April's Low Tech, Happy, Easy Version of CR

I promised some new readers some more food-related content, since if you're looking for ideas for what to eat on a daily basis, you might not have found much in the last few days to help you.

Today I'm having one of my very low tech CR weekdays. Here's what I'm eating today:

280 calories of fat free cottage cheese, 42 g protein, 70% of the RDA of calcium. I mix a little tabasco into it. I had some for breakfast and some with lunch.

For lunch along with half the container of cottage cheese, I ate about a cup and a half of my gazpachzo that I made on Saturday. It has organic whole peeled tomatoes, blended in the food processor with red bell pepper, cucumber, the juice of one lemon, and a large clove of garlic. I added paprika and cumin, a tablespoon of lemon herb olive oil, and a little salt and pepper. I add tabasco to it before eating... as you may have guessed, I like spicy food.

Tonight I'll eat my brewers yeast soup, which is made of two cups free range organic chicken broth mixed with two tablespoons brewers yeast, a little salt, and half a bag of frozen broccoli, cauliflower and carrots. That has 221 calories and is very warm and filling. The brewers yeast solves a lot of my nutritional problems, like iron and copper, and I like the taste. I've also learned to like nuts, so lately I've been eating about 200 calories of hazelnuts or almonds at night. Those are really filling. I think I'll stick with the hazelnuts that I've had the last couple of days because I'm not tempted to overeat them, as I sometimes am with almonds. When I was little, I hated nuts, but have grown to like them, no doubt a sign of emotional maturity.

My favorite thing to do at night is to curl up in bed with a bunch of blankets, a glass of red wine, and a good article... back in the early days it was all stuff directly related to CR, and mostly about specific food choices, but lately I've been on an Aubrey de Grey kick. More on that later.

My whole day, added up carefully in Dr. Walford's Interactive Diet Planner, comes up to 990 calories. It's got over 100% of the RDA's of everything except: iron 54%, manganese 90%, and zinc 44%. Not bad for under 1000! And check this out (you have to have been reading the blog for awhile to know why this is so exciting for me: 30% protein, 34% fat, 36% carbs! When I started CR, my idea of protein for the day was one hard boiled egg, and I thought oil was something you put in cars. Lots of normal people think that all fat is bad, but some kinds of fats are really important. I've tried it both ways, and I feel so much better now. I especially notice when I don't get enough protein. The high carb roller coaster makes you think you want things you don't. Like bagels. Or Dunkin Donuts coffee with cream and sugar. Or tickets to a Brittney Spears concert. Or whatever.

So that's my day. Low calorie, great nutrition, and I'm never particularly hungry. Also note: all my food is very easy to prepare. The cottage cheese I just buy in large containers, the gazpachzo I made in about twenty minutes on Saturday, and the soup takes maybe five minutes to prepare at night. Nuts live in the freezer, wine keeps with a stopper in the fridge (the wine store people say to put it in a sealed glass jam jar to keep it fresher, but I have a thing about opening jars so I don't.)

It took me a long time to develop an easy CR lifestyle that works for me, and it might take you some time and effort too. What you eat is so personal... what you like, what you're willing to make time for, how much hassle you're willing to put up with from the people in your family and social circles. If you're new to CR, try some of the things I do, but try other things too. Read Mary's blog at www.crdiary.blogspot.com, and see how two women eating similar calorie levels eat radically different things, but still great great ON! There's no one way to eat. Try it and see what works for you.

But I beg of you: buy yourself some nutritional software. Nutribase, DWIDP, whatever. I thought I was eating healthy before I bought my software, and the first time I put a "good" day into the DWIDP, I almost died of shock. It's worth the $48 to know that you're giving your body what it needs. You'll feel the difference, I promise. Just go do it. Go do it now. Go on. Click on www.walford.com. You're wasting your time trying to figure out what to eat until you have the software. And no, I do not have any financial connection to walford.com, or really to much of anything. Just buy the software. And eat your protein. Please. I promise, you'll be glad you did. It'll change your whole life.

What I Made For Dinner

My science advisor got right back to me on the new revisions on the blog entry we've been working on... and then I went and changed a bunch of stuff, so now it needs one more look before it's ready to fire off. I just want you all to know that it's entirely my own fault that I have to create more food related content to entertain you while you wait for the big stuff.

Here's what I made for dinner:

-- shrimp and scallops in a Williams Sonoma sauce that had roasted garlic and chiles, no oil
-- my vegetable soup: free range organic chicken broth, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, brewer yeast, juice of one lemon, 1 tablespoon lemon herb olive oil, dash salt.
-- my mother contributed a pumpkin bread pudding that was amazing and had no butter or anything, just pumpkin, rasins, pineapples, and German bread. Wow, it was so good.
-- little vanilla creme wafers from my mom's trip to Germany, the same kind that are in that Absolut Vanille billboard, pictured bowing down in worship of the vodka.

Side note inside baseball for CR list subscribers: when MR talks about "absolute calories," am I the only person who imagines an Absolut ad that somehow conveys this concept? Of course vodka is not a useful CR food (please don't take this to be a blog entry endorsing vodka, though I've been known to have the occasional Ketel One and cranberry) but that advertising concept is so embedded in my brain that I can't hear "absolute ____" without thinking of it.

Now that's catchy advertising. I must learn from this.

Yes, it's 4 am and I've been writing for two hours. I can't sleep, okay? And before you all tell me what I should take for insomnia, remember that I wouldn't produce nearly as much blog content if I could sleep through the night.

General, Count Me In

Princess Leia, of course. Go re-watch the movie until you find it. As you would expect, I knew the context of the quote as soon as I saw it in an email message yesterday morning. If there's one thing I know even better than the CR Society archives, it's the Star Wars movies.

It's the title of this post because it sums up my response to the latest round of debate about what I should do to contribute to the cause of ending aging as we know it.

For weeks now I've been talking about the blog entries I'm working on. I've spent most of my writing time over the last few days revising them, and they're almost, but not quite, ready. I'm waiting on the final okay from my science advisors.

A preview of coming attractions:

What started as an off-hand question to Michael Rae at the CRS Conference about what he would do with $23 million dollars for anti-aging research turned into a two hour debate between several of the most brilliant people in the world (all of whom are of course CR Society members!) My CR world was turned upside down, and I started to question all of my assumptions and everything I thought I had learned.

Don't worry... we're not about to revisit the quest for the right source of protein. I'm just fine with my eggwhites, thanks. Those hours of archive searches weren't wasted at all... in fact, if it weren't for all I learned in the last eight months, I wouldn't have even dared to ask the questions I now found myself addressing directly to my CR superheroes.

"What can I, personally, do to cure aging?"

The suspense is killing you, isn't it? Well, you'll have to wait just a bit longer. There's so much I don't know, and I've relied heavily on people who understand far more than I do. I'm hoping that their investment of time in energy in me will more than pay off. I may be prone to delusions of grandeur, but I think it will.

So wait just a bit longer... and I'll entertain you with some food related content in the meantime.

You Don't Even Know Who Liz Phair Is

No, that's not a comment on the failure of the vast majority of my readers to understand my pop music quotations. It's a line from a Liz Phair song called "Rock Me," located on the same album as "Extraordinary," and the title of a blog entry I've carried around in my head for months.

One Friday night in July, very soon after I began writing the blog, I was lying on the couch recovering from a girls' night out in Center City Philly, slightly dizzy from the effects of my 800 calorie a day experiment combined with a little cheap champagne from the Zanzibar Blue (an excellent jazz club, if you happen to be in Philly) happy hour. I was blasting "Rock Me" into my ears from my walkman. In the song, Liz Phair appears to be talking about her fling with a much younger musician who is unaware of her rockstar credentials but thinks she's cool anyway. In my habit of mentally bending pop music that has nothing to do with CR to be about CR, I somehow related the song to my blog.

Here's how it goes: Liz Phair had been a successful rockstar with something of a cult following. Then she meets this young musician (nine years her junior) who likes her for who she really is, not just for the hit records she's made. Chaos, scandal, and pop music ensue.

At the time, I was thinking about how nice it was that I was getting so many blog readers who had no idea who I was, and that I was making so many CR friends whose primary interest in me had nothing to do with my reputation as an organizer.

In the beginning, I was very careful to omit details of my work and personal life. Part of my motivation, as I've mentioned before, was concern about the blog being misinterpreted as a long and bizarre personal ad. While a girl going on at length about the quality of asparagus available in her local markets might not seem all that prone to misinterpretation, with all the weird stuff that goes on in the online world, one can never be too careful.

My other motivation for being intentionally vague about my personal and professional situations was that I very much enjoyed a mental break from my regular life, in which most of the people with whom I interact know me as a union organizer. As much as I enjoy hanging out with other labor movement people, it was nice to make friends who don't even know who April Smith is.

Organizing, if you're good, is a very consuming lifestyle. You talk to workers all the time, you work nights, weekends, holidays, months on end. You build intense relationships with workers during campaigns, and you have to be there for them, answering your cell phone or your pager at all hours of the day and night.

I have been very successful as an organizer. I've led many winning campaigns, and I've paid the price in terms of hours and refusing to be tied down by things like husbands or children. I'll spare you the details, but about a year before I started CR I led a successful organizing campaign at the largest hospital in Vermont. It was the kind of campaign that usually comes around only once in an organizer lifetime, and it broke a bunch of records.

The art and science of organizing is far from what it appears. To be successful, an organizer has to fundamentally change workers' worldview from one in which they are powerless into one in which, by joining together with their co-workers, they can change their working conditions. Challenging people's basic assumptions is a messy job, and it requires being comfortable with a level of conflict that most people can't stand. Every day, I confront people's deepest fears. Fear of losing their job, fear of losing their co-workers' respect, fear of just plain being wrong. I'm the person they yell at, the person they call at 2 in the morning, the person who is there for them when they're angry and scared and frustrated and in despair. I'm not just a teacher or a counselor, I push people to change things. Information alone rarely moves people to action. I take over where the information leaves off, connecting the dots in people's minds between their objective conditions and the power to change them.

When people assume that they can't change something, they have no motivation to try. It's been my job for nine years to prove to people that they can change their work lives, and to push them to take the actions they need to take to do it. Even when those actions are difficult and frightening. Even when that means going against everything they've ever been taught about how the world works.

When I talk to my friends and co-workers about CR, or about any sort of anti-aging intervention that might produce a real cure, I am met with responses like, "Aging... isn't that what we're doing since the day we're born?" "It's nice that you're healthy, but you're not going to forever." "Why would you want to live that long anyway?"

De Grey talks about aging as an engineering problem, and I'm sure he's right. But it seems to me that getting the funding to solve that engineering problem is largely an organizing problem. And I've been wondering a lot lately if an organizer might be of some use in the fight.

Suggestions welcome.

Women's Magazines

Last night in the airport I picked up one of those "women's" magazines, having decided that after driving from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, drinking two drinks with my new friends in the airport bar, and eating eggdrop soup (wow, it has been a terrible nutritional two days... no wonder I feel like crap... no giving up CR for me, not even after... but we're jumping ahead...) I lacked the mental focus necessary to give Dr. de Grey my full attention.

Now if you're looking for a diatribe about how those magazines are trash, how women shouldn't focus so much on beauty and pleasing men, you'd better read someone else's blog. I find those magazines very entertaining. I've often thought of myself as something of a later day, less uptight, better housekeeping, female Martin Luther, both as a freedom fighter and also as a lover of wine, women, and song... or in my case, wine, men, and pop music. So I am not offended by the content of Cosmo.

However, I don't read them nearly as often as I did when I was younger, so last night was the first time I had taken a look at a Glamour in awhile. In the magazine I found an article by the author of _The Vagina Monologues_, I can't remember her name but you know who she is. She was talking about her new play, I think it's called _The Good Body_, and urging women to give up their obsessions with their bodies in favor of other, more important pursuits. Like, say, taking over the world.

I've always had mixed reactions to this kind of advice. First, I wholeheartedly assent to the premise of Naomi Wolf's _Beauty Myth_. Keeping women focused on beauty, and keeping women divided into categories of irrelevant (if you're not pretty) and slutty (if you're too pretty) is a great tool for oppression.

However, I've never believed in "accept yourself the way you are, even if you're obese." What we eat is something that, unless we are in prison, we have some control over. Yes, it's hard. Yes, I struggled my entire life before March 26, 2004, with the whole body thing. But being relatively thin can be done, and there's tons of ways to do it. I was thin as a lowfat vegan, I'm thinner as a CR'd Zone wannabe, whatever, and I'm not one of those girls who is naturally skinny. Left to my nachos and margaritas, I look like a fertility goddess in a size eight petite.

The thing that was remarkable about this reading of the "Stop worrying about your body, accept yourself the way you are and take over the world!" advice was that for once, I was not one of the 99.9% of women cited as hating some part of their bodies.

That's right. I feel guilty saying it, the other women will no doubt come after me with pitch forks and pumpkin pie tomorrow, but I am happy with my body.

The author of play (wish I could remember her name) is right... liberation from the body hatred that governs most women's lives really does free up a lot of energy!

This will be hard for the brothers to understand, but the sisters should get it right off. Being set free from the "If only I were... thinner, more in shape, blah blah blah" mental feedback loop is like being given an entirely new life.

That's why I think it's so funny when people ask if CR takes a lot of time. Sure, it takes time to play with my DWIDP, to cook my veggies instead of grabbing a burrito, and it takes willpower to not eat like crap all the time. But compared to the constant mental self-bashing of the normal American woman... CR is the world's biggest time saver.

Yes, yes, yes, CR is not about weight loss. Yes yes yes, eventually I may get so thin that everyone will say, "You were prettier before." I remind you, it's not a contest for the cutest mouse.

Living in a way that is extremely healthy, refusing to poison myself with the deadly cocktail of bad food and bad body image, is unbelievably liberating.

Being back in my dad's house brings me back to all the struggles I've had with body image and weight. It's kinda scary to write about it because a) it's not considered cool for girls to talk about ever having body image issues b) I am terrified of not being taken seriously, and I am already fighting a lack of science background that makes me annoyingly clueless way too often. But I think it's important for us girls to be open about this stuff. If we talk about it, maybe we can save other women from the hell we went through. Maybe it just makes us feel better. In any case, here goes:

I was never anorexic. I suffer from a certain amount of survivor's guilt because several of my friends were very seriously anorexic, and one almost died. Have you guys ever read Marya Hornbacher's _Wasted_? It's a bit of an anorexic cult classic. She went to my high school... I am actually in the background in one scene, though not identified. As she got smaller, she gave me her old clothes. I was pretty tiny too, but at a performing arts high school where dancers were marked down on their grade reports for gaining weight, a curvy girl felt fat. However, the example of my friends losing their youth, their freedom, and almost losing their lives, made me too scared to go down that road. So while I wasn't always happy with my body, I did the Jane Fonda workout and ate bagels with mustard (remember those lowfat late eighties?) instead of starving myself. I was also lucky enough to have some great boyfriends and friend-boys who would talk me into sense when I started asking "Do I look fat?" For some reason, men were easier to believe than women. Your mom can say you're beautiful, but it really means something coming from the cutest boy in the class.

I remember the scale in the bathroom I shared with my step-brother at my dad's house. When I was in seventh grade, I weighed 108. I was exactly as tall as I am now, 5' 1.75" and I was one of those girls who started looking like a woman earlier rather than later. On a routine doctor's visit, my doctor told me that she thought I was getting heavy and needed to lose weight.

I stopped eating. I dropped to 92. I looked like a little ghost, and my parents were concerned, but you see, all the girls were shrinking. It's just what we all did. We didn't know about nutrition or anything like that... we thought that skipping lunch would make us look like we were supposed to look. I remember being so hungry that I once ate an entire candy bar that some kid on the bus was selling to pay for the band's trip to New York City.

Years later, when I was in college, I went back to visit the doctor who had said I was too fat and told her how that made me feel. We both had a good cry, and she said, "We just didn't understand back then."

I eventually re-fed, went away to school, fought the anorexic wars and won, and helped some other girls pull through. When I look back on those days of holding back my friend's hair while she threw up, or figuring out exactly what to feed a girl who had fainted due to hunger but just couldn't keep food down anymore (not eating makes it harder to eat... you feel sick when the food hits you) I feel so sad about the youth that was stolen from me and all those other girls. And some boys too... they were far from immune. It wasn't so much about thinness for us, though of course we thought that was the focus. It was about power, about controlling the one thing we had control of in a world where we were powerless.

I survived, but that bathroom scale never lost its grip... after I gained weight in college (knowing the location of every french fry in New Haven will do that!) I got into the lowfat vegetarian thing, at first to lose weight. It worked! 130 -> 110, my pre-CR lowest adult weight. I looked great, and felt a whole lot better than I did on the french fry and frozen mocha diet (does anyone out there remember the Daily Cafe, home of the frozen mocha? Ah, those sunny spring afternoons, skipping class and quoting Nietzche with my friend Katherine... I did enjoy college.) The weight came and went over the next eight years... up during periods of boredom and overwork, down during periods of excitement like the aftermath of the Republican National Convention (how can you eat when there are hunger strikers in jail? how can you eat when you have to clean up after six anarchists who are camping out in your living room?)

I've been thin, I've been really thin, I've been a little heavy, but up until now, I've never been at peace with my body.

Exorcism of the twin demons of anxiety and negative body image isn't like being quietly set free from a cage -- it's like smashing a mirror with a hammer. And the most important thing is that I did it myself... I carefully and quietly, sometimes obsessively, turned over every little corner of every book I could find, years of the CR Society archives, and the shelves of Whole Foods, until I found a way to save myself. At the time I thought I was just afraid of annoying the other people on the list by posting silly questions... in retrospect, I see how important it was that I did so much research on my own. While there were so many times that I could have asked, I had to figure it out for myself. Now I can look back and say "This is mine. I saved my own life."

Does that help you understand why I want so much to give something back? If you thought you were going to serve a life sentence, and you had resigned yourself to that, then suddenly they kick you out of jail, you have a whole new life! You've gotta do something with it!

I've been wrestling over the last few weeks, especially since the CRS Conference, with the question of what specifically I should do with all my newfound freedom and energy. I've been writing about it, and I've gotten some wonderful help from two CR brothers whose work is a constant inspiration to me.

Over the next few weeks, you'll read the details of my existential dilemma. I had no idea when I started CR that any of this would happen, but when I look back at last winter, I can see the storm brewing. I had, in a relatively short period of time, gotten almost everything I had ever wanted, both professionally and personally. At the same time, my anxiety was eating me alive and my health was going the way of most American woman in their thirties... to hell. These two forces hitting each other was bound to produce something weird.

I can't thank you, the people all over the world who read this nutty blog, enough for your support. When I think I'm about to get hit by a truck on the PA Turnpike, my first thought is, "Thank God some of the brothers have my blog password... someone has to tell my readers if I die!" The next few phases of this journey may take us into some unfamilliar territory. I hope you'll come along with me, and I hope that you'll find these new ideas just as challenging and difficult and powerful as I do. I won't stop telling you what I ate, throwing out easy, low calorie, always delicious recipies. You'll still hear about my cat's hunting trips, my eggwhites, and my adventures with VLC. But I may be going in a direction that neither of us expected when we first met. I hope all that I've written tonight, as weird as it was to share, will help you understand why I am so determined to go running down that road.

I'll close with my favorite quote from Martin Luther, a historical figure who may have had almost as many catchy lines as Michael Rae.

"Here I stand. I can not do otherwise. So help me God."

One Fine Day

George Clooney and Michelle Phiffer (that's not how you spell her name, but you know who I mean, the former Catwoman) movie that I watched at my dad's house last night. I don't own a television or a VCR (or a DVD or whatever it is these days,) so it's rare that I watch a movie.

It's the title of this post because Thanksgiving went relatively well. My relatives were very supportive of my new mid-CR look, and no one shrieked "You're too thin!"

I did okay on food. I started with a plate of six steamed shrimp, no cocktail sauce, just lemon, and a plate of salad: lettuce, tomato, cucumber, onion, and olives, no dressing. Then I got a plate of steamed veggies: broccoli, sweet potato and acorn squash, as well as tiny tastes of my old favorites: about a tablespoon of mashed potato, stuffing and green bean casserole. Just enough to taste it, but not enough to make up more than one bite of each. I had a tiny sliver of the apple pie and a bite of the baked Alaska, a dessert which fascinated me as a child, since I never did figure out how they got the ice cream inside the cake and meringue. If anyone knows how they do that, please write in. I am fascinated by all engineering, from biomedical to baking.

My grandparents were sprightly and adoreable as ever, and my aunt and uncle brought my aunt's mother who is 97. My niece Madeline was busy being adoreable and throwing herself into my father's pumpkin soup, while her mom, my sister-in-law, handled it all with patience. She had a baby in April and is already back to her pre-baby figure, which is astounding. I told her I hope my step-brother spends every waking hour thanking God that this beautiful, calm, patient, smart woman married him. I suspect that he does. He's a very intelligent man.

As I always seem to do when I am in the land of free flowing excellent wine (aka my father's house,) I drank more calories in alcohol than are helpful. I had a small one of my dad's world famous Bloody Mary's before Thanksgiving dinner, and merlot with the meal. Later on at around 10 last night my step-mother showed me her interesting new creation of orange zinger Celestial Seasonings tea with a dash of orange juice and a dash of Myers' Dark Rum, so I had one of those. I hope I haven't lost too many brain cells to the neurotoxins.

Today I was back on the straight and narrow. Well, I skipped breakfast, which wasn't good, but I ate a good lunch of romaine with tomato, celery, red onion, beets, balsamic vinegar, and a half cup of cottage cheese. Then my mother cooked us Thanksgiving dinner late, with free range organic turkey, cranberry sauce, green beans, and a small steamed sweet potato. It was delicious. Her cat didn't seem interested in the turkey, but I am about to take leftovers home to Kieffer, who I'm sure will behave in a more cat-appropriate fashion.

So Loud That You Can't Help But Listen

A line from an ancient XTC song I am listening to on my walkperson. I hope that it does not describe the sound of my typing, as my parents are asleep in the next room. I have always been a rather loud typist.

It's 4 am and we join our regularly scheduled insomnia attack already in progress. I slept for a long time last night, the first night in my old bed at my dad's (I lived with my mom growing up but spent many weekends at my dad's, where my step-mother decorated a beautiful little pink room for me) so I shouldn't have expected to sleep through the night tonight. Luckily, my dad has internet access! DSL! Wow! Blogging in the middle of the night without a) waking the cat b) driving to the office! Nice! I've been up since 2:30, after going to bed somewhere between 11 and 12. Hmmmm... two - three hours of sleep, not good. Let us hope that I can write myself into exhaustion.

The trip to the neighbors' was lots of fun, but I ate way too much and now I don't feel like looking at food again, ever. This seems bad considering that tomorrow is a holiday dedicated to gluttony. At least there will be salad. The food was delicious... a Southern hostess is always concerned that her guests not leave hungry. Glad I hadn't eaten much during the day. Let's see: a small cup of cream of mushroom soup, five shrimp with cocktail sauce, two triangle shaped pieces of cheese and two thin slices of cheese on crackers, seven crackers with crab dip, five small cheese straw pieces, and two chips with guacamole. Two margaritas, two glasses of red wine. An eating and drinking event like I haven't seen in I don't know how long. Oh, and let's not forget the itsy bitsy sips of Scotch from the really strong, undiluted by spring water, as authentic as possible bottle of Scotch that my dad got at Caddenhead's (am I spelling right?) on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. Neurotoxins here we go. I am actually starting to like the stuff. Chalk it up to my ancestry. Decided to hit the place next time I make it to Edinburgh... my dad says if you act clueless they'll give you lots of free samples. My cluelessness will not be an act.

I feel rather terrible now, no doubt as a result of poisoning myself with too much food and drink. At least there is no danger that I offended the hostess by eating too lightly. The food really was excellent... Southerners can cook. I guess I sometimes have to eat and drink a lot to remind myself that I just can't eat and drink like that anymore and expect to feel okay. I hope I feel better by morning.

Whenever I go out to meet normal people, I expect one of two things to happen:

a) Someone will make a joke about my name being a month. Usually when they first are introduced, usually, "Where are May and June?"

b) Someone, upon finding out that I am a union organizer, will ask me if I know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.

I got both last evening. Perhaps a record.

But enough about that...

Go look at this and tell me if that's not the cutest mouse ever:

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=76595

(Yes, yes, I know that it's not a prize for the *cutest* mouse. That's the much better funded *Minnie* Mouse Prize.)

I don't want to say too much about that because I don't want to get into too much content that will be covered in later entries. I think I'll write an entry that was kicking around in my head last night on the plane. New entry...

You're Not Too Skinny!

That's what my step-mother said upon seeing me in the new mid-CR incarnation. My dad confessed to a certain amount of apprehension but agreed that I look healthy.

I took a play from Kenton's book and salt loaded last night... eggdrop soup and a salted pretzel at the airport. My flight was delayed several times, and I met the most fascinating people while hanging out in the airport bar. First, a woman sat down next to me and we started chatting... I won't go into too much detail about her as she has not consented to being a character in the blog, but as it turns out she has a PhD in pharmacology and we have a ton of interests in commom. We also live near each other and are about the same age, so we're going to hang out after the holiday. I am so excited... I am always on the lookout for new friend-girls, as my circle of close friends is mostly men. That's great when you need someone to get something down from a high shelf, or you want "the guy's perspective," or you need to field a basketball team for some reason. But sometimes a girl just wants to hang with girls, and I seem to have trouble finding many girls close to my age who share my outlook on the world. My closest friend-girls seem to have all moved away from town.

She left and I discovered that my plane was delayed yet again, so I ordered a glass of cabernet and a kid, about 22, sat down next to me. He was thinking of going to law school, but definitely had a "save the world" mentality to him, so I talked him into checking out the Organizing Institute's website and thinking about becoming a union organizer. I thought that made for a fair and balanced airport bar experience: I may have been chilling with my de Grey articles and the cool science girl, but then I did my part for the labor movement by recruiting some new organizer blood. It all works out in the end... I hope.

Today we went to Southern Season, as promised, and for the first time in about ten years my step-mother and I ordered the same thing for lunch: garden salad with steamed shrimp on top. Back in my lowfat vegan days, she was doing Atkins. You can imagine the difficulties of those days. Anywya, she was actually interested in the CR stuff, and detecting that I had a new and willing victim, I went on at great, great length. She now knows more than she ever wanted to about p:f:c ratios, good protein sources, where to get calcium, etc. We went shopping and I bought some very interesting pepper and spice mixes, the kind that come with a grinder, that looked like they would be fun to play with at home and add to recipes. I love spices. I love strong flavors of any kind.

We went to the grocery store near home after that and I was stopped dead in my tracks by the sight of the most beautiful skinny green asparagi I've seen in ages, but alas, I couldn't get them because we're going over to the neighbors' for "cocktails and heavy hors d'oeuvres." Hmmmm. I am a little concerned about what this will mean. I'm not hungry and I haven't had that many calories today, just the salad plus a few little grocery store samples, 500 calories today max but more likely around 400 (I am afraid of the calories in a small piece of cheese that I tasted) so I can afford a little. I have my brewers yeast with me, and am planning to eat some of that in broth after the event to fix some of the nutritional holes I know will be left in this day if I don't.

more soon more soon... my dad needs the computer.

A Girl Has To Have Travel Shampoo

I am on the road so much and often at such short notice that I keep a bag packed at all times.

No time to blog... driving across the state, then getting on a plane to go to North Carolina for Thanksgiving.

I should be able to blog from there.

Bread Served With Every Meal

More text from a diner wall. Before CR, sit in diners and wait for nurses. After CR, sit in diners and wait for nurses.

Now when is that enlightenment supposed to hit?

No time to really blog but a few quick observations:

-- Saw: Western PA -- beautiful this time of year.
-- Ate: one french fry off co-workers' plate. Wanted no more. I kid you not. I wonder if I should seek medical attention... I don't want french fries? I used to know the location of every good french fry in New Haven, and how late they were open. I knew that food cravings might disappear, but this is a little more than I had hoped for.
-- Ate: cottage cheese, tossed salad (no croutons) with vinegar. Gotta find something real for dinner. Food is not good at turnpike stops.
-- Drove: across PA. The whole darned state. Driving back tomorrow.
-- Entertained: two children, ages 7 and 4, by teaching them how to build towers out of half and half.
-- Regret: putting half and half and sugar in my coffee, which I almost never do, but diner coffee really sucks and needed something.
-- Noted: talking about the end of aging as we know it doesn't make people, or at least the random sampling of people I've talked to about it, nearly as defensive as talking about CR. I think it's cause they don't feel like their creme brulee is threatened.
-- Also noted: You can build towers out of small packets of jelly too, and they hold up better because they're flatter. Kids love that.
-- Received: Facinating email from CR brother re: links between low cal levels and a cure for anxiety. Must find out more re: this.


Gotta go. More later, but probably not tonight.

0 Petite

Well, now I'm back from The Mall, the King of Prussia Mall that is, and I'm feeling a little better. Thanks to all for your emails re: Katherine... it cheers me up a lot to know that there are blog friends out there thinking of me!

Meanwhile, back at the mall, I went to the Ann Taylor, found the one black suit in 0 petite, tried it on, it fit, I bought it. That was easy. At the risk of beating a dead horse, CR is not about weight loss. It's a side effect. But it's a pretty noticable side effect.

I also did a little more shopping, picked up some interesting sauces at William Sonoma to put on food, bought a new cranberry scented candle for my living room. There must be something about human nature that forces people, when confronted with a candle that is clearly labeled "unscented" to pick it up and smell it. I did it, and everyone else I observed in the Pottery Barn did it too. This is obviously a great project for a psych grad student out there somewhere.

I had a half cup of eggwhites over spinach for breakfast, along with 180 calories worth of cottage cheese. Put the green chile sauce over both. I thought it was a good sign that I was hungry this morning, since I tend to stop eating when I'm stressed out or sad. Kieffer is doing okay... I distracted him by playing with a whole walnut on the floor. He really enjoyed chasing it around and batting at it. CR has brought walnuts into my life, and thereby provided my cat with a new toy.

Tonight my mom is coming over for dinner (I'm going to be out of town all next week so I won't see her after tonight -- for those of you who are confused, we live a couple of blocks from each other, so it's easy for us to hang out. We lived in separate states for 12 years, then decided we liked to be in the same general area, so now here we are) and I'm making scallops with some of my new Williams Sonoma sauce, green beans, romaine lettuce salad with tomato. I was just entering everything in advance in my DWIDP, and figured out that if I eat my chicken broth brewers yeast soup and a fourth cup of hazelnuts (my mom found some for me, yea!) I can get my RDA's up over 100% for everything except just under on the usual suspects Zinc 54%, Iron 49%, and hey, what's up with vitamin C? I'm usually way over on vitamin C, and today it's hanging out at 74%. Well, I get so much vitamin C most days that I'm not going to mess with it. P:F:C 43:23:34. If I add some olive oil to the salad (or maybe to the soup... I put the lemon herb evoo in last night and it was delicious!) I can up that... let's try it... yea! 40:28:32. Sounds like a plan. I really don't understand how anyone can do this without software. For those who eat the same thing every day, and those who have been doing it so long that they know what to do, I suppose it's possible, but I eat basically the same foods every day and I'm lost without my software to help me figure out the combinations. I mean, left to my own devices without the little ratios staring at me from the DWIDP, I would eat only traces of fat. I wonder if it will ever come naturally to me. Such a freak accident that I came of cooking age in the lowfat era.

Ah, but the no fat no protein -> now crisis was beaten to death in the blog months ago, and I'm sure you guys will run screaming away from your computer if I rehash it again.

I'm going to be in Pittsburgh tomorrow, so I'll have another five hour drive to write in my head. The next night I fly to Greensboro, NC to spend Thanksgiving with my dad and his side of the family. I'll be away from my DWIDP for a long time, and I'm worried about it. Luckily, my dad is an amazing cook, and cooks really fresh veggies and good seafood stuff. He also uses evoo rather liberally so I'll be eating fat. Protein sources mostly from fish. Thanksgiving Day I think I'll eat some of the New England clam chowder, something we have every year, but not much. There are tons of salads and vegetables so it shouldn't be a problem to eat fairly well.

Thanks again all for your support... I have the best blog readers on earth!

There's Something About Death That Brings Me to Crisp, Clear Resolution

You're probably thinking that I'm about to say that the death of my cat has led me to some profound conclusions in my latest round of existential angst.

Think again! I may be melodramatic, overly enthusiastic, and easily amused, but I am not tacky. It was bad enough that I pulled on your heartstrings to get you to click on the SENS website. That was a cheap trick, but justified by the cause.

No, this is not about immortality. It's about fashion.

The headline is a paraphrase of a line from one of my favorite books when I was a child, "Puppy Love," by Janice Harrell. Janice was a friend of my mom's, and she wrote teen fiction. The book was about a high school girl who opens a shelter for homeless dogs. Anyway, it was an incredibly funny book, and the line I'm working off of was, "There's something about other people's problems that brings me to crisp, clear resolution." I used that the other day when telling a friend what to do.

While I was in the shower about an hour ago (I often run home between morning writing sessions to take a shower, feed the cat, and drink coffee) it occurred to me just what will cheer me up today: I am going to go buy clothes that fit!

Not many, mind you... I'm a little broke from the recent round of veterinary medicine. But I desperately need a suit that fits, both for work and also for Thanksgiving.

Have I told you about my family's Thanksgiving tradition? I do Thanksgiving with my dad, Christmas with my mom. So I fly to Greensboro, North Carolina, usually the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. On the Wednesday, my father and I go to our favorite amazing gourmet grocery store, A Southern Season www.southernseason.com, in Chapel Hill. This year, now that my step-mother is retired from teaching kindergarten, she can come with us! We have lunch there and shop, usually buying wine and Christmas presents.

Then on Thursday, we pile into the car with my step-brother (and now his wife, and this year, for the first time, my niece!) and drive to Winston-Salem, NC, where my grandparents live. I think I've mentioned them before... they're in their ninties, in excellent health, and extremely active. By active I mean that they go out dancing. A lot. They have more fun than I do. They've been married for 69 years, and every year on their anniversary, my grandfather says, "Well, your grandmother and I have talked it over, and we've decided to give it another year."

My grandparents are very snappy dressers, and occasionally show up in matching suits. I can not remember ever seeing my grandmother in anything other than a skirt suit with a beautiful suit pin and heels. She is not the kind of woman who would ever wear comfortable shoes. Needless to say, I adore her. In April of 2001, in the same week as my then-boyfriend went to trial on felony charges after being arrested and beaten by police officers at the Republican National Convention protests in 2000 (he was acquited of all charges, which was good, as he had done absolutely nothing!), my grandmother beat back an illness that turned out to be colon cancer. She is still 100% cancer free! I share all of these details because early on in my CR journey it occured to me that my grandparents have been practicing moderate CR as long as I've known them, and probably most of their lives. For breakfast, they eat a little yogurt and fruit. For dinner, they usually split a small piece of fish, eat salad and vegetables, and a tiny bit of rice or something like that. My grandmother has always been slim and petite. My grandfather, also thin, says that he weighs himself every morning, and if his weight has gone up a pound, he cuts back on his food that day. They're so cute when they go out to dinner because the eat like little birdies! They could easily pass for people in their 70's.

My grandfather was a painter and later a photographer. He did advertising photographs, society photography, all kinds of things. His house is like a museum. His work was shown at the Chicago Art Institute and other cool places. Of all of his kids and grandkids, only one got his artistic talent. The rest of us can't even draw stick people. My grandmother ran his business and raised two children, my uncle who is a dean at Duke and my dad, who is a retired college professor and ordained minister.

The point being, CR works! You too can go dancing well into your ninties!

Even if we're wrong about The Second If, that's reason enough for me to stick with CR. Except that as a rule I hate going dancing, though I have occasionally been known to go salsa dancing, but only in LA. You don't have to go dancing in your ninties... you could do whatever it is you like to do now. Like fishing. Or whatever.

My grandmother does not cook, so every year for Thanksgiving we go to the Twin City Club, which is an old institution that hosts Sunday brunch, tea dances, and parties, as well as holiday events. They've been members since the dawn of time. It's a super dress up occasion, and when I was a teenager I used to absolutely obsess about what I would wear to the event. My older cousin, Holly, five years my senior, was always the pretty one. (She's still gorgeous, and just had her first child.) I was the smart one. I got good grades and got my picture taken with Jonas Salk at the awards ceremony for kids who did really well on the SAT in seventh grade, Holly was a debutante and got her picture taken in an amazing long white dress. I hated being the smart one, not because I hated being smart, but because I wanted to be the pretty one! So I would pay careful attention to my outfit every year, in a pathetic attempt to compete with my goddess cousin.

The goddess cousin lives in San Francisco now and no longer attends the Thanksgiving, but the need to look right for the occasion has never lost its grip on me.

Last year on Thanksgiving I weighed 33 pounds more than I do now. I looked basically okay, but I was wearing a size eight suit that I have long since given away. My father and step-mother saw me 19 pounds ago at 123, but the rest of the family haven't seen me since Thanksgiving. I talked on the phone to my aunt and uncle and told them about CR, so they know I'm thinner. But still, I think it's going to be a big shock. So there's no way I'm showing up in something that doesn't fit. Spending most of the weekend reading and running errands in lycra leggings that actually fit has really brought to my attention that my body is much smaller than any of the clothes I currently own.

Therefore, today I am going to take a break from writing, cooking, reading de Grey, and doing the laundry (CR, alas, does not make the process of laundry any less tedious) and go out to the King of Prussia Mall, which is truly a monument to American consumerism. There I will buy myself a decent suit in size 0 petite or whatever. Both Ann Taylor and Banana Republic have some awesome stuff out now. I think I'll go with plain black and dress it up with a suit pin. Very high but conservative heels.

It's not quite what Molly would wear, but it'll have to do for now.

Well, Ya Gotta Eat

Last night around five, my cat died. Not Kieffer... he's fine, though grieving. Katherine, whose been his best friend for the last seven years. We thought she was going to pull through when we went to pick her up at the vet, but almost as soon as we got there it became clear that she wasn't.

I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that what was supposed to be a good day... picking up the cat, bringing her home to Kieffer who has been running around looking for her, fixing dinner for friends... turned out to be a pretty bad day.

We (my mom and I) got home from the vet about ten minutes before company was due to arrive, but in typical April fashion I had already set the table and put out all the ingredients, so all I had to do was put things together. I made up the soup, pasta sauce, etc. I ended up making the pasta sauce with artichoke hearts and tomatoes since I had already eaten red peppers earlier in the day and they're really expensive right now. The guests ate the pasta with the sauce, but I put a layer of spinach between the pasta and the sauce, so the sauce lightly steamed it. I ate just the spinach with the sauce, and oddly enough didn't even miss the pasta. It was pretty good, and I ate fairly well considering. Earlier in the day I had made the brunch I told you about earlier, and then I had a cup of cottage cheese as a sorta mid-day snack. The entire day is coming in at 967, low in the usual suspects, with 100% of everyting except only 91% of calcium, 71% copper, 41% zinc, 93% thiamine. P:F:C ratios pretty bad at 34:16:50, which just goes to show that when I'm not paying enough attention I revert to my high carb ways. Of course, the wine I had with dinner didn't help, driving up the carbs. I put olive oil in basically everything I cooked, but split between three people my share of it wasn't much.

Before the whole cat crisis hit I had a solid block of time and mental energy, so I read an article by Aubrey de Grey called "The unfortunate influence of the weather on the rate of human aging: why caloric restriction or its emulation may only extend life expectancy by 2 - 3 years" that you can find here: http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/weatherPP.pdf

If you find that a bit concerning, you can go to http://lists.calorierestriction.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0310&L=crsociety&P=R37783 and read some things Michael Rae had to say about it. Caution: That was awhile back and he may have changed his mind about some things. Beware of the passage of time and its effects on the archives: remember that time I read the Albatross and went out and bought lots of tofu, only to find out the next day (upon further archive searching of later posts) that tofu caused dementia?

I figure it might be fun for all you bloggie friends to follow along with what I'm reading and see what happens to you. Let's do an experiment: you read what I'm reading, and see if you draw the same conclusions I do. Out of all the faithful blog readers, from Hong Kong to DC, there must be someone who is willing to play this game with me.

Friday night I read some stuff that can be found here: http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/AdGpubs.htm#social

which I was drawn to for obvious reasons.

If you're confused re: what the hell am I talking about, there are two good articles under "Introductions for the Non-Specialist" that might help. http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/AdGpubs.htm#intro

Wow, that's a lot of homework for the bloggiefriends, but since my cat just died, don't you think you can at least skim the intro stuff?

I think I'm going to work for a little while on the last of my revisions on the new entries... I've had it almost done for a couple of days now except for two small pieces that I can't seem to figure out and may just give up and ask for help.

The Second If

I was talking last night with one of the brothers about an "Intro the the CR List" message that I've been working on. I couldn't locate a minor gramatical error that he had found, and he said, "It's the second if." Apparently, the second if should be "whether." We decided it wasn't worth worrying about, but I pointed out that "The Second If" sounded like a great headline for a blog entry. He couldn't quite figure out how I would work it into the concept of CR, but I pointed out that if I can work a song about Saint Augustine into CR, I can do anything.

I was sitting in the parking lot at the vet's, having found out that my cat has to stay another night in the hospital. By the time I got to the traffic light at the corner of Ridge Pike and Butler Pike (about two blocks away) I had the premise of the entry in my head.

I got home, made dinner (ate only half the broccoli/cauliflower, so take 75 cals off yesterday's total.) Poured glass of wine, got in bed with stack of de Grey articles.

[If anyone has been following so closely that they would have noticed this: Earlier in the week I had talked about having dinner plans with some non-CR folk, and about the fear that I would not be able to keep my consistent calories theme going when we went out to a place I'd never been before... social struggle, etc. I ended up cancelling the plans, not because of that, nor so I could sit at home and read de Grey (a level of geekiness of which I am certainly more than capable but in this case did not happen to be expressing) but because I thought I was going to be taking care of a sick cat. I didn't find out till very late in the day that the cat had to stay at the hospital another night, and by that time it was too late.]

Began to wonder if I will start quoting de Grey in casual conversation too. He has quite a few catchy lines.

Got a call from a friend, chatted for awhile, read more, got tired, turned off light, went to sleep.

Went to sleep remembering one of Brian's old posts in the archives that seemed to address a conflict that must have been going on in the CR community at the time. It went something like this: "Life extensionists, meet want to be healthier people. Want to be healthier people, meet life extensionists."

Now I'd like to point out for the five thousandth time, if I had just wanted to be healthy, I would have stayed a lowfat vegan. I wanted to squeeze enough years out of my life to participate meaningfully in a pretty big change in the political economy of the US... that'll take awhile, don't you think? But I certainly did not have a "cure for aging" in mind on March 26, 2004, at 5:10 pm.

I fall asleep rather quickly... my insomnia is not a problem of not being able to get to sleep, it's not being able to stay asleep.

Had horrible blog stress dream, in which Mary says that she isn't going to talk to me anymore and is taking down the link from her blog to mine because I'm talking so much about non-food stuff in my blog.

Just reminding everyone... it was only a dream! But it provided me with a great framework for the concept of "The Second If."

It goes something like this:

The first if, for CR practitioners, is the "If CR works at all." Does CR slow down, (though not stop) aging? If we didn't believe that the answer to The First If was yes, we would be silly to eat less than our friends. Will CR keep us healthy and alive, longer than eating a "healthy" diet that is not restricted in calories?

For now, CR is all we have, so we may as well go with If Number One, eat as few calories we can, and enjoy the short term benefits of better health while we're hoping the long term benefits come through.

The Second If is: will there ever (or at least in our somewhat longer lifetime) be anything better?

I would venture a guess that many people in the CR Society would answer "No" to The Second If.

I wonder if this is out of a well-researched belief, or simply out of not knowing that there are people out there making progress on this stuff? In my case, I had no idea.

There's plenty of good reason to do CR even if you'll only go as far as The First If. To my mind, *any* lengthening of health and life is worth quite a bit of effort... I mean, what else are you going to do?

I have heard of, though never met in person, people who say yes to The Second If but no to The First If: they're waiting for the pill.

The debates about the Ifs remind me somewhat of discussions I used to have when I was a labor organizer (which as you know I still am) but I spent most of my social time with anarchists, especially the green variety of anarchists. "Are you an anarchist?" "Are you a communist?" "Are you a democratic socialist?"

My answer to these questions was always the same, "I'm an organizer."

It didn't matter to me so much what the final vision of the future was because I was determined to do whatever I could, right here and now, to make things better. If that meant the slow and agonizing process of helping workers fight tooth and nail for evey the smallest improvements in their workplaces, then so be it. I used to get quite frustrated with my anarchist buddies (who are by no means representative of all anarchists, in case there are any offended anarchists out there) not only because they would spend a lot of time sitting on my couch and drinking all my beer, but because they refused to do things in the short term that might cause incremental improvements. Some of them even argued that organizing unions was bad, since any improvement in workers' lives would only slow the coming of the eventual revolution.

"Big Labor is not revolutionary," one of them said.

"Get off my couch and out of my house," I said.

It was a rather dramatic moment.

That series of struggles cemented my belief that one, or at least I, must do what I can NOW, every day, even if the victories are far between. It's that belief that keeps me organizing workers in a time of fairly extreme darkness for the American labor movement.

And of course, that belief leads to doing CR at the most intense level I can work out in my life.

However, it doesn't preclude belief that the answer the The Second If might be yes. We certainly can't know that it won't. (Like the Black Moth, I enjoy sentences with double negatives.)

It seems to me that those of us who are willing to act based on assent to either, or any, of the Ifs, had better stick together. Buying into either of them makes us unusual, and being willing to act at any level on anything we believe makes us even more unusual.

Besides, who else is going to understand our bizarre eating habits?

The CR Society is a great example of a community in which people with very diverse beliefs, habits, visions of the future, and politics co-exist very happily, learning from each other even when they disagree.

Still, I'll be really happy when Mary writes to tell me that it was just a dream!

Food Related Content

That being said, I don't want to run the risk of boring those who look to the blog for food related content.

So here's some Cooking for the Non-CR'd Angst.

I have a lot of non-CR'd friends. Well, don't we all? VLC loves my food, as does Very Skinny Mom, but most of the people with whom I spend my social time are supportive of me, but not interested in trying CR themselves (except for those who aren't supportive of me either.)

Tonight I have company coming over for dinner. One of the guests is relatively CR friendly, the other is a standard American diet person, not even a "healthy eating" person. Has never had Indian food. CR challenge!

I am going to make my free range organic chicken soup with lots of vegetables for starters. But I'm really drawing a blank as to what to serve after that.

What I would really like to make would be a giant plate of sizzled vegetables on top of eggwhites on top of greens. Luckily, my mom is coming over for CR friendly fancy brunch this morning, and I'm going to make this favorite dish then.

But I am in the dark as to what to do tonight. I'll think about it all day and let you know what happens.

Eating the Same Basic Thing Every Day Makes Things Easier

Note: I am not saying that this is the only way to do CRON.

That being said...

Last night I found myself making what is in retrospect a rather absurd claim: that I was going to put my relatively smooth CR practice on autopilot so that I could devote the energy/time that I had been pouring into designing my diet into learning more about a real cure for aging (for the purposes of eventually knowing enough to be able to convince people to fund said cure, not just for my own entertainment.)

I woke up this morning thinking that might be the dumbest thing I've ever said in my entire life.

But then as the day went on, and I went about my normal routine of eating what I usually eat these days, I realized, that's not as nutty as I at first thought.

I've spent tremendous time and energy over the last nine months figuring out what I should be eating to get maximal nutrition in the fewest possible calories, within the limits of how much time and money I feel like I can spend. And when I just do what I normally do, I do pretty well!

Here's today so far:

eggwhites for breakfast (plain, with a touch of pepper) 140 calories, 29 g protein
half a large container of fat free cottage cheese, 140 calories, 21 g protein
salad with lettuce, tomato, balsamic vinegar, beets, olives, pineapple, strawberries: 229

509 so far for the day, and that's with going out to lunch with a co-worker.

I'm kinda excited about this: all the effort I've put into designing a diet that works for me might just pay off.

A lot of CRON folks like to eat different things all the time, and I certainly eased into CR by doing that, but I do find that it is much easier to stick to the same basic group of foods, varying the veggies and fruits, but keeping things like protein, fat and calcium sources fairly constant. I know I love egggwhites, I know I love cottage cheese and nonfat plain yogurt, I know I love almonds. (I can't find hazelnuts in my store... what's up with that?)

If you throw into the DWIDP what I was planning to have for dinner, which was a bag of frozen broccoli and cauliflower cooked in my 2 cups of chicken broth with 116 calories of brewers yeast, plus 200 calories of almonds and a glass of red wine, you get 1090. Not bad at all! And that's just what I was going to do anyway... before I threw it into the DWIDP. P:F:C = 34:26:40. Never Zone perfect, but a far cry from the high carb darkness. 90% of calcium, 80% iron, 48% zinc, and well over 100% on the rest! I am less worried about the usual suspects, calcium, iron and zinc, because the tier one stuff MR suggested for me would fix that, and while I'll never give up on getting them through food, I'm not going to stress too much about it if I'm both getting *close* to the RDA's in my diet and supplementing with the stuff.

So maybe I wasn't completely smashed with optimism when I said that I can maintain a decent CR lifestyle while thinking about other things too...

In a funny and probably completely irrational shift in perspective, I am suddenly finding my own personal low tech easy happy version of CR to be less stressful than it seemed a week ago.

Another happy warm fuzzy CR moment: I've been up since 3 am, it's almost 3 pm, and I have tons of energy! CR makes you need less sleep!

Forbidden Fruit Creates Many Jams

I read that line on a sign at a church somewhere in the middle of rural PA a couple of weeks ago, and I've been dying to use it as a blog headline ever since.

It's a bit of a stretch to work it into the larger themes of the blog, so when I realized that I'd forgotten to enter the red delicious apple into my DWIDP for yesterday, I thought, aha! A chance to use great line!

So that brings the calories for yesterday up to 1073 (I knew there was a reason why I wasn't feeling as hungry as I usually do the day after an under 1000 day!) and throws off the P:F:C ratios... argh. 31:22:47.

Oh well. Better today. Now, I'm going to go off and write for another hour or so before I need to start work.

Last Night I Didn't Get to Sleep at All

It's 4 in the morning, and I'm writing again.

I actually went to sleep around 9 and slept till just after 3, which is not too bad for me. But I heard that old song on the radio from which the headline was taken, and I thought it amusing that a radio station would be playing that at 3:30 am.

I've been getting lots of advice on what to do for insomnia, but at this point I don't mind it much... six hours of sleep is plenty, and the early hours of the morning seem to be the best time to write.

So here I am again.

Last night I made some nice steamed brussels sprouts with lemon herb olive oil and the juice of one lemon and some pepper. Brewers yeast soup. Glass of red. The rest of the almonds... 100 cals worth. ON = over 100% on everything except for: 92% Calcium, 81% Copper, 49% iron, 84% Manganese, 91% Vitamin A (that's weird, that's usually really high), 43% Zinc. 948 calories, P:F:C 35:24:41. Lower calorie day... not very hungry due to stress re: cat.

Eating my basic foods-that-work: eggwhites, plain yogurt, skim milk, almonds, brewers yeast, veggies, etc., saves me a lot of the time that I used to put into obsessing about ON. The blog up until now has been in large part about the quest for the right foods, and while obviously I still have problems, I think I've done pretty well. Now that I've figured out what seems to work for me in terms of what to eat on a daily basis, I'm planning to devote some the mental energy that had been going into the quest for the right foods for the last eight months into the quest for some meaningful way in which I can contribute to what I now understand to be the real fight: the fight to cure aging.

When I first started, I thought CR would help me live better longer, maybe a little bit longer and a lot better. Even then, I was hoping to get twenty more years out of this. [Remember that post where I said that before CR I had never thought I wanted children, but that if I could be relatively sure of getting back the 20 years I might spend raising kids, I might be willing to consider it?] I knew that starting at 29 was not as good as starting earlier would have been, and that even though the people who had been doing CR for awhile looked good and seemed to be doing much better than normal people, we couldn't be sure what would happen in the long term. Still, I thought it silly not to try...

I had absolutely no idea when I first started that there were people out there who thought there was a way to cure the fundamental problem of aging.

But wait... I'm afraid I'm giving away too much of the story. I've been working so much on the blog entries about the conference and the discussions we had there that I'm jumping ahead. You'll have to wait.

I have pretty decent mental focus now so I think I'll spend some time revising said entries.

Can Everyone Just Refrain From Perishing?

No, that's not my new approach to anti-aging medicine. It's what I said this morning when I returned home from my 5 am email checking/blog writing trip to the office to find a very sick cat!

To make a long story short, I spent most of the day at the vet, and the cat is in the hospital now, getting excellent care. I'm worried, but there's not much I can do about it, so I'm writing.

Oddly enough, today's CRON has gone well. This morning, 140 calories of eggwhites scrambled with a touch of a delicious new green chile sauce on top and some pepper. A red delicious apple as a morning snack just before the cat's vet appointment. After leaving the poor kitty at the vet, I ate the leftover "cream" of broccoli soup for lunch -- 120 on the yogurt (12 g protein, 30% RDA of calcium), plus about 40 of broccoli and 10 of free range organic chicken broth for a total of 170. Four tablespoons of tomato and red pepper salsa, straight out of the jar (old lowfat vegan thing... I prefer to eat salsa straight, having long ago given up chips and never found any point in putting it on anything else, except sometimes a salad), for 40 calories if I can trust the label (it was rather watery and had no oil). Iced latte in the afternoon, which is good since I'm sleepy but need to stay up late enough that I don't wake up in the middle of the night... I hope. Tonight I'll eat my brewers yeast soup with some fresh brussels sprouts that I picked up. I need to eat something with fat in it, so I may make an olive oil and lemon pepper sauce for the sprouts and eat them separately from the broth. Glass of red.

More soon.

Playing With Hunger

As you can tell from the last few entries, I have rather ambivilant feelings about hunger. On the one hand, I blog at length about avoiding it: though meal spacing, excellent nutrition, and avoiding blood sugar games, I have controlled it pretty well so far. On the other hand, I talk about trying to live with a little more hunger, thinking that I will get more benefits from CR if I drop my calories a little lower, which will at this point require a little hunger from time to time.

In the post-CRS Conference universe, I'm feeling a funny kind of shift in my attitude towards CR. What started out as a fun roller coaster (complete with funky dips into ketosis when I went too low, entertaining clothes shopping adventures when I hit size two, etc.) is now turning into a long distance drive. I'm feeling a very "in it for the long haul" type of spirit, and it makes me want to experiment with some new ways of structuring my relationship with food.

The problem is, I'm so used to having basically whatever I want, whenever I want, that the idea of not having this or that is a little hard to get used to. Between my every five or six day eating out events and my meal spacing that kept me from being hungry even on a fairly low calorie (under 1000) day, I haven't felt like I was engaging in much self-denial at all. While I certainly ate differently, eschewing the pizza and bagels and margaritas and nachos and pasta and well you get the idea, it wasn't like I was walking around feeling hungry. Maybe right before lunch, but at any other time I would just eat, even if it was just eating lettuce. I do love lettuce...

It's not just about getting the maximum anti-aging benefits from CR. I have a feeling that on the other side of this whole hunger dilemma is that ethereal calm that I am questing after. Facing down the hardwiring that says "Oh, just go ahead and have a bite," seems like the only way to get to the mythical other side.

That's why I'm playing some games with hunger, testing the waters to see just what it does to me.

For years, I've been afraid of getting hungry, afraid that if I let m

[break, that was yesterday afternoon, now 5:30 this morning]

That's where I trailed off yesterday because VLC called and said I should meet her for coffee to a) get the report on her trip out to a far away hospital b) catch up on relevant gossip. So I did that... in a bizarre role reversal, I drank tea, she drank coffee. She had some funny stories.

[I was rambling on about hunger because I wasn't eating much in an effort to keep my calories down in anticipation of a fairly big dinner. So I ate leftover vegetables with my red pepper marinara sauce for breakfast, followed by an iced latte for lunch. By the time I wrote I was getting kinda hungry.]

Then I went to an early evening meeting. Then I went home to cook dinner for non-CR dinner company. I cooked two things I hadn't cooked before: let's call them, "Not So Creamy Cream of Broccoli Soup" and "fish."

Cream of Broccoli (not particularly creamy)
2 heads of broccoli
2 cloves of garlic
2 cups free range organic chicken broth
3 cups non-fat plain yogurt
lemon (juice thereof)
salt, pepper

Blend broccoli, garlic, and chicken broth in the food processor. Put in big pot, turn on heat, stir. Add yogurt gradually, stirring. Turn off heat, add lemon, pepper and salt to taste. Don't expect it to be creamy. If you want cream soups, go read someone else's blog.

Fish. I had never made fish before. I had made shrimp and scallops, but not fish. I had gotten some advice about some rather high calorie ways to serve it that sounded delicious, but I really wanted to keep the calories to the fish itself, not add to. So the guy at the fish store said to coat it with olive oil spray, garlic, salt, and pepper and lemon juice, bake at 375 for 15 - 20 mins, and cover with fresh lemon juice. I did, and it was delicious. The cat went crazy. I gave him a few bites.

Drove to Center City to pick up my mother who teaches at night and had left her car at home on her most recent work trip.

I am continuing with the post I had started to write earlier... not even cleaning up the transition, because I want to have a record of exactly what I was thinking yesterday.

"On the other side of this hunger dilemma is that ethereal calm I am questing after."

Does that make sense?

I was trying to say that for years I was afraid that if I let myself get too hungry, I'd do something stupid. You know how all those books say "Don't let yourself get too hungry." Eat something you don't particularly want, at a time when you don't particularly want it, just so that you won't be hungry.

What exactly I was expecting to happen if I got hungry is beyond me... I mean, I never had one of those bad relationships with food where I would go nuts and eat myself into oblivion. The worst thing I'd ever do was eat a bagel with cream cheese.

CR = cure for anxiety, for me. The relationship between CR and anxiety is linear... the more I cut my calories, the less anxious I feel. At some point (and it's not a ketogenic state, which is another drug in itself, I'm always way over 10% carbs) the lack of anxiety starts to transcend just not being anxious and turn into a bit of that ethereal calm that I'm looking for. But just a drop, just a little peek at another way of feeling.

I think it's going to take more CR to get there. And I have lots of reasons for wanting to be there: not just the absence of feeing bad, but the presence of more focus, more power, etc.

I might need all that stuff, you know.

Saint Francis Of Assisi Could Never Be This Good

Quote from the Sting song "Saint Augustine In Hell," found on one of the mix tapes I made when going through a period of mild obsession with Saint Augustine in my late teens. In the midst of some late night thinking about religion, I somehow managed to leave that part out. Let's just take a moment to think of how the entire history of the Western world could have been different if Saint Augustine had known about CR.

To end my cheap attempts to somehow tie a Sting song in with CR, I'll explain the hadline this way: after falling asleep from about 7 pm to 10 pm last night, waking up and running back to the office to check my email, an event which ended in writing for about three hours, then going back to bed at 3 am, I still managed to get up and come to the office early enough to blog a bit before starting work. And I am pleased to report that my CR inspired clarity of skin and eyes seems to be saving me from *looking* like I was up all night writing.

You may be wondering what the hell I am writing, as my posts have not seemed any longer or more intense than usual. I'm working on some posts about the conversations I had at the conference, and Michael and Brian are working on them with me, so I'm doing a lot of writing and editing on stuff that is not yet ready to be published.

Writing myself into exhaustion seems to work as a cure for insomnia, though I suppose you could just say that I would have been tired again by 3 am even if I had done nothing but pet the cat.

I did have a bizarre dream in the early hours of the morning, right before I woke up at 5:30 am. I dreamed that a rabid right winger in the CR society (not someone who exists, a figment of the dream imagination) hated my blog and tried to organize all the other CR society members to disassociate themselves with it. He said he hated a) the politics b) what I eat c) the fact that I listen to my walkman all the time. How's that for a blog anxiety dream?

I think the Black Moth is right about not eating at night leading to better sleep... I also suspect that just eating less, for me, leads to better sleep. Yesterday was a higher calorie day for me than the day before, since I was hungrier and got home still needing to get some of my ON. Let's see... when last I wrote, I had eaten my 140 of eggwhites for breakfast, and was busy speculating on whether or not they actually like the Texas Pete.

When I got to the office, a co-worker suggested that we have a meeting we were planning over lunch, so I knew I would get a good salad since we decided to go to a place that has a decent salad bar. I didn't want to rely on the salad bar alone, though, since it has almost nothing in the way of protein sources and I didn't want to be so hungry that I would be tempted to eat one of the pasta salad thingys. So I went ahead and ate my cottage cheese pack, 280 calories, 70% of the RDA of calcium, 42 g protein. No fat. With tabasco. That was yummy. I also ate one rye cracker, 35 calories, with the cottage cheese.

At lunch I ate a salad of romaine, grape tomatoes, a few beet slices, ten black olives, artichoke hearts, balsamic vinegar and a teaspoon of olive oil, with a small plate of fruit (melon, pineapple, strawberry) for dessert. The olives and the olive oil helped out with the fat for the day, but the fruit upped the cals and the carbs. Did some guessing in terms of total amounts on my DWIDP, but I always guess on the higher end.

Got home earlyish from work, around five (things have been rather quiet since the Conference, after the crazy sprint of the two months before) and was hungry, plus wanted to fill in some holes in my ON for the day, so I ate my brewers yeast soup and about half the almonds I usually eat, for around 100 calories. Got in bed to read with my glass of wine and my cat, but fell asleep almost immediately. P:F:C ratio for the day: 35:25:40. Great ON -- over 100% on everything except zinc (49%) and iron (89%). It wouldn't have been great ON without the brewers yeast soup, and the PFC ratios would have been way off without the almonds... I had entered everything from earlier in the day before I went home, so I knew what I wanted to fill in. That works wonders for my ON... entering things before I eat them so I can figure out just what the right combination is. It makes it possible for me to eat a pretty large variety of foods without totally screwing up all the time. High calorie yesterday: 1264.3. If you average that with the day before, at 980, you get 1122.15. Not bad, and if I stay in this pattern, I'll end up averaging to around 1100 if I don't have the wacky 1500 or more calorie big eating days every five or six days. I have plans to go out for dinner with some definitely not CR'd friends on Friday night, so I'm worrying about that. It might make sense to adapt to the different pattern without dropping my calories (my weight is remaining very stable around 104 - 106 depending on how much salt I ate the day before and how late at night I ate my last meal), and then try to drop the calories a little bit.

One thing I've noticed about weight loss... I seem to stay stable for a long time, then drop a couple of pounds almost all at once, like I did after the conference, then hover right around there, going up a tiny bit if there's a "refeeding" period after a particularly low time (like the week after the conference), but rather quickly dropping back down permanently to the new low. It's hard to believe sometimes that I've lost so much weight since March 26. 137 - 104. Weird. It will be terrifying to see my family at Thanksgiving, since they haven't seen me since last year. I hope they don't freak out. I don't look all that thin (people who saw me at the conference can confirm that this is true, and considered positive in CR world where we all know that the ob/ob mice on CR live longer... ha!... not some anorexic raving that she's not skinny enough.)

Still no taller... but I acutally really like being a short person. Easier to be comfortable on planes, etc. You can always get someone to reach items from high shelves. Even after the Biotech Rapture, I will still probably want to be 5 feet, 1.75 inches tall.

Am thinking a lot about hunger lately and about the various uses for it. Meal spacing is so critical to avoiding hunger. Careful planning to make sure that the right foods and only the right foods are available when I am hungry seems to be the key to ON, now that I have found foods that I really like that are CRON friendly. When I read back over old issues of the blog, I see how much time and trial and error went into finding those foods. That entertaining adventure with Grape Nuts... I just can't eat high carb like that without going nuts. Talk about food cravings, and blood sugar games!

Wondering if I could channel physical hunger into useful pursuits, like writing. Seems like a small rewiring of my brain could accomplish this. Will think more about this later... it's time to organize the nurses now.

The Good Kind of Hunger

Mary wrote the other day about three kinds of hunger: low blood sugar, food cravings, and genuine hunger. I was thinking of that this morning when after writing for two hours, I was beginning to feel very hungry for my eggwhites. That was real, genuine hunger, and it felt good. I had eaten very little the night before, slept well, written well (I think!) and I was ready for breakfast. So I went home and sizzled up my 1 cup eggwhites, this time with a little Texas Pete (which is the best hot sauce ever invented) on top. I felt satisfied but not stuffed... kinda like being 80% full!

The difference between real hunger and crazy fake terrible hunger is that real hunger is really about what it seems to be about. Low blood sugar hunger is about low blood sugar, and you can have it even if you're not really in need of the calories. Look at all those people on the high carb roller coaster!

Food cravings are often not about food at all... they're replacements for other things, like love or sex or interesting things to do. Witness the millions of people eating themselves into obesity... is it really because they love food? Somehow I doubt it.

I find that unlike low blood sugar or food cravings, real hunger is not self-destructive. For example, when I'm really hungry, I genuinely want the things that are good for me. Don't take that as any endoresement of the idea that people "just eat better" because they're eating less -- that is definitely far from the truth. It's taken tons of ongoing conscious effort for me to evolve a diet that gives my body what it needs in as few calories as possible. I couldn't have done it without nutritional software, or the advice of those who know more than I do (with a heavy dose of fire and brimstone, which I find intoxicatingly compelling.) So I'm not suggesting that people just naturally eat healthier foods when they're genuinely hungry. I'm observing that at least for me, I feel more inclined to eat the foods I know I need when I am genuinely hungry.

This morning, I didn't want a bagel, I wanted eggwhites. Granted, I really, really wanted eggwhites because I was really, really hungry, but the fact that I passed by a sample of chocolate chip bagels with creamy whipped cream cheese on my way to get my morning coffee at Panera Bread Company is not just progress, it's a revolution. In the old days, it would have been inconceivable for me to pass up such a tasty little treat. But now, it's not that I would feel guilty or beat myself up for eating something "bad" in that eternal guilt game that American women play with food. It's that I didn't see the point of eating something that would not do anything good for me, when I had eggwhites waiting for me at home. (CR Hacker Boy brother says "Information loves to be anthropomorphized." I say, "Food loves to be anthropomorphized." I mean, are the eggwhites really waiting for me, staring up at me from their little carton in the fridge, wondering when I'm coming home for breakfast? Considering the possibility that I might skip breakfast for the third day in a row? Feeling happy when I finally open them up and pour them in the pan? Expressing a preference as to whether they want to be eaten plain or slathered with Texas Pete? No, I don't think so.)

CR has definitely changed the way I think about hunger, and I suspect that it will continue to evolve. Last night I definitely could have eaten more, but I felt satisfied enough, and I was already where I wanted to be in terms of calories. Had I eaten all those calories in the form of oat disks and boca burgers (CR list inside baseball -- apologies to the non-subscribers) I probably would have felt like crap and eaten the neighbors' pets.

You're The Only Person I Know Who Lives Her Life On Greenland Time

Quote from an email that Friend From College Who Used To Date My College Roommate (that's FFCWUTDMCR) sent me, explaining why he thought it probably wasn't safe to call me at 10:45 pm.

It's 5:30 am and I'm at the office writing. I actually got a great night's sleep last night: went to bed at 10:30, got up at 4:30. For me to sleep that long without waking up is pretty amazing. My pharmacist friend thinks I should take bendaryl or something when I wake up, Brian was was horrified at that suggestion. I think I should just write myself into exhaustion every night... last night after writing for two hours I fed my mom's cat (who is so cute and cuddly!), went home, drank my brewers yeast with chicken broth soup, drank my little glass of red wine, and then ended up talking on the phone to a bunch of people for an hour or so, listened to Suzanne Vega for a few minutes (Fruitgirl... do you have "Nine Objects of Desire" by Suzanne Vega? Great food songs on that. "Caramel" is the best, but I've been listening to "Stockings" lately too.) went to bed.

So writing myself into exhaustion seems to be working. I noted yesterday that I can't seem to write in my head unless I am in motion, either walking or driving. I write almost everything in my head before putting it up on the blog, so I write the most when I'm walking or driving a lot. I tried to write last night while lying in the bed with the cat, and I find that only works in the middle of an insomnia attack, not in the evening when I'm just chilling with the furry one.

So anyway, yesterday was almost perfect at 980 calories, and I seem to be re-set. I think that eating a lot at night makes my sleep even worse, so it probably helped that I had very little to eat last night. This morning I'll eat my eggwhites before I come back to work, but I wasn't hungry yet at 4:30 so I figured I'd go to the office, write for awhile, then go back home and eat breakfast.

Girl, You Need to Chill With Your Bad Self

That's a quote from my very hip and up to date cool friend, Myrna Perez. I told her I was listening to a lot of Melissa Etheridge these days.

I think today's eating was a good example of sucessful chilling.

You already read the part about lunch. After lunch, in the late afternoon, I ate the remains of the cottage cheese, for a total of 280 calories, and more protein and calcium than you could shake a stick at, if for some reason you were in the habit of shaking a stick at cottage cheese.

Went home, ate 200 cals worth of almonds and a salad of lettuce (romaine) with a teaspoon of evoo and some red wine vinegar. Still have to drink my brewers yeast and chicken broth soup, but if I do that, then my day will come in at 980 calories and over 100% of the RDA of everything except zinc (48%) and iron (68%) and p:f:c ratios of 32:27:41.

Came back to the office to write write write, and wrote another draft entry that will need to be approved by the characters involved pre-publication.

Am now leaving to feed and cuddle my mom's cat, feed and cuddle my cats, drink my brewers yeast soup, drink a glass of wine, and cuddle up with some de Grey articles.

If There's Going to Be a Food Fight, Don't Make Marinara Sauce

Last night I had my leftist book club over for dinner and discussion. I made a delicious CR friendly soup and a CR friendly marinara sauce that could go over either steamed veggies for the CR or pasta for the non. The soup was made of: two cans of crushed plum tomatoes, one 8 oz package of neufchatel cheese, and 1 cup of non-fat plain yogurt, the high calcium brand that I buy. The entire recipe had 1076 calories in it, and I split it into eight small cup servings, each of them 154.5 calories. It is so rich and creamy that it seems rather decadent, and the assembled crowd of leftists loved it.

Then I made up a marinara out of 2 cans crushed tomatoes, 1 can tomato sauce, 1 cup red wine, 1 small yellow onion sauteed in 1 tablespoon olive oil, 1 can of roasted red peppers packed in water, not oil (usually I roast my own, but my mom had gotten three jars on sale at BJ's -- yes, I used a bottle opener to open the jar), a dash of sea salt, a few grinds of fresh pepper, and a dash of dried oregano. Total calories on the entire batch of sauce: 975. Very yummy. I just put out dishes of steamed broccoli, yellow squash, and green peppers, as well as a collander of pasta, and let people assemble their own dishes. VLC and I ate steamed veggies with sauce, the rest ate both steamed veggies and pasta. The crowd went wild. Food very well received.

Alas, that wasn't all the crowd went wild about. Half the people had brought red wine, and as the night wore on and the leftists refilled their glasses, the arguments got rather heated. At one point, I feared for my white carpet when it seemed possible that a food fight might break out. I regret to report that I drank at least two glasses of wine, maybe more, and while I don't think this negatively effected my political rhetoric, it didn't help my calories for the day! All I had eaten up to that point was a cup of cottage cheese, 160 calories, 40% of the RDA of calcium, 24 g protein, no fat. There was only 54 g protein total in the soup, so my 1/8 would have been 6.75 g. The marinara with veggies was great on vitamins A and C, but low on protein, and the 120 fat calories in the olive oil was divided amongst 8 people. All in all, the day was high in carbs, low protein.

I swear, sometimes I really wonder how long it's going to take me to get it. I was full on Sunday morning from eating too much the night before at a Cuban place in NYC, then I spent the entire morning writing, didn't eat anything till about 1 pm, when I ate a cup of cottage cheese (which isn't bad nutritionally but it was bad to skip breakfast) so then I'm starving by the time dinner guests arrive, and I eat too high carb, too low protein, whine whine whine. I SHOULD KNOW BETTER BY NOW! I get that horrible hungry feeling, the "I'm just as likely to eat the guests as serve them dinner," hungry feeling that is blood sugar out of whack and not in a fun ketosis type of way. Oh, and did I mention that I ate two slices of the pumpkin pie that one of the guests brought? They were small slices, but still, one would have sufficed, but I was so screwed up from my not eating all day pattern of the last two days that I didn't say no.

And of course, I woke up this morning not hungry. I was desperate to get to the office early early early to write, so I ran out the door without breakfast (I did shower, dress, and brush my teeth, as well as feed the cats and listen to Suzanne Vega's "Caramel" five times in the process.) I had a great lunch though: 1 cup of cottage cheese with a little tabasco on top, plus the steamed broccoli, peppers and squash in marinara. I think my co-workers were envious of my beautiful dish. Haha! I do love to cook. Love love love to cook. Love to have zillions of friends over for dinner. Anyway, I am feeling very stuffed now and need to eat little for dinner so that I can reset and be hungry for breakfast and get on with my CRON life. Brewers yeast soup tonight, more writing in my head, and snuggling up with some de Grey articles, a four ounce glass of red wine, and a very soft cat.

Hanging Out With All Your Male Friends

Line from the one hit wonder "Ready for the World's" hit song of the early eighties, "Oh Shelia." I found it on one of those old mix tapes I've been listening to, and since Mary cautioned about the danger of assuming that the rules that apply to the brothers also apply to us CR girls, I figured it would be a good title to the post.

I completely agree that CRON is a dramatically different experience for women than for men. Liza is so right about everything with regard to how women treat each other as they get thinner. I've always thought that men have much more defined hierarchies to begin with, so the competition for social status and/or scarce resources is more upfront, frequently even openly discussed. And as one of the brothers pointed out, while very thin men might be asked if they're sick, they're not usually assumed to be anorexic.

Anyway, thanks for the kind words, Mary... I've frequently noted that I'm so lucky to have the kind of body where I look pretty normal even at technically underweight. I doubt that the curves will ever go away, even as I lose more weight as a side effect of my attempts to outlive anyone I find annoying.

I am extremely curious to know how different CR is for me as I get deeper in. There just don't seem to be any women at more serious levels of CR, and so there's not a lot to go on other than what the men say. And the men are by no in agreement about anything. I found that CR men were willing to answer some pretty personal questions, and a random sampling confirmed that on everything from hunger to social struggles, the brothers have had vastly different experiences.

So far, at what I believe to be very moderate CR for me, I have experienced an almost complete cure of the anxiety that had plagued me for all my life. But I feel like I'm a long way off from the super calm that some of the brothers report.

The brothers were far from in agreement about the hunger issue too. Some claimed to be hungry most of the time, others didn't. They also had vastly different approaches to meal spacing, from Paul's 18 hour a day fasts to John's chain eating of lettuce. There are so many ways to do this, and it's tremendous fun to see for yourself how people have solved their CRON problems and created lifestyles that work for them.

I know you're getting annoyed by now that I haven't told you what I've been eating, so the next entry will be food-focused, I promise. I'm also waiting on two of the brothers to read and fix any problems in an entry I wrote about the search for the real cure for aging, so that's coming up as well. Tune in next time...

Doesn't Matter What I Lose

That's a line from "Consume Me" by DC Talk, a Christian rock band. It's the first song on the first mix tape I made in my CR era, back in July, when I was playing with calorie levels that caused too rapid weight loss but induced some pretty serious euphoria. I don't usually listen to Christian rock (except Amy Grant, of course), but you try dropping your calories to 800 and see if you don't start listening to some odd stuff.

Wow, yesterday's entry got great responses! Thanks for your message, Black Moth. And as always, thanks for your comments, Mary! Pumpkin custard sounds delicious too!

I have to agree with one of my CR sister Mary's comments, and respectfully disagree with the other.

First, the one I agree with:

Mary's been telling me for ages that it's easier to stick to the same calorie level every day rather than cycling between high and low. I'm starting to think she is absolutely right, and in a minute I'll tell the story of my day yesterday to illustrate the point. Especially from the standpoint of my anxiety, which can be kicked off by just one feast, it might make sense for these feast days go away. But oh how I would miss going out and eating lots of yummy food! This is why it always cracks me up when people wonder if I'm anorexic... I love food! Anyone who has ever seen me attack a really good bread basket would have no worries.

I'm going to experiment with keeping my calorie level very steady this week, until Friday when I have dinner plans and we'll have all week to figure that out. I'm going to stick as close as possible to my April's Diet Day One, the low of the two days I sent MR as representative days. It's a very good day nutritionally, and I find it very satisfying. Travel is minimal this week, so I should be able to do that. I finally think I figure out how to print my nutritional info off DWIDP onto the blog, so I'll do that and you can see how good it is! I'm very proud of myself on this one.


The part with which I respectfully disagree: "How low is too low?"

This question was asked often at the conference, and I noticed that it was asked primarily by people who either just started to practice CR, or people who don't practice it very seriously. Now before anyone gets mad that I'm saying others are not serious, let me outline what I consider some basics of being serious.

First and foremost, using nutritional software to monitor your ON. While those who are very experienced may no longer need to do this (I don't think I would ever feel comfortable without my DWIDP, but I respect those who have been doing CR for years and basically have their ON figured out), those who are just starting out absolutely must monitor their nutrition. Our society's ideas of what is healthy are so silly that people who think they're eating well usually aren't. For evidence, just go back to June/July and read what I was eating before my DWIDP finally arrived in the mail. If someone says they're starting CR, but they're not using the software, I get very concerned. It's silly to worry about how low to go, if you're one of those people, because if you're not getting the right nutrition, nothing you're doing is right. Of course it's bad to eat too little of the right nutrients, whether you're malnourished on a 3000 calorie a day diet or a 1000 calorie a day diet. Get your ON, then drop your calories a little, then fine tune your ON, and it'll probably be years before you're even thinking about going "too low."

Category two of people who I don't consider "serious" about CR: people who are thin because they eat a tiny bit less crap than normal people and they exercise heavily, like distance runners. They are not doing CR, no matter how skinny they look. That's great if that's how you want to live, and I bet it feels fabulous. Some of my best friends live this way, and I support them all the way. However, there's lots of evidence that it's calories, calories, calories that cause the CR effect, not BMI, skinniness, exercise, etc. That great Michael Rae article in the AOR magazine that I linked awhile back, and will link again once I go back in the blog and copy it, gives an overview of this evidence. So if you claim to be doing CR, but this is what you're actually doing, and you're worried about how low is too low to go, I'm confused. If you were really trying to do CR, you'd drop your calories instead of over-exercising. Some of the serious CR brothers (hello Black Moth -- you're definitely serious!) who really enjoy exercise as a QOL issue struggle with this, in an effort to get their cals as low as possible while still doing the activities they enjoy. Keep in mind that I'm not talking about moderate exercise like weight lifting three times a week, (hello, Blockade Runner... look, you got a name!)... I'm talking about serious, intense, calorie burning exercise, like running (which as everyone knows, I will only do if a large wild animal is chasing me.)

That being said, most of the "How low is too low?" "How do you know when you've gone too far?" questions were coming from, to my memory, the not quite so serious group. I respect their right to ask these questions, and the question is important, but it seems to me that they are in no personal danger of going too far any time soon.

As to those who went down what they considered too far -- that seems to me to be a very individual decision, and one that people know when they get there. To my mind, if your blood tests are coming back good and you like the way you feel, you are obviously not "going too far." That decision can only be made by the individual, and while it's a good argument for regular monitoring of everything important, it's not an argument for one particular BMI or another. It sounds like Mary has reached a BMI, calorie leve, and quality of life that's working for her. Great! She sure looks good... so what she's doing is working from the standpoint of my favorite motivation to do CR: looking fabulous as long as possible!

However, I'd be interested in what scientific evidence exists for a specific BMI. To my reading, it seems that calories, calories, calories are what's deciding how fast we age. While BMI can be a QOL issue, I don't see why dipping below 18.5 would by itself by a safety issue. (My BMI, btw, is 19.2 -- I'm shorter. I just wear heels, that's why I look taller.) If your blood tests are good, your bone density is good, etc. etc. etc., then why not go lower if you want to?

Luigi Fontana, who is obviously brilliant and also gorgeous, was asked the "How far is too far?" question, and as much as I adore him, I'd have to say that I found his answer unsatisfactory. "It is not good to go too far," I think was his answer. But he seemed to have no answer to "Why?"

"Moderation for the sake of moderation" makes no sense to me, any more than extremism for the sake of extremism makes any sense. One person's extreme is another's regular day. To some people, it's extreme to weigh every piece of food you eat. Okay, but if your goal is to carefully monitor and control your intake, wouldn't it seem silly to do anything else? (No, I do not do this yet, for blog readers who have not seen me lately. That's something that really seems to push people's buttons... which strikes me as odd because it's such a logical thing to do. It's rather illogical to monitor your food intake with guesses, though for most of us it's a significant enough hassle to weigh anything when away from home that we don't bother.)

Another thing that bothered me about the scientists who insisted on "moderation." They're not actually doing CR themselves! Without going into detail which they may not wish to have shared, it became clear that most of the scientists who presented, who live with the evidence that CR works, are not practicing CR themselves (with one possible exception who looked pretty good, but even he said he didn't not carefully monitor his calories.) Several of them were definitely "normal people eating a healthy diet," and that's great, but that's not CR. Some of them actually ignored their own evidence to the point of developing the very diseases of aging that CR seems to prevent. While I deeply respect their work... heaven knows I could never do the things they do! ... I hesitate take advice about my own personal health from people who don't do what the evidence supports. I can take clues as to what I should do from their research, but when it comes to speculating about "How low is too low?" I am more inclined to follow the example of those who believe in what they are doing so strongly that they're testing it on their own bodies.

[Side note: several readers at the conference told me that I'm not the same in person as I am in the blog. I believe one direct quote was "You're not the little girl of the blog." It was noticed that I am more sarcastic, sharper, just less nice in person that I appear to be in the blog. So I'm trying to address this, and I may go too far in the other direction! I hope you all still love me!]

One of the brothers mentioned that he couldn't get any skinnier or else he would no longer be able to open the jam jar. I think this is a good example of an individual decision as to how far is too far. When you're not feeling good anymore, stop. Till then, it's calories, calories, calories, and how far you're willing to push to cheat death.

I can not, however, decide anything based on whether or not I can open jam jars, and there's a moderately amusing reason for this. When I was in my early teens, I read quite a lot of Cosmopolitian and other such "women's" magazines. They're silly but actually rather educational when you know absolutely nothing. I swear that one of these magazines, which I digested at a tender age, said that a woman should never open a jar herself. Rather, she should pass it to a man to open so that he could feel strong and powerful. Somehow this got into my head and even though I no longer care much if the men around me feel strong and powerful, I have asked men to open jars for so long that I really can't open them myself. At home, I use a bottle opener to loosen them. Or I get my mother, who obviously did not read Cosmo in her teens, to open them. She's pretty good at it.

All that being said:

When people ask me how far I'm going to go, my answer is always the same. I'm going to keep pushing my calories as low as I can, while maintaining ON and without losing weight too fast, until I no longer feel good. I'm not measuring my progress by my weight or my BMI. It's about time to get some into-CR bloodtests, and I already know my blood pressure is better than it was when I started (remember when I went to the ER a few months back and they said, "You're a very thin, healthy young woman."). I'm eating more calcium than at any other point in my life, more iron, more protein... I will be shocked, shocked, if I am not healthier by objective measurements than I was before. I promise I'll keep a close watch on how I'm doing.

I also think that with so many experienced CR sisters and brothers reading the blog, I am likely to find out sooner rather than later if I am doing something stupid. Almost all the changes I've made in my diet and lifestyle since I started CR have started with a comment from a brother or sister who knew more than I did. I can't thank you enough, all of you. Someday I'll figure out a way to pay you back.

Which brings us neatly to the topic I've been meaning to blog about since the conference... what's the best way to find the real cure for aging? (or, How do we raise the $10 million to DTGDRS, for the three of you who were there and remember how I said we should really stop calling it that.)

And I'll Pay The Price, and I'll Pray That It's Enough

That's a line from Melissa Etheridge's "Chrome Plated Heart," another song off my old tapes that is ringing true this week.

And the title of this post because I am beginning to think that I am nowhere near the level of CR that I need to be at.

Now that may seem absurd when my daily calorie target is 1000 and I've lost 33 pounds in eight months, but remember this: at least once a week, usually twice, I am going out and eating many, many calories, which thrown onto my averages means I'm eating at least 1100 - 1200, and some weeks more.

Upon hearing from all the scientists about the many theories of why CR works, as well as hearing from the brothers and sisters about their own experiences, I am starting to wonder if my body is not stressed enough. I mean, at first, I was just burning off a lot of unnecessary fat, so it's no wonder that I was not hungry even when I dropped my calorie levels very low. (or does that make sense? it's how I felt. could have been a ketogenic state, though my carbs were never low, if anything, they were way high back then.) I have rarely felt hungry, and I'm starting to think that's a problem.

WARNING: Soft skinned folks in the moderate camp should just stop reading now. It will only upset you. (vague paraphrase of Rant: Moderate CR, MR, Sept. 5, 02)

I am not doing this to lose weight. I am not doing this to look like a very short supermodel... I wasn't happy with my body at 137, but I've been happy with how I look from about 128 on down. The "You're too thin" comments didn't start to hit until under 115. Now they're becoming more frequent, though it's hard to tell the motivation of those who say it... especially when it's coming from women. I've started to just say, "Okay," when someone tells me I'm too thin. Like, I heard you, but I don't feel the need to explain myself.

I am not even doing this to "be healthy," though of course CR WORKS BECAUSE IT MAKES YOU HEALTHY (again, quoting the Rant). I am healthier now than I have ever been, but that doesn't mean that the things I do fit into the normal American definition of "healthy." [Relevant tangent: Have I ever told you about how I think that "healthy" is the new American substitute for "virtuous" in Victorian morality? Read any pop psychologist: anyone who is over 30 and isn't married with 2.5 children, "balancing" work and family, pursuing the ownership of houses, cars and vacations, is "unhealthy." Well, bullshit. If that works for you, great, but it doesn't work for me, and if it did, there would be several thousand workers who wouldn't have a voice on their job because I would have been too busy planning a wedding to be a union organizer.]

I am doing this to live a very, very long time. As one of my CR brothers put it, living longer means that if you hate the way things are now, you may live long enough to see them change. The slowing of aging may be caused by the very stress of eating less than the body thinks it needs. I feel like I have been eating only as much as my body thinks it needs, and not a drop more, but because I am rarely hungry, and when I am, I eat, I don't think I am stressing my body out enough.

Now I get tons of benefits, and the benefits of "moderate" CR are undeniable. It does make you feel better than the deadly standard American lifestyle. You've read essay after essay on how great I feel, how happy I am, how CR can do everything from cure anxiety to mow your lawn to do your taxes. If you're out there and you want to do CR but you don't want to do anything extreme, that's great! Eat less, buy your nutritional software, get your RDA's everyday, up your protein and your MUFA's, and you'll look and feel great! If you're a woman, it's likely that you won't feel that hungry once you adjust your macronutrient ratios and figure out what meal spacing works for you. I would be really happy if any of my readers made changes like this in their lifestyle and felt better, lived healthier, in part because of things they had learned from my crazy journey.

But you didn't think that would be enough for me, did you?

For months now, ever since I first read "RANT: Moderate CR" I've known that I would not stay at that point. I'm not a moderate... and I want to live forever. Or at least the 600 years I should get before the NJ turnpike eats me alive. I want to be there when de Grey and his buddies figure this whole thing out. I believe this can work. I want to be first in line, and looking fabulous at that. What's the point of living forever if you...

I keep saying that, and I keep making progress, but I suspect that the next phase will be much, much harder.

First: hunger. I am not good with hunger. For example, last night, I was hungry. No doubt due to playing blood sugar games, eating an apple and a banana on the road after eating that silly bagel for breakfast, etc. I ate right around 1500 calories yesterday, which if you throw it only the day before still averages out okay, but was a good example of how when I'm hungry, I just eat. Low carb tortilla filled with eggwhites and part skim mozarella... not terrible, but I'm not going for "not terrible," I passed "not terrible" months ago. And this am my anxiety threatened to jump back up. I have to learn to deal with hunger, both from the perspective of anxiety control and for the possibility of achieving that thing that people think might be doing that thing we're trying to do. You know what I mean?

[Moderately relevant tangent: I am chilly and I am putting on a sweater. I know I said I'd never eat breakfast and I do now, but this one I'm not backing off from any time soon. I really hate being cold. And I own some very cute sweaters, and everyone knows about the life-extension benefits of cute sweaters, especially if they were on sale.]

I had a long chat (hmmm... name of a Thai restaurant in Burlington, VT -- hello JG and PF!) with one of the brothers about hunger, and he said he was basically hungry all the time. I am so amazed by that. He didn't even like vegetables before CR! I haven't changed my life all that much, compared to that. I respect that level of self-discipline. I hope I have it.

Second: social issues. I was asked twice in the last two days, "Do you really eat?" Context was talking about going out to dinner with friends. Up until now I've been able to say, yes. I have arranged my food intake such that I can eat low cal for five days or so and then go out for a normal dinner out and act like a normal person. It makes social life easier, and it's fun! I really love good food, and I enjoy being able to eat fancy out food without worrying too much about the calories.

That collides with the hunger issue in this way: I suspect that the up and down-ness of my diet has made it easier to deal with hunger that would naturally arise at 1000 cals/day because just when I start to get really hungry, I go out and eat a whole lot. If I want to lower my total calories, I think I need to do it by cutting back on the fifth-day-out practice, not by lowering the other days. As evidenced by Thursday's 700 ish leading to Friday's low carb tortilla with eggwhites and mozarella, I get super hungry if I go too low. So I need to even it out to be about 1000 each day, which will lower my averages.

That means: even more fanatical attention to nutrition. This is why I am so grateful that Michael Rae did me as a case study and just sent me lots of info on what supplements he thinks might help. I've done pretty well on my diet, but I don't want to take chances. The whole world of supplements is totally new to me, and I need to re-read my notes to his presentation, combined with the me-specific info, a bunch of times to decide exactly how high I go in the tiers. (Go read his presentation if you're wondering what I'm talking about. Use the archives, find Dean's Conference Day One Notes.) But to put it mildly, my interest here is in life-extension, and so I'm willing to try a lot. As I said a couple of times at the conference: I'm up for anything.

The April's diet day 1 is pretty good, you've read it before, and if I did something like that most days, combined with some tier 1 and 2 supplements, I would feel confident about my ON. No room for junk calories though! Ah, those days when I drink more than one glass of wine... those days when I eat seafood, which has suspicious levels of toxic stuff... you're getting the idea.

Tonight I am going out to dinner with friends in New York city, and I will no doubt drink more than one glass of wine and eat seafood. And I will enjoy it. But I will spend the entire train ride there and back, plus my night time insomnia attack, wondering how much longer I will be the person who does that.

I Need A Quick Fix

That's a line from one of my old mix tapes, a song called "Sick and Beautiful" by Melt. It's on one of the darkest mix tapes I've ever made, and I've made some pretty dark mix tapes. But I challenge any of you to spend your first year out of Yale on the road in the South, spending fourteen hours a day visiting workers who slam the door in your face when you try to talk about the union. Then see if you don't make some dark mix tapes.

It is the title of this post because it's exactly what I was thinking last night as I printed out some stuff off of Aubrey de Grey's website, http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/, to read at home. One of my favorite things to do is to get into bed with a nice glass of red wine (4 oz) and a good article. I was feeling a bit low, having just returned from a five hour drive in the rain, and I figured Dr. de Grey could cheer me right up. In the post-conference world, I am finding the that frequent email contact with my CR brothers and sisters combined with fresh stuff from the SENS website is keeping me from running screaming out the door.

All that preamble leads to a discussion I was thinking of taking up with my blog readers. I'm thinking of putting a picture up on the blog. I've resisted doing so for several reasons up till now: 1) as a young single woman, it is always a bit odd to put your picture up on a website. I have not wanted my blog to be misinterpreted as a very long personal ad (I assure you, there are much easier ways to pick up guys than eating 1100 calories a day!) 2) I can't decide what I would want to look like in a picture. I mean, this blog is about my CR life, not my work, so pictures of me in my work clothes (business suit, conservative yet high heels, tasteful makeup) wouldn't really be right. I'd like to imagine myself in my CR life as something like a heroine in a science fiction novel, like Molly in _Neuromancer_. I've found myself recently thinking, as I contemplate buying clothes that actually fit, "What would Molly wear?"

Last night as I was walking down the long sidewalk to my apartment in the rain, it occured to me that how I looked then was really a more accurate representation of who I really am: hair wet from the rain, desperately trying not to touch anything because I'd just gotten my nails done (it's a razorgirl thing, you wouldn't understand, unless you've read _Neuromancer_), clutching a stack of de Grey articles in one hand, my walkman in another, and a Hello Kitty totebag stuffed with workclothes from my recent trip over my shoulder. Skirt dragging the ground because having lost thirty-three pounds, I no longer have the waist or the hips to hold it up. Feet getting very cold because wet skirt is hitting freshly pedicured toes. (If you're going to live forever, there's no excuse for not taking care of your feet.) I suddenly envied some of my CR superheroes who actually manage to look like superheroes. I really must work on this.

First, I need clothes that fit. That's just a given, but I keep spending money on other stuff and not taking myself shopping. I also hesistate to buy much until my weight stabilizes, and I feel like I have a ways to go on that (more on that next entry.)

Second, I need to figure out what I look like as a thin person. I've never been fat, but I've never been as thin as I am now, and I suspect that I will get even thinner. (One funny thing about the CR world... saying that someone is *not* skinny is a compliment. We had a discussion about this in the car when five of us were packed into the front of a pick up truck that seats 3.) I am still living with an image of myself that doesn't quite fit how I look now, and sometimes I am startled when I catch my reflection in the mirror. For example, this morning I threw on some black leggings, a sweater, and hiking boots, just something quick to run around in the rain taking my mother to the airport and doing errands. In the ladies room at my office I walked by a full-length mirror and was shocked at how small I am now. I like it. I worry that others in my life won't like it, but it's a risk I'm willing to take to add many years to my life. (more on my newest answer to "You're too thin" coming up) Especially after seeing some of the more experienced CR folk in person.

After all the silly popular press about hardcore CR practitioners looking gaunt and sickly, I feel I owe it to my readers to debunk that myth. The most serious, most long term of the people I met looked so vibrantly, creepily healthy that I thought to myself: This is the best possible advertisement for the benefits of CRON. For one thing, everyone looks much, much younger than they are. And then there's the clear, glowing skin. Then there's the clear, glowing eyes. You see why I felt like I was in a science fiction movie? If any of the brothers had mentioned that he happened to be an elf, and that's why he was so beautiful and would live forever, it would have seemed perfectly reasonable. Go watch Lord of the Rings. This is what CR can do for you. The great thing about CR is that while you have to be born an elf (or maybe marry an elf... whatever happened about that whole thing with the mortal who was in love with Liv Tyler, did he get to be immortal cause he married an elf? I never saw the last two movies) you can eat (or not eat) your way into just looking like an elf. CRON is so democratic that way, I love it.

I am very excited to see that the benefits of CRON that I have seen in my own appearance in a short time seem to be magnified with time and degree of intensity. As I said in the last meeting, I look better now when I wake up in the morning after three hours of sleep than I used to look fully rested with makeup on. So that's one reason why now I think I may put up a picture. As I quote lighter and lighter weights, those of you who haven't seen me may be wondering, okay, but does she look like a chemo patient? I can assure you I do not. But why should you take my word for it?

Anyway, I have no good pics yet so it'll be awhile before I figure this out.

Radio In My Head, Radio In My Car

The most miraculous thing has happened! One of my old co-workers found a stash of my favorite mix tapes from years back in my old desk and gave them back to me! So I have a new set of tapes that read like a chronicle of every exciting quest I've had for the last ten years! It really brightened up my ten hours of driving over the last two days.

The line above is from a tape I made in 1997 called "Home At Last?" There is an art to mix tape naming... has nothing to do with CR though so I won't go into detail here. The song quoted above is "King of New Orleans" by Better Than Ezra.

I'll write more soon... catching up on work. Hopping up to New York City tomorrow evening for a quick dinner with friends... hoping to write later tonight or tomorrow morning.

There's More Butter Where That Came From

or: "CRON on the Road"

The headline was a slogan posted above the dining area in the diner where I met with nurses from 2 pm - 6 pm yesterday. Needless to say, it wasn't CRON heaven.

Luckily, after nearly ten years of organizing, I'm used to this kind of thing. Even before I started CRON, I was a somewhat "healthy" eater. For instance, you wouldn't catch me dead eating that weird Philly creation called scrapple. Some of the ways that CRON, or rather, the influence of my CR brothers and sisters, most notably the two MR's (hi Mary!), has changed my diet (that was a gramatically complex sentence, I apologize) has made it easier to eat in diners. For instance:

Yesterday, after eating eggwhites and a glass of skim milk for breakfast at 5:30 am, I was feeling pretty hungry by the time I landed at my diner on the other end of the state at 1 pm. I felt like I needed some protein, so I ordered an eggwhite omlet with tomatoes, green peppers, onions and mushrooms. I asked that they please not put butter in the pan, but judging from the slogan quoted in my headline, I can't be too sure. After eating that, I was still hungry, and I knew I wouldn't get much food later, so I ordered a tossed salad with just vinegar (never trust the oil in a diner) and an order of cottage cheese. The small dish of cottage cheese was no doubt full fat, but it's still not a terrible calorie hit for just a small cup, about 120 - 150. A bit of calcium. The salad was just iceberg lettuce with a few tomato wedges, yellow onions, and croutons, which I regret to report I ate. Just a few though... not enough to plunge me back into the depths of high carb darkness. I drank a cup of tea and a ton of water.

After doing four hours of meetings, I was ready to curl up in my hotel room with a nice glass of resveratrol, but I had stupidly forgotten to pack any for the trip. So I popped by a wine store, only to discover that it was closed for Veteran's Day! The wine stores are all state run here in PA. So there I was, corkscrew (having learned my lesson about not packing a corkscrew in Charleston) but no wine! Oh well. I went back to my hotel room, ate an apple from the free fruit display, and curled up with the book that I'm reading for my lefty book club, which is meeting at my house on Sunday night.

Yesterday's total calories were rather low: eggwhites, skim milk, eggwhite omlet, cottage cheese, lettuce and croutons, apple. 700-800 I would guess, judging from the calorie totals I know on things like eggwhites but throwing in some extra for the possibilities of butter in the pan, etc.

I woke up this morning very, very hungry, and went downstairs hoping to find something edible at the free breakfast bar. There were these weird flat egg patties, of which I ate two... rather rubbery, but no doubt contained some protein. My old arch nemisis called out to me from the bagel bin, and I regret to report that I ate one tiny Lenders' sized bagel with cream cheese... about 150 on the bagel, 200 on the serving of cream cheese. A nutty waste of 350 calories that I will no doubt regret later in the day, but not exactly a crisis considering how low I was yesterday and that tonight I'll be home for dinner with veggies. I really wanted another bagel. but in a great example of how writing the blog keeps me relatively on track, I decided that I couldn't face telling you that I ate two bagels, so I just poured myself some coffee and left the dining area. Yea! Accountability works! I made a rule very early on that there was no point in writing the darned blog if I didn't tell you about all my mistakes, so perhaps you can learn from them. But I've found over time that knowing that I'll tell the world about them makes me less likely to make the mistakes in the first place! And knowing that you'll be out there somewhere feeling good when I make some progress makes the quest for ON, even with all its detours, much more fun.

I also ate a small dish of cut citrus fruit: grapefruit, oranges. So a giant breakfast for me, but since I won't get any food for quite awhile, probably not terrible.

It's easier for me to adhere to my CRON principles on the road than it was to eat lowfat vegan in middle America. Now, in my CRON life, I can happily eat eggwhite omlets and cottage cheese at a diner, knowing that I'll get real veggies later at home. Much easier than being a lowfat vegan, where the only things I could eat were salad and fruit cup. No wonder I was shaky all the time! Can you imagine... being on the road, eating only salad and fruit? No protein anywhere in sight? Maybe I'd eat a baked potato with nothing on it if I was really hungry. Maybe I'd throw some ketchup on the baked potato if I was feeling wild and crazy. No wonder I was a nutcase! This is why for me, CRON is actually easier than what I was trying to do before. The p:f:c ratios make all the difference. I am still a little fat phobic, but look at where I started!

So yesterday was good on protein, good on calcium, low on veggies (never trust the "vegetable of the day" in a diner) and bad on fat (there was some fat, it just wasn't a particularly good kind.) I'll have a good salad with my own evoo this evening, and a brewers yeast and steamed vegetable soup. I hear cruciferous creatures calling my name...

So much more still to tell you about the conference but I'm borrowing the hotel computer at the Hampton Inn and I have to hit the road for another five hour drive. More soon.

The Only Thing That Never Dies Is a Theory of Aging

Great quote from one of the scientists at the conference, and I want to tell you all about it, but I can't because I have to run out the door to drive to Pittsburgh.

I'll have five hours in the car to write in my head, so when I get back, I should finally be able to deliver on some of the rash promises I've been making to explain it all to you.

More soon.

The Prevention of Paraplegia Through The Non-Jumping Off of Cliffs

is not a victory for neurosurgery.

Thus, I attempt to introduce you, my darling bloggiefriends to the concept that preventing the diesease of aging (heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, etc.) is not the same thing as actually preventing aging.

Don't get me wrong. I am all for Preventing What Will Kill You (see Walford, _Beyond 120 Year Diet_ Ignore his lowfat recommendations.) As everyone who knows me knows, I used to fantasize about teaching former heart disease sufferers how to cook lowfat food. I used to envision a lowfat vegan universe, in which meat eaters would pay more for their health insurance. I was all about preventing disease.

Until I read The List, of course. I had always had an intuitive understanding of the fact that CR slows down all the processes of aging, but I didn't realize just how different that is in terms of the actual number of years to be gained. Just playing dodgeball with disease won't add too many years to your life. But actually slowing, or reversing, or stopping aging, that's a different game all together.

That's why I was a bit frustrated at some of the scientists' presentations where they talked lots about preventing cancer and heart disease, but they scooted this issue of actually slowing aging. I understand that we have no certain biomarkers for it (and that we have a lot of dead rats to show for the effort to find them) and that scientists are sometimes reluctant to speculate when they just don't know based on the data at hand. But I think it's important that we recognize the difference in the two concepts: disease prevention vs. aging prevention.

I wasn't in a high risk group for diseases of aging as a lowfat, fit, healthy vegan. But I wasn't doing anything about aging. So I choose to do CR, and do anything I can to help with the search for the immortality pill, instead of hopping along my merry Ornish way.

I'm gradually introducing the topic, in an effort to prepare you for a discussion of one of the most fascinating conversations I've ever had, or witnessed, or been in a room with.

But you'll have to remain in suspense... I have to make dinner and memorize Aubrey de Grey's website. Seems like it would be a shortcut to just make dinner for Aubrey de Grey and have him explain it all to me, and he seems like the kind of fellow you would enjoy having over for dinner, but since he's in Cambridge that might be impractical. And I don't know what he eats. One thing about the CR brothers... at least you know what to cook for them.

Cooking for the Non-CR'd

Last night I was having non-CR company over for dinner, and I faced a dilemma. I had promised I would make some of my famous non-CR foods, notably my peanut butter pie, which is like a frozen Reces peanut butter cup, but I wanted to make a basically CR friendly dinner so that I could eat and not fall off the straight and narrow path.

I ended up making a delicious CR friendly, almost Zoned pasta-free lasagna. It has spinach, so those who are spinach phobic should substitute other greens. But here's the basic recipe:

1 can purred tomatoes
2 cloves garlic
4 oz mozeralla cheese, part skim, low moisture
280 cals fat free cottage cheese (that's one carton of the kind I buy)
2 red peppers, roasted
sundried tomatoes, packed in balsamic vinegar, no oil
1 can artichoke hearts packed in water, diced
spinach leaves, raw
half a cup of dry red wine
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 bunches broccoli raw, diced or cut into florets and small stem pieces

Mince the garlic and simmer it in the wine. Throw in the tomatoes, turn down the heat, stir in the olive oil.

Roast the red peppers. If you don't know how to do this, email me and I'll tell you. Chop them.

In a casserole dish, put down a layer of artichokes, broccoli, red peppers. Cover with dots of fat free cottage cheese. Cover with a layer of spinach leaves, pretending the spinach is lasagna. Cover with a layer of tomato sauce. Repeat until dish is mostly full. Dot some sundried tomatoes on top. Top with the mozarella. Cook on whatever temperature you think makes sense until the cheese is slightly melted.

It's just like lasagna, except not. It's quite good. Nearly Zoned, too, according to my DWIDP, though a touch high carb and a touch low fat. It's better Zoned if you take out the wine, but the wine really makes the tomato sauce taste good.

I served pumpkin soup first, which I make with free range organic chicken broth (4 cups), a can of pure pumpkin, salt, curry powder, garlic powder, and the juice of one whole fresh lemon, as well as some lemon zest. It's fabulous this time of year.

Tonight I am once again having non-CR'd dinner company... trying to catch up on all my socializing now that my campaign and my conference are over. I'm going to make a CR friendly tomato soup, and a shrimp dish. I'll let you know how it turns out. I frequently enter the kitchen with just a vague idea of what I'm making, then I play with the food until it turns up something I like. It's one of the reasons why I enjoy cooking so much.

I'm still feeling high from the conference... I hope I can keep living on it indefinitely in these dark days of winter with no CR brothers or sisters in sight.

It Won't Do To Dream of Caramel

The first line of Suzanne Vega's "Caramel," a song which should go on the CR theme mix tape if there ever was one.

And the title of this post because one of the most interesting and useful things I found out about at the conference was how eating just one bite of a food that is high in saturated fat and sugar causes physical changes in the body that make you want more of that food!

Like many things I learned at the conference, I learned it from another CR practitioner in conversation outside the main sessions. Chatting with a CR brother, let's call him Very Perceptive CR Brother, on a walk in downtown Charleston, he described how this phenomenon works. So it's not just my imagination... trying just a little bit of something really does make you desperately want more! The potato chip manufacturers are correct: You can't eat just one!

I thought this information would be particularly useful to my blog readers, if anyone out there is struggling with food cravings and social situations where people urge you to "just try a bite" of whatever it is they're eating.

This morning, at a meeting with nurses, I remembered this advice and refused to eat even one small piece of the bagels with cream cheese feast that was provided. I know better than to have even a taste of my old arch nemesis.

No Wonder I Was Hungry

As you read, I was already near my calorie target for the day when I left work yesterday. I ate my little salad, only about 60 calories there, and drank my little glass of wine for 85.

And I was still hungry. Really hungry. Like, considering eating the neighbors hungry.

I had very little already prepared things in the house. One of my strategies, actually, is to keep very little prepared food in the house so that I am not tempted to snack.

But I did have one unusual set of items. The leftover ingredients from last Saturday night, when I made Michael Rae's delicious CR friendly pizzas for myself and my Very Skinny Mom.

So last night I ate: two low carb tortillas, 200 calories each, with part skim mozarella, just over 200 calories worth of that. Those were the only remaining ingredients. So my total intake for the day was: 1574 - 1600.

[Wow, fancy that, my calorie intake yesterday was right around the average SAT score of the guys I dated in college. Now that explains a lot.]

That's about what I eat on my going out to dinner days, so it's not that big a deal. But the fact that I ate it in an unplanned way, on a day when I was planning to eat at target, not above, and that I was sooooo hungry, was of interest.

I got on the scale this morning. 104. Yikes! I was 106 before the conference, and with that big meal late last night, I was if anything holding more water weight than usual. My carb content yesterday wasn't particularly low, though my fat content, especially saturated fat, was high. So I don't think it was the Atkins water weight effect, since I was way over 10% carbs, I had the wine at night, and the tortillas, while low carb, were still tortillas. We'll see tomorrow.

Sure enough, my anxiety returned in force this morning, and it took awhile for me to catch onto it. Argh! I am so sensitive now to calorie changes, and I don't think it's all in my head because I was having the classic anxiety symptoms for about an hour before it occured to me that my calories had dramatically increased late last night. It's like low calorie levels are an anti-anxiety drug for me, and I can't go off them without significant cost to my mental well-being. This is fine, over all, even good, because it makes me focus on CR. But it's a pain! And it's getting worse! My body is so much more sensitive to changes in calorie intake and food content than it used to be.

I think a lot of us ate less than normal at the conference. I had saved calories on Sunday night for resveratrol, and when that plan was stifled by the inability to locate a corkscrew, I didn't make up the cals. On top of the total deficit... not eating breakfast, eating fewer than 200 cals for lunch on two days, etc. Wow, now that I look back, I am realizing that I ate very little. I thought I was eating more because I had decent sized portions of fish at dinner, but that doesn't make up for eating just a plate of veggies, or a handful of almonds and an apple, all day.

Thank God this morning I had my eggwhites. They are quite delicious plain, though I did grind some fresh pepper onto them today. Eating a cup of eggwhites in the morning really makes my protein goal achievable, and I missed them so much! It was fun to meet other lovers of eggwhites at the conference. It was just fun to meet everyone at the conference, but you non-CR society folks are probably sick of hearing about it by now. Too bad. The next several entries are going to deal with some specific debates that were had at the conference. But first, I have some more research to do.

Yeah, But What Did You Eat?

Having been away from DWIDP during the conference, I hadn't been sure how I was doing on calories and nutrition. Well, that's not quite true. At this point, I am good enough at counting calories that I can get a basic approximation without my software, and there were lots of people at the conference who were helpful in figuring out how much was in what. I knew I was eating under target, and I could feel that "I'm eating myself" feeling by the second day, but I had intentionally gone a little higher on calories the week before in preparation, knowing that when I'm in the midst of an exciting situation, I immediately cease to eat.

I couldn't find a reliable source of eggwhites in Charleston, so I skipped breakfast, and no doubt was a little stupider for it. However, I did go to the grocery store on the first full day of the conference and got some almonds, which helped to keep me from getting shaky on Friday when we all decided to forgo lunch in favor of another presentation. On the first night, Mary had found a restaurant that looked good and reasonably CR friendly, so we went there. It was a fish place called Fish, and it had as you might suspect, fish. I ended up eating there three nights in a row with different groups of people each night, mostly because we tried to go to other places but they were either too crowded and noisy or we just couldn't find any decent food elsewhere. So I got most of my protein over the course of the conference from fishes grilled with nothing on them and shrimp serviche and scallops. Fish had steamed vegetable sides that most of us took advantage of. The CR meals provided at three meals in the cafeteria had lots of veggies, salad, steamed broccoli and cauliflower, fruits, but the only serious protein source was turkey, which I don't eat. I did have some heaping plates of salad, though.

It was tons of fun to eat out with other CR people because we all negotiate with the waiters pretty much the same way. It was funny though, not to have anyone to feed leftovers to, and since everyone else was also cold, there was no one to borrow a jacket from. Eating with CR folk meant having the inner dialogue that runs in my mind about calories and nutrition outloud, and with people who actually care! There were lots of wine drinkers, and we greatly enjoyed "resveratrol hopping."

By the last day, I was about to have a protein deficiency freakout, and a CR brother came to the rescue with some whey protein powder that's very different from the kind I had before. We set out in search of some skim milk, since I was low in calcium too, and sure enough, there was none to be found! The hotel restaurant only had whole milk and half and half, the McDonald's only had whole and 2%! It's hard to believe that skim milk, such a mainstream item, can be so hard to find!

The final night, after almost everyone had left, four of us who remained went out to Whole Foods to graze on produce and the salad bar. Going shopping with the CR brothers is a truly entertaining experience. We have fun figuring out what was in the salads, eating free vegetable samples, and talking about how we had changed our tastes in food since starting CR. I was surprised to find that some of the most disciplined CR practitioners really didn't like vegetables when they started! It made me realize how lucky I am that I liked vegetables from the first time we ever met. It was fun to watch a brother from the UK discover all the wonders of Whole Foods, including the "Just Berries" dried berries, with no sugar added. We all agreed that we could go way overboard on those if we weren't careful!

This morning I didn't get breakfast since I was in midair at my usual breakfast time, and I went straight to the office from the airport. I did stop at the produce store and pick up a salad, so I ate a hardboiled egg there. By noon I was desperate for protein, and I organized the work crew into going out for a fishy lunch. I had a seafood gumbo with okra, a little rice, tomato, crab, grouper and shrimp, as well as a Greek salad topped with three shrimp, vinegar instead of dressing, though I did eat the feta, which was delicious but not overly abundant. DWIDP thinks that I have had 839 calories so far today, with 65.7 g protein and more protein and fat than carb. I think I'll just finish off the salad (lettuce, celery, cucumber, red pepper, vinegar) tonight that I bought this morning, drink my little glass of red wine, and call it a day. I was hungry in the morning, but now I'm pretty satisfied, and just a few greens plus a glass of wine should get me to target but not over. Too much saturated fat today, but overall, not terrible for a day when I wasn't able to prepare any of my own food.

Tonight, I go to the grocery store, and tomorrow I can be back to my old self, eggwhites and all.

If You Won't Turn To the Dark Side, Then Perhaps Your Sister Will

Yesterday morning, standing in the lobby of the Howard Johnson's Riverfront Hotel in Charleston while people were leaving the CRS Conference, I finally understood how Princess Leia must have felt when she looked up from the forest moon of Endor and saw the Death Star blow up in the sky. The new information that I have these amazing CR brothers and sisters all over the world, combined with the horror of returning to a world of people who just don't get it, caused me to feel exactly what Leia must have felt in the split second between when the Death Star blew and when her Jedi warrior princess sixth sense kicked in telling her that Luke Skywalker was okay, and would be returning soon enough to teach her cool Jedi tricks.

The CR Conference was mindblowingly amazingly amazing and I don't have time now to write about it. I think the thing that stands out most in my mind, other than the fact that my CR brothers and sisters are so brilliant and gorgeous, is that I really became aware of the difference between those who are interested in preventing the *diseases* of aging, and those who are really interested in preventing aging itself. I had an interesting exchange with one of the scientists about this, and lots of fascinating conversation with the CR brothers who are most knowledgable about life-extension. But more on that later... for now, I am back at work, having flow in on a 7:25 am flight out of Charleston and gone straight to work after being picked up by Very Skinny Mom. A zillion things to do await, and I need some protein.

But How Much Baby Do We Really Need?

For those who don't have song lyric recall, that's a line from "Daydream Believer."

In an event that rarely happens in my life, but never goes unnoticed, the actual soundtrack that was playing at the time actually fit the scene.

Last night I was talking with Brian Delanney, Michael Rae, and CR Hacker Boy Brother (who is very into online privacy and therefore I assume would not want to be named) about how much money it would take to fund the rodent studies for the CR mimetic drug (I am simplifying a very complicated concept here, apologies but I have little time), and out of the annoying hotel music that I was unable to find the switch to turn off the strains of "Daydream Believer" begin to play. I said, "Finally a song I actually like," as we had suffered through "It's My Party and I'll Cry If I Want To" and other such torture. There was a moment of silence in which I mentally wrote the headline of this post. It will take at least ten million, it seems. My fantasies of fundraising are starting to seem less and less like fantasies and more like possibilities.

Being here at the CRS Conference is like having all my childhood fantasies of being Princess Leia come true. I am surrounded by Jedi Knights, blockade runners, and interesting creatures from another planet. It definitely feels like the first movie, when all the characters have just met but you have this sense that they'll be appearing in several sequels over the course of many years. Luckily, I am not wearing my hair in an unflattering style. Princess Leia never got the hair thing right until _Return of the Jedi_, I think we could all agree.

I am learning so much. Yesterday the presentations from the scientists were fantastic, about Every other day fasting, a history of CR science, and all sorts of things. I love to watch the scientists be catty about each other and argue. I have understood almost everything, and what I haven't, others are explaining to me.

The food has been infrequent... yesterday we decided to skip lunch because we were running low on time, and I hadn't eaten breakfast, so I wasn't feeling too good. I ate a bunch of almonds and stole and abandoned apple from a desk (missing VLC's habit of carrying fruit around.) I don't trust the restaurant here to make an eggwhite omlet so I haven't been eating breakfast and I miss my eggwhite scrambles!

So much more to say but a CR scientist who is making a presentation this morning needs the computer, so I'd better run!

Live from Very Supportive CR Brother's Computer

I'm hanging out before dinner with some awesome brothers -- VSCRB and New CR Hacker Boy Brother, and we're chatting about how wonderful this conference is. It's just been amazing. I met so many of my CR superheroes, including Michael Rae whose presentation on supplements was fantastic. I am learning so much, and actually following most of it. It's just amazing. I went grocery shopping with Brian Delanney and Kenton Mullins! All the people here are so much fun, so nice, and really beautiful. It's incredible how alive and vibrant the folks here look.

I have been way too nervous and excited to eat, so I have had eight unsalted almonds so far today. I knew this would happen, so I upped my cals last week to make up for the decrease this week. In just a little while, we're picking up Brian Delanney and hopefully some other board members after their meeting to go out to dinner. Fun fun fun!

Eating out with CR brothers and sisters is so much fun. Last night a huge group of us went out, and we all wanted our fish with nothing on it, our veggies steamed or sauteed, and everything in tiny portions. We all wanted the room to be warmer! We can squeeze tons of us in around one table cause we're so tiny! Earlier today, five of us drove to the grocery store in a pick up truck that seats three! Last night, I ate a piece of grilled tuna, Mary estimated at five or six ounes, and some steamed mixed veggies and broccoli. Glass of pinot noir... I'd say the majority of us are wine drinkers. Meeting Mary has been so awesome... it's like meeting your best friend! We feel like we know each other since we read each other all the time. This morning when I saw Dean for the first time I ran up to him and gave him a big hug before he could figure out who I was. He recovered from the shock quickly. I gave Michael Rae a big hug and said, "I feel like I know you, I've read everything you've ever written!" At least it wasn't "I carried a watermelon." When I first met Kenton he was stuck in conversation with a bunch of people, so we didn't get to chat till later. Kenton and MR look like they're about 21... I feel certain that if either of them were to visit me, I could pass them off as my little brother home on spring break from University. MR looks like my mom, Kenton looks more like my dad. Clearly, we are all related in the CR universe. Brian Delanney is extremely witty, and has been writing notes on the back of some Hegel that he's translating into Swedish. This is a group of beautiful, brilliant human beings.

Right now, VSCRB is making us all tea with broccoli extract while we're waiting to go out to dinner.

Yesterday, I had some time in the afternoon so I went out and bought some new clothes... size 0 Banana Republic pants. I never thought I'd see the day that size 0 was actually kinda big. What now? The children's dept?

I am having so much fun. It's been a rough week until now, but this conference is taking my mind off the horrors and focusing me on the long term.

And CR Hacker Boy Bro told Brian about my fundraising dreams... stay tuned!

Live From Charleston

Hi guys,

I'm at the CRS conference in the lobby of the hotel, watching Michael Rae, Lisa Walford, and Don Dowden talk about an AOR clinical trial. I don't think anyone has noticed that I'm here yet, which is fine, because I'm following their conversation. Fascinating.

I'll write more later... just wanted to let you guys know that I'm alive.