Do any of you remember the calorie-restriction movement? I am not going to do it the honor of Googling it and finding a link, but it got a lot of attention about 15-20 years ago. It was this small movement of people who, inspired by research (in rats, I think) that suggested that eating very low-calorie diets could help you live longer, began subsisting on only a couple hundred calories a day. Watercress and water, that sort of thing. Apparently they got very skinny, but their skin glowed, and they claimed they’d never had more energy. (I could be getting most of these facts wrong, by the way. They don’t matter to this story.) An old college acquaintance of mine became a passionate advocate, so I paid a bit of attention for a while. Anyway, in one of the articles about CR, the writer got in a very good quip, something to the effect of, “You may not live longer, but it will seem as if you have.” The days pass pretty slowly when you are starving yourself.
I couldn’t get that line out of my mind as I read not one but two mentions in the past week of Peter Attia, a doctor who has a plan for helping you live longer, a plan that involves a lot of tests of blood levels of this and that, a lot of exercise, and, well, a lot of time. He popped up in the Times and in the Free Press. The articles are pretty interesting, even if the lives they describe—of people who spend their time trying to extend life, or avoid death altogether—sound pretty boring. They may not live longer, but their lives will seem longer.
Or will they?
What interests me about these people—real-life versions of the Silicon Valley tycoon who, in the HBO show Silicon Valley, hires a “blood boy” to transfuse into him younger, healthier blood—
—is that they don’t seem to be bored by all this work, the work to incrementally increase the chance that they’ll have a few more healthy years. They find this work interesting. I mean, I am as afraid of death (and decline) as the next person; if you could tell me that by running in place for an hour a day, staring at a blank wall and listening to Atlantic Starr slow jams on my refurbished high school Walkman, I could extend my healthy life by five years, I’d probably take that bet. But I’d hate my life during that one hour of exercise every day. And I probably would keep the shades drawn.
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