Extreme CR (again)

[Guest guest]

Walford talks about his own CR on page 239 of "Beyond the 120 Year Diet." There he says that to relate the animal experiments to his own life, he would have had to lose 15 to 37 pounds. He began at a set point of 150 to 155 pounds. (He's not a tall man.) At age 76, he said he weighed 130 and exercised vigorously. So that's 20 to 25 pounds, right in the middle of the 15 to 37 pound range, after having been on CR for 12 years.

He also recommends a BMI of less than 19 or 20 for those of average musculature, and states that the typical fashion model is about 18. So being "somewhat underweight," like a fashion model, is a reasonable goal. If you ever cruised the pro-anorexia sites (before bad publicity shut them down,) you realize that true anorexics make most fashion models look quite healthy. My take on Walford's "fashion model" analogy, which he uses at least twice in the book, is that the fashion-model look, or a BMI of 18, is probably about right. Perhaps I'm reading too much between the lines, but he did NOT advocate anywhere in the book that we should aim to look like anorexics. He does briefly discuss that anorexia is an interesting but unfortunate illness with potentially disastrous consequences if practiced long-term.

Walford says a man's bodyfat should not drop below 5%, and a woman should go below 10 to 15%. That's actually a broad range for women. I know that when I'm at 15% (measured hydrostatically) I look "somewhat underweight." At 12% I begin to experience some of the symptoms of anorexia. I've been lower than that and it wasn't fun.

I'll also reiterate that the lab animals I've seen on CR looked quite athletic to me, not at all sickly thin. Yeah I know they have FUR...but still. They also don't have to operate heavy machinery or do long-division in their heads.

Suz