A study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has identified critical biochemical pathways linked to the aging of human muscle. By manipulating these pathways, the researchers were able to turn back the clock on old human muscle, restoring its ability to repair and rebuild itself.
Mr. Deity has returned… and this time, he is helping Adam find a wife!
I tried screaming at Adam not to do it.
He didn’t listen.
My cat Kieffer howls to wake the dead when anyone gets anywhere near where we keep the cat food in the kitchen. He also howls anytime anyone is in the kitchen at all starting a few hours before meal time, and continuing with growing franticness (is that a word? Frantacity?) until the cat food actually appears in his bowl.
The cat is not starving. The cat is not even CR'd. The cat is actually a little chubby (just big boned!) though he has lost weight in recent years on his doctor's advice. I'm sure he is hungry for meals, but I sincerely doubt that he's hanging around all day in an acute state of hunger. However, the possibility of a human nearing the catfood cans sends him into meeeeeoooooww overdrive!
Here's another funny thing: if one of us feeds him when the other is not home, then the other walks through the door, Kieffer will immediately start howling in an attempt to convince us that he has not yet been fed. He is so convincing that MR frequently leaves me notes saying, 'Kitty lies!' if he's giving the cat his meal while I'm out. The cat can not be biologically hungry, but his little kitty instincts tell him that he must be fed again!
Hunger is a funny thing... most people who hear about CR say, 'But aren't you hungry all the time?' I know when I was on hardcore CR, I was definitely not hungry all the time, but the hunger when I was hungry (a bit before mealtimes) had a totally different character to it from the hunger that non-CR'd people feel. It was real, biological hunger. Not just a stomach rumbling or an 'It's time to eat' hungry. It was even different from the hungry feeling of not having eaten for quite awhile (like if you skip breakfast and it's half an hour till lunch) and genuinely being in need of a meal. The CR'd hungry started to kick in when my body fat stores were way down... I never did get the percentage professionally tested but the Tanita scale said 18%. It was completely different, and not upsetting or scary at all. It was more like being in touch with what the body *truly needs* as opposed to what it might be craving. It was actually rather nice. My meals were extraordinarily satisfying (nothing like 100 grams of kale and a cup of cottage cheese to fill you up!) and the feeling of being satisfied with a healthy meal was also completely different from the feeling of being 'done' with a meal that's less nutritionally optimal.
Now, of course, there are limits. At one point I went to what I would consider too low for me, for too long, and I didn't decide it was too low because of my weight or how I looked. I was 99 pounds at the time, and I was fine with how I looked (though I like my body with yoga muscles better) and I was eating 1200 consistently without days out. I may have at one point dripped just a tiny bit below 1200, and then instead of just feeling hungry for awhile before meal times, I noticed that I was really, really hungry, and thinking about food more than I wanted to. At the point where it became distracting, I decided it was time to go up on calories. We are always telling people that you have to make your own decisions about what's too low for you. There's no weight number or calorie number dictated from on high. MR's rather random rule (and he knows it's random) is that he doesn't go below 115. My low point seemed to be defined by when I felt that hunger was becoming no longer a pleasant reminder of our place in the natural world, but a distraction from the things I wanted to focus on in life. Just a few more calories and I returned to my CR-happy point, but I know for sure that 1200 is too low for me.
It was my experience that the quality of hunger changed when I started exercising. I wrote awhile back about hungry muscles, and I can testify that there's a different kind of hunger when you're exercising and building and maintaining muscle mass. When I was on my way down and at my CR-low, I had about as much muscle as a paper bag. I hadn't been exercising much for years and I lost weight by cutting calories and improving nutrition alone. I wish I had lost weight with exercise, and now that I'm dripping back down and still holding onto my muscle mass, I know I'll prefer the way I look and feel. It's a difficult balance though. Some exercise, especially a lot of cardio, seems to make me hungry disproportionately to the calories it burns, and that's the last thing you want if you're on CR. Yoga doesn't seem to do this as much, even though the style of yoga I practice is very swift and athletic. But still, I have to eat a lot more now that I have muscle mass than I did before. It complicates the equation, and I'm still working out a balance between all my exercise practices and the need to drop my calories lower.
Hunger is not something to be feared, not if you're a little hungry because you're dropping your calories, not because you're out of money to buy food. When I feel hungry now, I sometimes head straight for the Nancy's Organic Lowfat Cottage Cheese and shove it in my mouth as fast as I can. But at other times, especially if I've made plans for my meals that don't involve an extra cup of cottage cheese mid-afternoon, I take a moment to settle in and remember that the hunger is a cue, not a command. I can follow it, or I can make another decision. I have the power to determine what's right for me at any given moment.
In a world of mindless eating, this isn't easy. Yoga and meditation have helped a great deal, but I still find myself picking up the bruchetta just because it's on the table. But as I drop my calories lower and try to negotiate the balance between exercise and CR, it's something I've been thinking about.
And as Kieffer reminds me, several times a day, a beast doesn't have to be experiencing biological hunger to howl for the Fancy Feast.
"