.
"Michael's dinner is always 639 calories," April explains, eyes on the screen while her fingers dance across the keyboard, tweaking portions. She makes the job look easier than it can possibly be, like one of those kids who can solve a Rubik's Cube in under a minute. "I'm so used to doing this now. If I need more protein, I add more protein. If I need a little bit more carb, I add more strawberry. Ohhh, and I forgot the ricotta for the dessert... see? Now I have to mess with it. So 45 calories of nonfat ricotta, so I have to take out some protein, so I need to take out another scallop from the salad. Take out some strawberries from the dessert..."
This comes from a long and quite readable article about the Ultra Extreme Calorie-Restriction Diet, a sub-2000 calorie a day program the author of the piece, semi-famous
MMORPG econ guy Julian Dibbell lost twenty pounds on over the two months prior to the big dinner party detailed in the article. How do people on this diet look?
There's no mistaking the peculiarly lean little crowd gathered here, and the recognition is mutual. Paul, blue-blazered, gray-haired, with the face and gaze of a preppy Don Knotts and the approximate body-mass index of a Noguchi floor lamp (five foot eleven, 137 pounds), gives me a once-over and grins... Michael, stands beside her at the ready: a boyish-looking 35-year-old with brush-cut red hair, translucently pale skin, and-at six feet tall and 115 pounds-an eerily spare physique.
Divide Michael's weight by the square of his height and you get a body-mass index of 15.6. Compare that with the minimum BMI of 18 recently decreed by the organizers of the Madrid Fashion Week -- who cited the World Health Organization’s definition of 18.5 as the lower limit of healthy weight and offered medical assistance to any models who couldn't meet it -- and you might wonder how Michael can stand up in the morning, let alone jog twenty miles a week. But jog he does, and if the results of both his latest physical and the latest CR research are anything to go by, Michael is probably one of the healthiest 35-year-olds on the planet.
The diet is a highly scientific one, with nutrients measured to the percentage point, and it absolutely works. Everyone who sticks to it loses weight, cuts their cholesterol, improves their eyesight, ends other health problems, and so on. No one has stuck with it long enough to know how it works on human longevity, but it extends the life span of rats, mice, and numerous other lab animals by 50% or more, and there's no scientific reason that shouldn't apply to humans, even though one has yet figured out exactly why it extends life so much.
Sticking to it is obviously the hard part, and while Dibbell lasted two months and lost twenty pounds, the dinner party was a sort of sanity check that led him to immediate dietary insanity.
Late in the morning on the first day after my dinner party, I awaken hungry, go downstairs, walk into the first McDonald's I encounter, and consume, for breakfast, an entire Quarter Pounder with cheese and a 12-ounce chocolate triple-thick shake. Later, at the cocktail hour, I drink several Cuba Libres and eat cheese-laden canapes to my heart's content. For dinner, I stop in at Katz's Delicatessen on Houston Street and ingest one half of a two-inch-thick pastrami on rye, half a corned-beef sandwich just as massive, several pickled tomatoes, and a cream soda, and only after eating a slab of chocolate-coated Haagen-Dazs ice cream on a stick at bedtime do I begin to feel the first, light pangs of queasiness. For the first time in 63 days, I end the day without the slightest idea how many calories I ate or the least desire to know.
The diet is interesting, since it directly confronts the common human desire to live forever. How badly do you really want immortality, or at least another 40-50 years? Badly enough to never gorge again? To cut out all candy bars and sodas and beers and second helpings? To give up any intense physical activity? To measure out your every meal and portion precisely, both by weight and nutritional content? For most people, me included, the answer is definitely no. We're all much more comfortable living in denial, eating what we like, encouraging ourselves by looking at really unhealthy people, and hoping for some miracle scientific breakthrough not only in our lifetimes, but while we're young enough to appreciate it. Go go scientists!
Labels: diet, immortality
