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Will cutting calories make you live longer? — 10 Comments

  1. I need to live another 20 years in order to see Creighton in the Final Four. But I will never live long enough to see the Cornhuskers in the Final Four.

  2. It is depressing to read the calorie burn of what seems like serious exercise. Swim hard for half an hour and that’s half a Krispy Creme.
    Still, I talked with a tri-athlete who said, that, when in serious training, he could easily eat six thousand calories a day. (I can do that without training). It would stand to reason, then, that if he ate five thousand calories, he would shortly die of starvation. Or have to quit training.
    It is difficult. But if you keep your cookies and crackers around the house to a minimum, you might save a couple of hundred calories a day. There’s a kind of low-level craving you would feed if it were easy but not if there were any effort to it. You’d eat a cracker. But you wouldn’t go out and by a package, nor make up a batch.

  3. the medical model is so wrong no one even looks at it to fix it
    i have had discussions and have shown that their model does NOT match reality..

    and the things your mentioing from caloric restruction to a kind of immortality if you could stop the dings of outrageous fortune (started by the man who invented the nuclear bomb – not einstein)

    tons of stuff
    but even a cursory glance at their model and what is known would show its not even close.. and they just ignore it.

    i worked out the math, but im a nobody
    and ramanujans era is over, so dying in obscurity is best
    cant wait
    really..
    with what they have done to me at work and now, i cant wait.

  4. I have been on quite the journey lately in an effort to be able to run a full marathon and to lose some weight. I am over 50 and found that with the onset of menopause, I was rapidly gaining weight. I had been running 4 to 6 miles every few days but had not changed my diet and was unable to lose weight. I read Taubes and tried many things but found that a Ketogenic diet worked well for a while for me. However, after a while, I once again was unable to lose weight that I needed to lose in order to be able to run faster and longer.

    After several years of frustrating diets that seemed to come with weight gain, I finally broke down and consulted with a sports dietitian. She evaluated what I like to eat along with what my goals were. My goals were modest….lose a little weight (maybe 20 or so lbs) and be able to survive running a full marathon within about 4 months. She noted that I was still mostly doing a ketogenic diet but put me back on certain carbs (beans, winter squash, root vegetables, colored potatoes with skin, oats, berries, small apples and oranges) I still got most of the same protein and fats but she did ask me to cut back the amount of bacon that is prevalent in keto diets and to add more nuts and seeds for fat. I also experimented with things to eat while on long runs to see how my stomach would tolerate them and had to make sure to consume a lot of water with electrolytes and salt sticks.

    I did manage to run\walk my first full marathon this year. It was difficult and I think I need to do more to help myself get through it better. However, along the way, I have lost about 15 lbs with most of that loss from loosing body fat, lost 5% of my total body fat, gone down inches in nearly every part of my body and down 2 clothes sizes so far. I feel like I may be down another size but am afraid to test out that theory. To top it all off, I feel like I am starving all the time now when before I used to not be hungry but would eat anyway. I am taking care to eat good carbs and other things and seem to not be gaining weight despite eating a LOT lately.

    Since my full marathon I have run another half marathon (that makes half marathon #14 over 8 years) but am finding that my body needs a rest from running. I was logging what I eat for the dietician but have lapsed on that for the past 2 weeks. Logging food is a huge pain in the neck but I will restart my logging so that I don’t fall too far off the wagon during my break.

    I feel like my story is a study in how diets work for some and not others. And I finally had to consult with a specialist who listened to me to get things right. Hopefully what I am doing now will keep having benefits and get my weight down even further. What I want to leave off with is that if anyone here is struggling with their weight, please find a dietician to work with. I was very skeptical that I would get much out of my engagement but am very pleased and will likely re-engage with her this fall when I start training for my next marathon.

  5. I got interested in calorie restriction after reading the book by Roy Walford. Average lifespan extension by calorie restriction with optimal nutrition has been shown repeatedly in studies from nematodes to recently higher primates like rhesus monkeys. See for example this Scientific American article

    It is not sufficient just to reduce calories, you have to do it with a diet that provides the nutrients your body needs. And of course it does not lead to immortality. It does extend average lifespan by “squaring up” the mortality curve. Practically that means you stay healthy until shortly before you die–not the steady decline that most people have.

    To get the full benefit, the suggestion is to find the number of calories, again with full nutrition, that keeps you at your weight set point and then drop 10-15%. That’s too much for me but I have managed to stay at my set point. I am in my late 60’s and weigh as much as I did in my 30’s. A lot of that is probably genetics but I have found that if I eat restaurant or frozen prepared food I gain weight.

    I look at it like something I read in a book about test pilots. They could not control things going wrong but if they went down they did it while doing the things that they were supposed to be doing.

  6. First of all 50+ years later, I weigh 2 pounds more than when I graduated from HS. I have a high metabolism which helps, plus I eat and usually drink with moderatio, and now that my new knee has healed, I walk 3 miles a day. I say this not to brag, but to note weight problems usually result from too many calories and not enough exercise.

    However, there are exceptions. We are not born equal.

  7. If someone said, start using Meth and once you’re good and hooked, we’ll see if we can cure you of it, you’d probably think it was a crazy thing to do.

    The point is, you shouldn’t have to be cured of it, because before you tried it there was no problem.

    I’m afraid the best solution is to never be introduced to anything but healthy foods.

    Before I started anything, I never suffered from missing it, whether it was cigarettes, or candy bars, or soft drinks. I didn’t have a problem with any of those, I developed it.

  8. I did well with Tim Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Body Diet” — four small meals a day of protein, veggies and beans, but nothing high-glycemic (sugar, flour, fruit). Slow-carb in other words.

    It was pretty boring but you also got one day per week to go wild and eat anything you wanted. The idea was to prevent your body from lowering your metabolism in response to dieting. I lost about 20 lbs in three months.

    Then my life went crazy for various non-diet reasons and I didn’t get back to it.

  9. Here’s a flaw that I see in the above…

    When attempting to reduce one’s weight, the proper approach is not ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and’.

    I combined lowered calories with an increase in exercise. This allowed me (I think) to kick my metabolism up a smidge, or at least not let it drop. I found that weight training did help. An increase in muscle mass in theory increases your daily calorie burn. It may not matter that much in the short term, but certainly over time I think it may help.

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