Starving themselves to life
The Calorie Restriction diet has been making the media rounds since that New York magazine article, most recently popping up on Salon.com. I fear it really will be the next fad diet, only this time instead of making people constipated, it will kill them of starvation when they miscalculate their daily nutrients.
For the people who practice it, the CR diet is a perfect reflection of the society in which they live. That is, post-religious, hyper-individualistic, work-a-holic, obsessive. For one thing, it takes an unbelievable amount of dedication and after-hours discipline - you can never take a break, and you like it that way. Neither can you have children because the diet kills the libido of men and stops women from ovulating, but that shouldn’t be a deal-breaker for a hyper-individualist.
As for the post-religious, CR comes along at the perfect moment in history. It’s scary to think that we are mortal, and ours is the generation that didn’t even go to Sunday school. CR fills that gap. It fulfills the human brain’s peculiar need to convince itself of its own immortality.
Sure, 150 years isn’t very long. But if you start starving yourself at 35, it might seem like an eternity.
april wrote:
Actually, CR doesn’t take that long. I spend about a half hour a day, total, cooking. It takes a bit more attention and discipline than eating whatever pops from the drive-thru into your mouth, but it’s not that hard at all. And it’s much less expensive than eating out frequently or grabbing take-out.
What is killing people is the standard American diet, which has made the majority of Americans overweight and set up entire generations for easily avoidable diseases such as heart disease and type II diabetes. Perhaps you could turn your considerable writing skill to this (actual) problem?
Why do you think it’s selfish for those of us who do CR to consume less? We eat less, we spend fewer health care dollars, we take fewer sick days. Why does this upset you so much? Would you really be happier if I ate more? Would the world be a better place if I ate 2000 calories a day and weighed 137 instead of 104?
No one is telling you what to eat. Why do you feel the need to pathologize those of us who make different choices? You may not feel that you’d be happy on a CR diet — so don’t do it! But most of us who do practice CR are quite happy. Enjoy your life, and leave us to enjoy ours.
april
Posted on 23-Nov-06 at 3:57 pm | Permalink
pjk wrote:
april, you are free to eat whatever you want, and I don’t say otherwise in this post. I’m a libertarian. knock yourself out. but considering your movement (and the media coverage thereof) is vocal about the potential rightness of CR, I should have the freedom to mull over the potential wrongness of it as well.
“what is killing people” in America is the fact of mortality. people are living much longer today than they did just one generation ago, but amazingly, they’re still dying. urban America’s post-religious obsession with trying to deny this fact and control the uncontrolable nature of life is the pathology that fascinates me.
finally, I would add that you shouldn’t worry about what I write because, the nature of affluent urban America being what it is today, you soon will have many more fans than detractors - a whole army of marathon runners, fad dieters, and obsessive-compulsive manhattanites trooping along behind you to wherever it is they think you’re going. I’m not even trying to stop this flood… just to sort out why it always happens that way.
(oh, and I didn’t call CRers “selfish,” I called them hyper-individualists, which I still think is accurate.)
Posted on 24-Nov-06 at 9:39 am | Permalink