Die or diet

New York has a fascinating article on calorie restriction - not to be confused with anorexia - and how it could potentially double your lifespan. Certainly not my thing - it's entirely possible that I've had more than 1800 calories in a day just from Pepsi/Coke - but the rigour is intriguing. Take Michael, the guy who counts 1913 calories a day - no more, no less. (Clever quip: "Cooking for him is the same elaborate exercise in dietary Sudoku it is for all CR die-hards, only more so.") How much of the extra lifespan is spent weighing and counting calories?

I have to say this, though. Michael is cited in the article as having a BMI of 15.6. For the longest time, until I went to America, that was pretty much my BMI (I was a meaty 15.9 entering the army).

Consider those dimensions for a moment. Divide Michael’s weight by the square of his height and you get a body-mass index of 15.6. Compare that with the minimum BMI of 18 recently decreed by the organizers of the Madrid Fashion Week—who cited the World Health Organization’s definition of 18.5 as the lower limit of healthy weight and offered medical assistance to any models who couldn’t meet it—and you might wonder how Michael can stand up in the morning, let alone jog twenty miles a week.

So... for a long while I had the same BMI as a man on a severe near-starvation diet? Good lord.