Skinny For Life

And so the sleek shall inherit the Earth: eat less, and live longer.

In stark opposition to the plethora of Seventeen and YM magazines stories touting only the negative sides to anorexia and bulimia-- new studies seem to support the idea that the less food a person consumes, the longer, and better, they live. Seems like Eating Disorders need to hire a better PR company…

The premise isn't that new, people have been searching for the fabled Fountain of Youth for thousands of years, and stories about staying young forever continue to circulate throughout modern societies due to our culture’s obsession with youth. Everyone's heard the story of Dorian Grey, girls everywhere are obsessed with Edward Cullens, and stories like these will continue to be created and passed long, because people love the fictious idea of staying young and beautiful forever.

Meanwhile, wouldntcha know that the very trick to achieving this may have been right under our nose along? Literally. By keeping your mouth shut-- and staying hungry-- you can stay young possibly forever.

I’ve heard this lore before, and dismissed it. (Probably because it was too impractical to ever be applicable to real life?) However, I was reminded of this "starvation= longer life" theory when I heard that Oprah was doing an upcoming show about this, because, you know, if Oprah is recognizing this, it has to be a big deal. (Or, soon will be.)

It’s an interesting idea, and would make a great “would you rather” question—is an extra 20 years of life worth sacrificing the foods you love, forever?

Consider: Monkeys, Mice and Men! (oh my!)

• Mice that are on restricted diets are living twice as long as their litter mates who are fed regular diets, and can live for 4 years instead of the average 2.

• In a study between two groups of Rhesus monkeys, where one group is fed normally, and one group is fed 30% less, the differences are extreme: the chunky monkey control-group is nearing the end of their life-span (about 27 years) and dealing with high occurrences of diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. The skinny monkeys actually look and behave as if they were much younger-- with shinier coats, and fewer instances of health problems.

• Humans that have joined the CRS- Calorie Restriction Society- (a group that has severely restricted their calories for years now, some of which are are also participating in the Washington University monkey study) have lowered their blood pressure, reduced their body fat, and lessened risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and even cancer. And, they’re looking more physically attractive for it too. As stated by one CRS husband regarding his wife, "to be honest, if you saw her without any clothes, you'd see she looks pretty darn good, like a woman like of many, many years younger."

If you’re interested in science stuff, there are a lot of supportive and significant statistics regarding this kind of lifestyle; and if you're interested, please reference the link above to the CRS website. However, I find myself more interested in the psychological “hows” and “whys” of this lifestyle?

How can people force themselves to live like this, indefinitely?

An example of the menu at a celebratory occasion dubbed a “happy hour” for a group of calorie restricters includes a cocktail of low-calorie soup, some walnuts, a jar of pureed green beans (preferably baby food) spread on flour-free bread. Was the celebration over the fact that there was food?! Foods with high-fat content, such as meats, cheese, sweets, basically everything worth eating, are totally cut out. Instead, dense, high-fiber foods are to make up the bulk of your diet, with the emphasis not neccesarily on being thin, but being healthy.

The people in the CRS are not going on these restricted diets to lose weight, everything they do is solely for the purpose of elongating their lives. But, if you are drastically cutting your food intake, day after day, for the rest of your life, how do you stop yourself from being too skinny? Is there a point where you weight is considered too skinny and negates whatever health benefits you’re aiming to achieve? On the official CRS site, it defines your goal "thinness" (which needs to be achieved to maximize long-life benefits,) as whatever your weight was as a teenager. (With one noteworthy caveat-- this only applies as long as you were NOT one of those morbidly obese kids that would be shown on another accredited talk show hosts line-up, gobbling up everything in sight because, as Maury would expertly suss out, food was the only medium your teenaged mother could express her love with.)

But how does being hungry make your body live longer??

There are many compelling arguments to support the longevity issue, but advocates believe that at the very least, following CR will enhance your health right now by minimizing body fat, inhibiting cell mutation, lowering blood glucose levels, decreasing inflammation, activating brain-alertness, promoting deep restful sleep, increasing energy levels and creating a more youthful biological age.

As the recent studies from the National Institute on Aging, Harvard University, and Washington University show-- a calorie restricted diet can include many other benefits too, one of them being extending human life. Lab studies dating all the way back to the thirties show that mice and all sorts of laboratory critters, when placed on a severely restricted diet, lived fifty percent longer than the oldest members of their peer community.

I don’t expect people to forgo the easy fix that Botox can provide in order to achieve the same effect that starving themselves for the rest of their lives might produce, but it is very interesting to think about.

If in the end, the skinniest of us will be what's left over (like the cock-roach equivalent of humans), the end of times will be populated with models, homeless people, and Rachel Zoe clients. I suspect that if this "calorie restriction=longevity" theory is true, current records would indicate that models already have a much higher than usual life-span in comparison to us regular working folk-- and if it weren’t for those pesky drugs and that meddlesome alcohol, those hungry bitches could probably have gotten away with it and lived forever!