Your potential average and maximum life spans will be substantially increased by the nutrient-rich food.
Let’s say that your hereditary potential the age you might expect to reach based upon the genes you’ve inherited from your parents is to live to be 80 years old. Let’s assume that you started and stuck to a rather high percentage of calorie limit, beginning at age 20. Over that remaining 60 years you might expect to age at half the expected rate, be “functionally” 50 when you were in fact chronologically 80. Your 60 years would thus stretch out to 120. Add that to your initial 20 years (when you started) and you reach 140. And note that when you were in fact 100 years of age, you would “functionally” and in all outward appearances and inward workings be only 60, this is your functional age.
Of course, even if this analysis holds in a population, one cannot guarantee that you as an individual will live to be 140. You will simply have skipped onto the survival curve of a population whose last surviving members live that long. Exactly when you personally might fall off that greatly extended curve can’t be foretold. But you will be substantially younger in form, feature, and function than your birthday age. The evidence makes this relatively certain.
Naturally, if you choose a lower percentage of calorie limit of the Anti-Aging Plan you won’t obtain quite such amazing results, but you’ll still be way ahead, even with no more than a 10 to 20 percent calorie restriction cutback. Pick the tradeoff that leaves you comfortable. We recommend that you try about a 20 percent calorie restriction, and see how it goes. More is too much, unless you are under very close medical supervision.
Do not lose more than 20 to 25 percent of your initial body weight, as an upper limit. Of course if you are slender to start with, even that would be too much. You have to use judgment, and consult with your doctor. The Biospherian men lost an average of 18 percent body weight, the women 10 percent. This was enough to induce in all of them psysiological changes that suggest retarded aging. Body fat content of the men declined to 6 to 10 percent; of women to 10 to 15 percent. These should be taken as lower limits.
If you are a woman and weight loss becomes associated with any menstrual irregularities, that’s too fast or too much. Consult your doctor. None of the Biospherian women experienced menstrual irregularities.
If you find yourself having to sleep longer than usual, or becoming fatigued or light-headed, you have lost weight too fast or too much. Proper use of the diet should do the reverse of these things. Be sure your diet is high in quality, not just low in calories!
Living longer wouldn’t be desirable unless you stayed bright-eyed, on your toes, and free of disease throughout those extra years.
Consider eyesight, for example. By about age fifty-five most people cannot “accommodate” very well. That is, they cannot read newsprint if it’s held, say, a foot away from their eyes. The print blurs and they have to hold the paper farther away to bring the print into sharp focus. The lens of the eye stiffens with age, and the eye muscles can no longer make it thinner or fatter in response to what you are trying to see.
If you go with calorie limit well before the stiffening of the lens, the time of accommodation failure will arrive much later in life. The same holds for cataract development.
Athletic ability is a reasonably good marker of functional age. You can’t persuade a mouse to play tennis but you can measure its muscular and motor coordination by a sort of log-rolling test. Place the mouse on a rod about the thickness of a broom handle, which is held four feet off the floor and rotated slowly at a fixed speed. Not liking to fall from that height, the mouse will try to stay on the rod. The observer records how many times the mouse falls off in six one-minute trials. In this simple but very good test of a mouse’s “athletic ability,” the 32-month-old nutrient-rich, calorie-limited mice did just as well as 12-month-old ad lib-fed mice, and far better than 32-month-old ad lib-fed mice, who in fact fell off most of the time. Thirty-two months is quite old for a mouse, yet calorie restriction kept them functionally young.
In terms of the Biospherian experience, we may note as a kind of testimonial that I was the oldest Biospherian at functional age 69. The others ranged from 31 to 42. Yet having been on the Anti-Aging Plan for five years before entry, I was able to sustain the enormous physical stress of the two-year experiment right alongside the others who were thirty to forty years younger.
In many sports enjoyed by humans an older person can train up to nearly the ability of a much younger person, but let’s look at a sporting event in which older humans cannot do this: running the New York Marathon. Judging by animal data measuring overall physical fitness and performance extrapolated to human performance, in a human population on the Anti-Aging Plan with calorie limitation and follow protein intake recommendation for a substantial period of years, the curve should appear as shown by the dotted line. This is a remarkable showing! To sustain this much energy output, the older Anti-Aging Plan calorie-limited runners would doubtless need to refeed and gain some weight well before the race, but they would be physiologically much younger than their chronological age.
