craschworks

Via the CR-Society archives:

http://lists.calorierestriction.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0404&L=crsociety&P=R13297&X=0C73E86EFFE53BD404&Y=archiveguest@calorierestriction.org

Dear members of the CRSociety,

I have recently completed my first year as a practitioner of CR. This message summarizes my results to date. I hope the information will be useful to those who have been on CR for a long time, as well as to the newcomers. I've organized the message into five sections: how I discovered CR; my pre-CR state; how I've practiced CR this past year; results to date; and future plans. Comments and questions are welcome on- or off-List. Please forgive me if my response is slowŠI'm swamped with work right now so it may take me a few days to get back to you.

Part 1: How I discovered CR.

In two words – 'by accident.' I've had relatively high total cholesterol and LDL for probably most of my life in spite of a healthy life style and diet (see Part 2). A year and a half ago the Los Angeles Times health section featured some recipes that were claimed to lower cholesterol (and do other good things), so I order what I thought was a cookbook from Amazon.com. Imagine my surprise when the copy of Roy Walford's “Beyond the 120-year Diet” arrived! Skeptical, but with an open mind, I read the book, tracked down the CR Society website, starting reading the daily CRSociety digest, talked with a couple of friends who are scientists working in the field of human aging, and decided to give CR a try.

Part 2: My pre-CR state.

First, the basics: I'm 66 inches tall, slim build, and 56 year old, but people always seem amazed when they learn my age because, they claim, I look much younger. When I began CR I weighed about 127 lbs, compared to my college weight of about 118-120 lbs. The most I've ever weighed was 132 lbs, when my kids were young and I did not have the time or energy to exercise regularly. I am not one of those folks who can consume unlimited calories and still remain slim. I have consciously tried to avoid gaining weight since college by watching what I eat. So before I formally began the practice of CR, I was probably on an 'obesity avoidance diet,' which some on the List have equated with a mild form of CR.

Pre-CR diet: My wife and I both grew up in families that valued a healthy diet (almost exclusively home-cooked meals with a fresh salad with every dinner) and we've continued the tradition with our kids. A couple of years ago one of my twin daughters at the age of 15 became a vegetarian, so we eat very little meat, sometimes none at all during the course of a week. However, when I ate meat pre-CR, it was usually grilled fish or chicken, only very occasionally a lean and small steak. I've never eaten many grains. Pre-CR my wife and I almost always had a couple of glasses of red wine with dinner.

Exercise: I've done the following fairly regularly for many years and continue to do so now. Running: 15-25 miles per week, including one 7-10 mile hill run on the weekend (1500-2000 foot elevation gain). Muscle training: I have followed the Canadian RAF exercise plan for many years and do about 65 sit-ups, 75 back exercises and 100 push-ups three to five times a week. I also do 30 pull-ups (15 over-hand, 15 under-hand) as part of my three to five times a week workout. Outdoor activities: I'm an avid skier (Alpine, telemark and cross-country) and ski about 40 days per year with family and friends. In the summer we backpack a couple of times, including an extended trip of a week or more, and do a lot of day hikes.

Pre-CR state of health: Excellent in all respects. I almost never got sick, except when my kids were much younger and were excellent disease vectors :-). Aside from high total cholesterol (230-240 mg/dL) and LDL (130-150 mg/dL), all other indicators of health have been good to excellent. See Part 4 below for more details.

Part 3: How I've practiced CR.

I followed Walford's general advise in BT120YD, which is to (a) establish a new set-point for body weight that is 10-25% below the pre-CR weight (p. 62, BT120YD); (b) modify diet by substituting more nutritious foods for the less nutritious ones consumed pre-CR; and (c) slowly cut back on portions consumed in order to loose not more than one lb per week until the new set point is reached. I also had a complete physical exam at the start of CR, another one six months later, and again six months after that. I faxed the results to Michael Rae for the long-term CR cohort study, and strongly encourage all practitioners of CR to do the same!

(a) Establish new set point. Because I started CR at only 10 lbs or so above my college weight, and was therefore probably already practicing a mild form of CR, I chose the lower end of Walford's recommended range for my new weight set point, namely 10% less than my pre-CR weight. I started at 127 lbs and adopted a goal of 114 lbs. In terms of Body Mass Index (BMI), at my height of 66 inches, 127 lbs = 21% BMI; 114 lbs = 19% BMI. I estimate that my pre-CR percentage body fat was 12% based on an extrapolation backwards from where I started measuring it a couple months after beginning CR; my goal is to make sure that it does not drop below 5% at my new weight set point of 114 lb. I have used a combination of Tanita scales and hydrostatic measurements to monitor my percentage of body fat over the past year.

(b) Modify diet. During the first 8-9 months on CR I did not use diet planning software to track my actual caloric intake or nutrient balance. I relied heavily on the tables in BT120YD and on the postings in the daily CRSociety digest to choose foods with the highest nutrient density and lowest glycemic index, and then I started eating smaller portions of everything. This did not cause me to feel hungry, probably for the reasons noted by many on the List (lower-GI, highly-nutritious foods leave one feeling more sated than the alternatives.) Here are a few of the changes I've made to my diet, to illustrate how easily one can adopted the 'ON' part of a CRON diet:

- Added to my daily mixed green salad – dark green leafy veggies (kale and spinach), red, green and yellow peppers, fresh tomato, one TBS sunflower seeds, and portion of fresh fruit of the season. My typical salad has a dozen or so ingredients. – Substituted sucralose for the sugar in my wife's otherwise CR-friendly canola oil and balsamic vinegar salad. The other ingredients, BTW, are dried basil and mustard. – Substituted poached egg (made from egg white only, with a 'pinch' of fresh-shredded parmesan cheese, fresh dill, and fresh ground black pepper) in place of the daily bowl of oatmeal. – Added to the poached for my daily breakfast: One Sherm's Megamuffin (follow the CRSociety Recipe linkŠmy wife and kids LOVE these!); 1/2 medium sliced tomato, 1/2 cup blueberries, one additional serving of fresh seasonal fruit, 4 oz non-fat milk. – Switched from coffee to green tea for my regular morning hot beverage (but still drink coffee on occasion). – Added 1/4 cup filberts or almonds to my daily diet, usually with lunch. – Added 8 oz of 'Gregg's chocolate milk' to my lunch (8 oz non-fat organic milk, 1 TBS cocoa powder, 1/4 tsp cinnamon, and a couple of drops of sucralose solution) – Added Pasta Primavera (but I put the sauce over grilled veggies rather than pasta) and Almond Sauce recipes from BT120YD as standard weekly dinners. – Added Michael's Mulligatawny Mess as another frequent dinner (my family really likes this one, too). (I don't think this is on the CRSociety Recipe website yet but it's in the archive for 10 January 2003 in a posting from its creator, Michael Rae, or I can send it to you. Don't bother Michael for it directlyŠwe don't want to distract him from those remarkable technical posts that he makes almost every day :-)) – Added one 4 oz serving of grilled, wild-caught Alaskan salmon and one 4 oz serving of grilled New Zealand free range steak to the weekly menu, consumed on separate days for dinner. – Deleted my wife's delicious but very CRON-antagonistic chocolate brownies [:-(] – Decreased daily red wine consumption to an average of one glass or less per day (but we do indulge when we have friends over, or go out to dinner). – Modified my daily supplementation based on advise in BT120YD, and Dean's web page. – Adopted a 'zone-like' balance for the macro nutrients – P:C:F::30:60:30, with an emphasis on MUFA for daily fat intake.

(c) Cut back on calories. By replacing okay foods with really good foods and eating smaller portions, I was able to achieve an average 0.5 lb per week weight loss for the first 8-9 months, with a few set-backs when I was on business travel or vacations, but then I hit the wall at about my college weight of 118-120 lbs and stopped loosing weight. I did not track daily calories rigorously at that time, but tried simply to eat smaller portions of food. That was December 2003. I did two things at that point: First, I began fasting one day per week, between dinner on Tuesday and breakfast on Thursday. This had the desired effect and I began loosing weight again. Second, I bought a copy of Dr. Walford's Interactive Diet Planner (DWIDP), and Virtual PC so I can run it on my Mac (it's a pain in the rear, but you don't have to be connected to the internet to use it, as with some of the other tools used by members of the List). I've been using DWIDP now for about three months with success in further refining my diet and, most importantly, keeping much better track of my daily caloric and nutrient intake. I enter my breakfast and lunch menus in the morning and that tells me what my dinner allowance is, to meet my target calorie and nutrient intake goals for the day. I've given up the one-day-per-week fast, and by setting my calorie intake at 1700-1800 kcal per day, have now reached my new weight set point. However, I've not been following this quantitative approach for very long, so I don't yet know if I've got the right calorie intake goal to sustain my desired combination of weight, BMI and percentage body fat over the long term. That will be the subject of Part 5 below. But first, some highlights of my results to date.

Part 4: Results to date.

The following table summarizes results from a few of the tests and biomarkers recommended by Walford and by the CR Society. I have included only those that seem to be of greatest interest to folks who have been posting on the List over the past year, but I have had all of the Tier 1 and 2 and most of the Tier 3 tests done at six-month intervals since beginning CR a little over a year ago. I also have extensive data for the past 10 years from my regular annual physical exams. I began CR in March 2003 and values posted below for blood chemistry at that date are consistent with the data from the prior 10 years.

Test or biomarker 3/03 10/03 3/04

Body weight (lb) 127 119 114 Body fat (%) 12 9.4 6.2 Body temperature (F) n/a 97.1 96.9 Resting pulse 60 54 58 Systolic BP n/a 110 110 Diastolic BP n/a 72 65 Fasting Glucose (mg/dL) 90 80 83 Cholesterol (mg/dL) 233 207 208 Triglycerides (mg/dL) 51 56 39 HDL (mg/dL) 82 87 88 LDL (mg/dL) 141 109 112 Homocysteine (umol/L) 10 7.3 13 WBC (K/uL) 3.8 2.3 7.0 RBC (K/uL) 4.5 4.3 4.1

Other than the persistently high (but still slightly falling) total Chol and LDL, I'm pretty pleased with these results and those from my other biomarkers. I've got a few more diet modifications to try over the next six months to get total Chol below 200 and LDL below 100. If that doesn't work, I'll probably have to give in and try drugs.

In terms of general state of well-being, it remains quite high. I have at least as much energy as I did pre-CR, even though the recent RBC count indicates that I may be borderline anemic. Just before my October 2003 checkup after I had lost eight pounds, I ran my fastest Tioga Pass race to date. The Tioga Pass annual run begins at Mono Lake and ends at the Tioga Pass entrance to Yosemite NP in Eastern California, 12.4 miles and 3500 feet uphill (yesŠyou've got to be a bit crazy to even do it, but the scenery is as breathtaking as the run itself). I think my mental clarity and memory have improved, but that's based on very subjective (wishful???) evidence. But I'm certain that they have not declined any! I did get a rather nasty cold about two months ago, my first one in over a year, but I had been at two conferences back-to-back and exposed to lots of people.

One final note regarding health status over the past year: In late December I had my first skiing accident in 30 years of skiing and suffered a green stick fracture of the distal fibula when I caught the edge of my telemark skis while skiing in some fairly heavy powder. Telemark skis do not have releasable bindings so this form of skiing is a bit more risky than Alpine (and much more so than cross country). Instead of blowing my knee, as would be more common in a twisting fall (I twisted at least 90 degrees), the bone broke instead. My first thought was to wonder if CR had induced osteoporosis. My bone doc thought the bones looked healthy enough from the x-rays and predicted I'd be out of the walking cast in six to eight weeks, but at week four the break was sufficiently healed that he removed the cast early and I was cross country skiing (gingerly!) two days later, and have since logged another 10 days of cross country and Alpine skiing. Now, two months after cast removal, my leg is almost fully healed and I hope to resume running gradually over the coming month. However, I've not been able to run for the past three months and that may have affected the blood tests somewhat because that comprises half of the period since my prior blood tests in October 2003. It might also help explain why I caught the nasty cold mentioned earlier.

Part 5: Future Plans.

As far as I'm concerned, the CR 'lifestyle' is great! Even if the magic life extension 'pill' were to become available tomorrow, I would not modify my current diet in any major way. The food I eat tastes great. The slight hunger that I occasionally feel before my next meal has become something like a friend (Paul McGlothin apparently feels the same), because it tells me I'm doing the right thing. As noted above, I believe that I'm at least as vigorous mentally and physically as I was pre-CR, if not more so. Really, the only thing that I do miss is the extra glass of good merlot with dinner :-). My primary focus the next six months is going to be (a) zeroing in the optimum caloric intake for maintaining my new weight and percentage body fat goals once I've returned to my regular exercise schedule, and (b) optimizing the nutritional profile of my daily food intake to improve the biomarkers such as (especially) total Chol and LDL. Otherwise, I plan to stay the course for the duration.

I would be happy to correspond with folks on- or off-List, but please be patient if it takes me awhile to respond. Meanwhile, I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who routinely posts such useful information on the technical and practical aspects of CR. I have learned so much from you this past year! Best wishes to all for success with your respective health improvement and life extension programs.

Warm regards,

–Gregg