The Daily Mail
London, UK
Published: 7 February, 2007


Can 1,000 calories a day make you live longer? Fat chance!

Along with leggings and Pat Butcher earrings, calorie-counting is the latest Eighties fad undergoing a resurgence.

It's a while since we've heard of a diet that focuses on the basic principle that the more you eat, the bigger you'll get.

We're so used to faddy diet theories - Atkins, food-combining, glycaemic indexing (GI), caveman diet - that good old-fashioned calorie counting had become unfashionable.

But it's back, and back with a vengeance, in the form of what might be the most hardcore diet regime the world has ever seen. It's called Calorie Restriction, and glossy magazines have hailed it as the latest miracle.

Known as CR to its devotees, it's a bizarre practice where followers may consume only 1,000 calories a day.

To put that into some kind of perspective, Western women are supposed to have 2,000 calories a day (information gleaned from the nutrition label on a stonkingly fattening Marks & Spencer readymeal in my fridge).

And because we're all greedy and Krispy Kreme doughnut concessions are springing up all over the country, most of us tend to eat around 2,600. So to live off 1,000 calories a day means you'd be cutting your daily intake by about 60 per cent.

The CR Society, based in California (where else?), has 1,000 members worldwide and its numbers are growing. They all subscribe to the notion that a degree of self-starvation can trigger physiological and biochemical changes in the body that slow the ageing process.

So far, this theory is based on experiments on mice. Tests at America's National Institute on Ageing, in Baltimore, discovered that mice fed every other day appeared to live longer than those allowed to eat at will. The semistarved mice displayed resistance to toxins that can cause damage linked to Alzheimer's disease.

To the casual observer, CR looks worryingly like a justification for anorexia. There is a feeling that it helps eating disorders slip through the net, that someone vulnerable to consuming less might simply label their disorder calorie restriction.

The CR Society insists this isn't the case, because the emphasis is on obtaining as many nutrients as possible from the few calories they allow. A typical meal includes organic egg-white omelettes, raw-food salads or vegetable broths (yum!).

Meals are a 30 per cent protein, 40 per cent carb and 30 per cent fat mix, which nutritionists recommend, although health professionals say that calcium, iron and B vitamins are often lacking when calories are reduced.

Coffee and tea are out. Most devotees cut out dairy and meat altogether.

One glass of red wine a few times a week is allowed, the only alcoholic drink deemed to have enough antioxidants to make it "nutritious" enough to pass a CR person's lips.

Even if the food consumed is healthy, the psychological impact of following a diet this restrictive and anti-social can't be good for you.

Measuring out your life in terms of calories consumed and nutrition obtained is a complex business, and one that means this is a diet you can't dip in and out of easily.

If you've struggled with the computations needed to do Atkins or the GI diet, they're nothing compared to CR, which requires an encyclopedic knowledge of the calorie and nutritional content of every foodstuff on the planet.

Most CR dieters have a laptop in the kitchen loaded with special software to help make sure they don't have so much as an extra prawn or stem of broccoli that would take them over their daily calorie intake.

Would Nigella Lawson be a national treasure and sex symbol if we watched her tapping figures into a computer rather than licking spoons covered in chocolate? I think not.

One leading proponent of the diet has worked out, via a system of graphs, weights and measures, that he needs to survive on 1,913 calories every day.

His girlfriend, an equally hardcore devotee, finds the fact that his dinner is always exactly 639 calories attractive.

She also finds the fact that he has an orange tinge to his skin from eating so many carrots and tomatoes endearing: if ever there was a case of two people made for each other, this is it.

But not all CR followers find that the diet is the route to domestic harmony. One woman who eats conventionally told a magazine recently that her husband's rigid, unflexible devotion to CR has almost broken up their marriage on a number of occasions.

And many report that they have ended friendships with people who didn't understand their need to live the rest of their lives in a state of near starvation. When you think about it, 1,000 calories really isn't very much; there are nearly that many calories in some Pizza Express salads.

I burn 1,000 calories during an hour's workout with my personal trainer. If I did the CR diet, exercise would be a thing of the past.

The CR people avoid gyms anyway. They advise some light work with weights, since CR can adversely affect bone density, but they say that CR alone gives better results for longevity than aerobic exercise, and that too much exercise is counterproductive.

I can see why some people would be attracted to it: one look at the little Augustus Gloops waddling around the playgrounds is enough to make anyone turn to the broccoli.

In such an atmosphere of gluttony and over-indulgence, it's little wonder CR is attracting an increasing following. But the pendulum doesn't need to swing so far the other way.

Of course, I'd love to be skinnier and look younger. Who wouldn't? But I've flirted with calorie restriction in the past, although at the time I didn't know that I was part of a cutting-edge diet fad, I just thought I was on a crash diet. And it was miserable.

In the run-up to my wedding, I tore a hamstring and couldn't move around much. To fit into my wedding dress, I lived off 1,100 calories a day for a couple of months.

It was a humourless, antisocial experience in which I measured out my life on the kitchen scales and inhaled miso soup while my beanpole bridegroom tucked into bangers and buttery mash.

During that time, I was hungry for the first time in my life.

My IQ plummeted along with my waistline, and I routinely sailed past my bus stop, forgot myself mid-conversation and once forgot how to use chopsticks (although this worked out for the best as I consumed less noodles).

I went on my honeymoon to food paradise New York, where I consumed so many calories that I would have needed an abacus the size of Central Park to count them all, then ran around Central Park to burn it all off and didn't put a single pound back on.

Can you guess which of those regimes made me a happier, more relaxed person?

The bottom line is that I want a normal, healthy, spontaneous life more than I want to be really thin, more even than I want to live for ever.

The chances of me persuading any of my family or friends - epicureans, all - to join me on this diet are slimmer than a CR follower during Lent.

Would I want to be super-skinny if I had to sit chomping on a lettuce leaf through every family Christmas, every birthday dinner, to give up alcohol and all that? No.

Would I want to live for ever if I couldn't take the people I love with me? Definitely not.

Today's CR devotees expect to live well into the beginning of the 22nd century. Perhaps they'll toast their 200th birthdays (with a glass of distilled water if they're feeling particularly Bacchanalian).

Maybe when I'm 70 and looking every day of it, they will all still resemble lithe 30 year olds.

But a life lived in constant deprivation is a funny kind of existence. Their skinny, brittle legs can dance on my big fat grave for all I care: I won't be around to hear their smug "I told you so".



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