April's CR Diary

A diary of a 30 year old woman following CRON, or Caloric Restriction with Optimal Nutrition, for health and life extension.

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

The Greater Alberta Life Extensionists' Intentional Community

Or, "Philadelphia is just a suburb of Edmonton!"

In addition to the excitement of watching a packed house of students and townspeople respond enthusiastically to Aubrey de Grey's message that curing aging is possible, I tremendously enjoyed the experience of hanging out with other people who have somehow removed themselves from the global pro-aging trance. In addition to TNGOE, who was swamped with ferrying Aubrey from one media interview to another, MR and I met up with Aaron, aka The Newest M Prize CR Brother, and his wife, Christine. Aaron just started CR a few weeks ago and is doing very well -- you can check out his blog at www.spaz.ca. We had a CR potluck after the talk, during which we ate Sherm's megamuffins, Sherm's binging brownies, carrots, fruit, a grape tomato and artichoke heart in balsamic vinegar with capers salad that I had made (40 calories/100 grams -- am I being assimilated by the Canadians?). It was tremendous fun to hang with Aaron and Christine. Aaron has been a long term life extensionist and an M Prize volunteer from practically day one. As it turns out, he started reading my blog when the first flurry of bloggiefriend M Prize donations came in (thanks, bloggiefriends!) and decided to do CR! His wife Christine is a dance teacher pursuing a degree in psychology. MR and I worried a little bit over Aaron's protein intake and apologized a couple of times for acting like his mom. It reminds me of my early days when Little MR (that's Mary, at www.crdiary.blogspot.com) would point out problems with my diet and send me on searches for the source of what I was missing. Guess I found what I was missing, eh?

Meanwhile, I can't wait to hang out with Aaron, Christine, and Kevin again. Hopefully we can come up to Edmonton again when I'm visiting MR in Calgary. It's not too terribly far by bus, just about 3.5 hours, and MR and I got some fabulous work done during the ride. It's amazing how much I learn just from chatting with MR. You can imagine how mindblowingly awesome it was to spend two days with both MR and A DNJ d G. And then Kevin showed up, and the other Canadian M Prize brother named Michael... genius overload! I'm going to have to hang out with some stupid people just to achieve a balance after all this!

I'm thinking that the Greater Alberta Life Extensionist Club has some serious potential, as long as no one minds counting Philly as part of Greater Alberta.

On the road is never an easy time for CR folk to eat, but thanks to MR's careful preparation, we were set. Well, except for the fact that he forgot to pack my breakfast. Something funny about that, seeing as the reason why I eat breakfast now is that he's ranted so much on the List about how important it is. Well, he forgot my breakfast so we stopped at a Subway and grabbed the highest protein, lowest carb/calorie thing we could find to stuff into me: a turkey sandwich on an Atkins wrap. 180 cals. Yes, that's right bloggiefriends, I ate some meat. I haven't technically been a vegetarian since I started eating fish, and I'm still profoundly disturbed by factory farming, but I'm thinking that nutritionally it makes a ton of sense for me to occasionally eat meat. However, I plan to only buy free range organic at home. We also had Subway on the bus on the way back, and I was under calories so I had two glasses of pinot noir when we got home, before completely collapsing with exhaustion.

I've been consistently right on 1000 for ten days now, and I'm finally starting to get hungry. As you'll recall, I've been hitting 1000 most days and then on the fifth or so day going out and eating close to 1500 or more, so that I average 1100. Well, after ten days of 1000, it's starting to catch up with me. I think I'll try to keep it up though. I have tons of energy, my mood is great, and the decrease in anxiety when I stay at a consistent low calorie level is so remarkable that I don't want to give it up. MR and I have talked a lot about how I can Zone my meals to take maximum advantage of whatever that's doing for me, and we've also figured out how to throw tons of protein at me early in the day (yea eggwhites) so I have optimal mental focus. It's nice having the CR guru right next to me.

Tonight I'm cooking dinner. I'm making my lasagna with greens, and using a lot of the same measurements as MR uses in his CR friendly Zoned pizzas. I hope he likes it!

By the way, today is the one year anniversary of the day I bought and read Dr. Walford's "The Beyond 120 Year Diet."

I've come a long way, baby.

1 Comments:

  • At 4:57 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    hello, S. here!
    can you post the recipes for Sherm's MegaMuffins, and binging brownies? Or just the link to them.
    thanks in advance!
    S.

     

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