My diet and "Eat to Live Forever"

GIllian McKeith next to a cracking buffet.

The idea of wanting to live forever is pretty horrific.  Carrying on in to your hundreds whilst everyone you've ever cared about has already passed away.  As with the Tom Hanks character in 'The Green Mile', it would feel like a punishment (even if you did have an immortal pet mouse to keep you company).

In his documentary aired last week, "Eat to Live Forever", food critic Giles Coren found plenty of people whose very aim was this.  If not live forever exactly, a desire to live until at least 150.  A very old age, no doubt, but certainly not one that would make as catchy a title.

In his quest to find entertaining television weirdos he of course heads to America.  I've always found there to be quite enough weirdos in the UK myself, so I'm not sure why documentaries always have to head across the pond to find them.

Maybe this is something UKIP could take up as a cause.  Nigel Farage being interviewed saying "this is a waste of license fee payers money travelling to find strange foreigners.  What we say is British nutters for British TV shows!  I suggest that if the BBC are struggling to find any unhinged lunatics, they should just come down to our next party conference".

In America the first people Giles meets are Paul McGlouthin and his wife, of the CR Way (a.k.a. the calorie restriction way).  They believe that to live a long and healthy life the secret is to eat a calorie restricted diet.  The average man is recommended to eat 2500 calories a day, but they say it should be 1800 instead.

This is not an idea that is new to me.  Many started to understand this concept following another documentary on the BBC back in 2012 - "Horizon: Eat, Fast and Live Longer".

Presented by Dr Michael Mosley, this documentary looked at the health benefits of fasting.  What attracted me to the findings of this program was that everything discussed was done through a scientific process.  This wasn't just hearsay.  It was this documentary that really launched the concept of the 5:2 diet.

To give you an idea of my own dieting, I started making a conscious effort to look after myself around 5 years.  Following my partner at the time I started doing Slimming World.

To boil it down to it's basics, the concept behind Slimming World was that you have 'free food' (lean meats, pasta, rice, legumes, etc) and 'super free food' (most fruit and veg).  You had to aim to have at least one third 'super free food' to two thirds of the 'free food'.

The key to this was that there was no weighing or points counting, you basically ate as much as you wanted until you felt genuinely full.  If you ate within these limits you could eat as much as you wanted and you would lose weight.  The group 'weigh-in' session I went to each week showed that this was genuinely true.

Not to say it was easy of course.  All the naughty food, like chocolate and booze, was given a 'syn' rating.  You could only have up to 10 syns a day.  Or, like me, you could save them up over the week, then on the weekend do a murder.

Seriously, after no biscuits for a week you would be ready to stab someone, so that's barely even a joke.

I must say though, this diet did work well for me.  Over about 6 months I ended up slowly managing to lose about one stone in weight.

But then I watched the Michael Mosley program and discovered the 5:2 diet.  The concept is simple.  On 5 days in the week you eat normally, and on 2 days in the week you can only consume 600 calories (500 for women).

Having never been a dieter that counted calories, it took me a bit of effort to work out what I could eat that would fit in to these limits.  After a process of weighing foods and using MyFitnessPal to check on calorie levels, this became my meals on a fast day:

Skip breakfast

Lunch - A tin of Mackeral in tomato sauce with spinach leaves

Dinner - fillet of cod with steamed brocolli and cauliflower

What I discovered was that with using veg you could have quite a plateful within the calorie limits.  Other than that I was having fish so I had a source of low cal protein, as protein tends to fill you up more.

It seems that for everyone who does this diet they have different good and bad points for them personally.  For me, the bad points were a lack of energy in the afternoon, and, I'm reliably informed by my girlfriend, a tendency to be a little snappy in the evening.  No surprise there, I am literally starving!

Another problem was dehydration.  I would drink plenty of fluid and feel fine throughout the day in that sense.  At night though, I would either end up having to get up in the middle of the night at least once for the toilet because of how much I had drunk, or if I stopped drinking long enough before bed time, I would end up feeling really dehydrated in the night.

It was like my body wasn't able to keep hold of the water like it would normally.  Again, I'm sure that's part of the starvation process.

The point of the diet though was mainly in the overall health benefits.  When Dr Micheal Mosley did it he found he went from being overweight and bordering on diabetic with very high cholesterol to having very good blood levels and losing weight.

The weight loss is the by product of fasting rather than the point really, although without doubt this is why most people give it a go.

In terms of my own health, a recent blood test showed that my cholesterol was 2.9 - very good.

Also, combining the 5:2 intermittent fasting along with my normal diet conscious of the Slimming World ethos and regular exercise meant that in total I went on to lose 2 and a half stone in weight.  I went from being overweight at over 15 stone to going down to 12.5 stone.

So, with everything combined, I've done pretty well.  I don't want to live forever, but hey, I want to have a good go at it and not be ill or in excessive pain whilst I'm at it.

Spot the odd one out

Back to the documentary and Giles Coren is on his calorie controlled diet.  One thing you notice about Paul McGlouthin and his associates from the 'CR Way' is that, frankly, they don't really look healthy.  Unsurprisingly, they are pretty skinny.

At one point McGlouthin congratulates Giles Coren on how good his skin looks, a way of saying how well the calorie restricted diet is working for him.  All you can think while he says this though is 'well, Giles might look well, but your skin looks awful!'  And it really did, unfortunately.

Writing them off as nutters isn't really fair, lets just say they are a little eccentric and a bit overpowering in their interpersonal skills (well, he was anyway, not so sure about his wife...).

Giles went to visit various other groups, including fruitarians (or just 'Fruits', really) and a Doctor who promotes the idea of 'faecal transplants', which involves squirting a healthy persons poop up your own backside to get all the good bacteria from it.  It looks like there might be something in that, but hey, maybe not for me quite yet.

What did look interesting though was the 'paleo' lifestyle.  The paleo diet is essentially a caveman diet.  You only eat what a caveman might have done.  So that means no cultivated food such as those containing flour or oats, and instead eating meat, fish, fruit and veg.  Anything processed is out, including sugar.

So this means no sweet snacks at all, no sugar in drinks, etc.  The main thing really, is no carbs (so no pasta, rice or bread).  That's the tricky part.

Yes, in the documentary the paleo community do come across as something of a cult, even with their own 'Jesus' leader figure.  The fact that you can call people linked only by a diet a 'community' seems extreme enough in itself.

Also, a drawback is that there seems to be very little science in understanding the true benefits or flaws of the paleo diet.  If I had one major criticism of Coren's documentary it's that the whole thing is a bit 'science lite'.

Yes, he has a Harley Street Doctor on call to discuss each diet, but she is only able to give the conventional scientific response.  As we know of the fasting diets, conventional medical advice would be to definitely avoid fasting, but the science definitely backs it up.

All this said though, I am attracted to the paleo diet.  The main reason was seeing so many people talking about how fit and healthy they feel.  Full of energy throughout the day, no problems sleeping, looking great and burning fat.  Even with looking online I have struggled to see evidence from people who have tried it and suffered.

But still, the Science is not conclusive.

What I have decided to do then is give the full paleo diet a go for a full month, to see how it effects me.  My bloods are already very good and I could have them tested again after the month has passed.

I'm even considering setting up a new blog to keep a diary of how I get on.  If you have any thoughts on this, please let me know.






EDIT - Well, I have indeed decided to try going paleo for a month.  My first day was today and I've set up a dedicated blog so I can keep a diary of how I get on, which you can find here - paleochallenge30days.blogspot.co.uk