Yesterday was an little milestone. The SLD was so easy and fun that I did it too much. I couldn’t eat my one meal of the day. Part of my brain said: You really should eat something, if anything you’re too thin. Like a parent to a child. But I didn’t. (And woke up this morning not hungry at all.) Was I testing the power of the SLD and went a little too far? No: it was an accident. Which is why it is interesting.

This has never happened before. I discovered the basic idea of the SLD and got down to my current weight six years ago. Since then I have eaten one meal per day, including any number of meals I could have easily skipped. The thing is: I didn’t skip them. The part of my brain that said eat even when I wasn’t hungry was powerful enough to overcome my lack of hunger. Yesterday, for the first time, it wasn’t. It reminded me of being unable to eat in Paris, which led to my discovery of the SLD.

After six years, why now? Because of the SLD forums. In two months they have injected enough new ideas into the diet (e.g., take oil with water, oil improves sleep, crazy spicing is worth pursuing) to make it too much fun. (For me.) Hard to believe, I agree. Here is what I ate yesterday:

1. Early in the morning, a cup of tea (unfamiliar flavor) with one sugar cube. I’ve done this a thousand times. 15 calories.

2. A few sticks of gum. I’ve done this thousands of time. 0 calories.

3. Around 11 am I drank some walnut oil (Spectrum). I bought it a few days ago because of a forum post about its benefits. I drank 2 tablespoons of it with water — testing my friend Carl Willat’s suggestion that he drew from the forums. I don’t have trouble drinking oil but the oil/water mixture is even easier, a curious texture. This was slightly different than usual: I have been drinking 1-2 tablespoons oil/day for the last 3 years but (a) I have always drunk 1 T in the morning and 1 T later in the day, sometimes forgetting the second dose and (b) I have tried many different oils but not walnut oil because it has some flavor. The water seems to eliminate or greatly reduce the flavor. 240 calories. So far: 255 calories.

4. More gum. Thousands of times. 0 calories.

5. A few small pieces of excellent dark chocolate. Thousands of times. 50 calories? So far: 305 calories.

6. Small amounts of several cheeses. Thousands of times. 100 calories? So far: 405 calories.

7. Half a bottle (8 oz., whole bottle is 16 oz.) of Healing Springs Raw Watermelon Kambucha. An associated website (www.honeysweetdrinks.com) is non-functional. I almost never drink strange soft drinks because I’m afraid they will ruin my appetite, as they did in Paris six years ago. But in Paris I drank about two per day. This time I drank half a bottle — surely too little to matter, I thought. Such an interesting flavor, honey-sweetened. No indication of how many calories. 60 calories? So far: 465 calories.

8. Protein drink. Curious about tasteless protein drinks, I tried to follow a recipe from Sean Curley. My drink contained 1 tablespoon each of 3 different protein powders. To improve the taste I added one sugar cube, a package of Splenda, and some random spice blends. 75 calories. So far: 540 calories

9. 10 flax-oil capsules. A week or so ago I slept unusually well and somewhere around that time I had taken about 6 flax-oil capsules. Forum discussion led me to think the flax oil might be responsible. I took 10 capsules to see if I could repeat the experience. 100 calories. So far: 640 calories

10. Chai ice blend. To make swallowing the flax-oil capsules enjoyable I made a chai drink to wash them down. I blended together sugar-free chai mix, 4 oz. half-and-half, water, and ice. I’d had about 10 cups of this mix before. To make the flavor more interesting, I added a couple shakes of two random spice blends. 212 calories. So far: 852 calories.

At this point I decided I didn’t want dinner and took a long walk instead.

11. Two sugar-free chocolate-chip cookies. New-product sample left at my house. 100 calories. So far: 952 calories.

12. Two Emer’gen-C (vitamin) packets mixed with 3 tablespoons half-and-half. Makes a lovely mousse-like concoction. Vaguely-familiar flavor. 90 calories. So far: 1042 calories.

Total flavorless calories: 340. Total unfamiliar-flavor calories: 347. Whereas normal values would be roughly 240 flavorless calories and <100 unfamiliar-flavor calories. So I had at least doubled my usual intake of these hunger-suppressing foods. Not because I was trying to lose weight, though, but because of forum discussions, because I found combinations of random spice blends intriguing, and because I wondered if flax oil caused better sleep. Not a long-term healthy diet but v v filling and v v easy.

I woke up the next day having slept unusually well. For me, it was an unusual form of good sleep. Many times I have slept ingextremely well after standing 9 or 10 hours but in these cases I woke up feeling scrubbed clean of tiredness. In this case, however, I didn’t feel scrubbed clean of tiredness (and I hadn’t stood 9 or 10 hours) but my brain felt very clear when I awoke. I’d been drinking oil for years — this wasn’t produced by my usual oil intake. If it was cause and effect (oil caused better sleep), something found more in walnut oil and/or flax oil than in canola oil or ELOO or safflower oil or grapeseed oil (oils I had had many times in the past) was responsible.

Many people find that the Shangri-La diet makes it easy to skip meals. It is natural to ask: How does meal skipping affect overall health? Having eaten one meal per day for the last six years, let’s just say I care about the answer.

For more than half a century it has been clear that calorie restriction is a powerful way to increase the lifespan of rats and at least a few other species. An experiment with monkeys seems to be headed for the same result: calorie restriction increases lifespan.

Calorie restriction is a complex treatment. Calorie-restricted rats eat less, they lose weight, they may eat less often, they eat less protein, they eat less carbohydrate, and so on. Which of these changes cause the health benefits? A researcher at the National Institute of Aging named Mark Mattson has been asking this question. He and his co-workers have discovered that the benefits of calorie restriction can be achieved by eating less frequently, even when there is little or no weight loss. The implication is that skipping meals, if anything, is likely to be beneficial.

One study, published in 2003, compared four groups of mice. One group (ad lib) got all the food they wanted every day. Another group (calorie restriction) got 60% of the amount of food that the first group got. A third group (intermittent fed) got all the food it wanted but only every other day. A fourth group got the same overall amount of food as the intermittent-fed group, but without a one-day “fast” between feedings. After 20 weeks, the calorie-restriction mice weighed about half what the ad-lib mice weighed; the other two groups weighed about 90% of what the ad-lib mice weighed. The most interesting measure was what happened when kainic acid (which kills neurons) was injected into the brains of the mice. The measure was how many neurons survive. The results were not easy to completely sum up but they did show that intermittent feeding was more protective than ad lib feeding, and at least as protective as calorie restriction. In other research from Mattson’s lab, intermittent feeding has been found to be healthier than ad lib feeding in other ways — for example, a rat study found protection against heart-attack damage. A review article by Mattson concluded that “both caloric (energy) restriction (CR) and reduced meal frequency/intermittent fasting can suppress the development of various diseases and can increase life span in rodents.”

What about humans? In January I was contacted by Dr. James Johnson, Dr. Donald Laub, and Sujit John, who had been studying the effect of intermittent feeding on humans — starting with themselves. Johnson had tried to lose weight via an on-day-off-day diet: One day you eat normally, the next you eat 20% of what you would usually eat. I think he based this diet on Mattson’s results. Eating only every other day — the usual regime in Mattson’s experiments — was just too hard but Johnson found that eating a percentage on the order of 20-30% of usual intake on the off days was just bearable and did produce weight loss. Johnson found that not only did it produce weight loss, it had many other beneficial effects, such as an improvement in asthma symptoms. He first noticed these improvements when he tried the diet himself (he wanted to lose weight); later he saw similar improvements when his friends did the diet, the same path I followed with SLD. Johnson, Laub, and John have just published an article in Medical Hypotheses about their ideas. They were interested in my weight-loss ideas as a way of making the on-and-off regime more bearable — to reduce the hunger involved. “The oil and sugar water seem to work well,” Dr. Laub wrote me recently.

Here is the abstract of their Medical Hypotheses paper:

Restricting caloric intake to 60-70% of normal adult weight maintenance requirement prolongs lifespan 30-50% and confers near perfect health across a broad range of species. Every other day feeding produces similar effects in rodents, and profound beneficial physiologic changes have been demonstrated in the absence of weight loss in ob/ob mice. Since May 2003 we have experimented with alternate day calorie restriction, one day consuming 20-50% of estimated daily caloric requirement and the next day ad lib eating, and have observed health benefits starting in as little as 2 weeks, including insulin resistance, asthma, seasonal allergies, infectious diseases of viral, bacterial and fungal origin (viral URI, recurrent bacterial tonsillitis, chronic sinusitis, periodontal disease), autoimmune disorder (rheumatoid arthritis), osteoarthritis, symptoms due to CNS inflammatory lesions (Tourette’s, Meniere’s) cardiac arrhythmias (PVCs, atrial fibrillation), menopause related hot flashes. We hypothesize that other many conditions would be delayed, prevented or improved, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, brain injury due to thrombotic stroke atherosclerosis, NIDDM, congestive heart failure.
Our hypothesis is supported by an article from 1957 in the Spanish medical literature which due to a translation error has been construed by several authors to be the only existing example of calorie restriction with good nutrition. We contend for reasons cited that there was no reduction in calories overall, but that the subjects were eating, on alternate days, either 900 calories or 2300 calories, averaging 1600, and that body weight was maintained. Thus they consumed either 56% or 144% of daily caloric requirement. The subjects were in a residence for old people, and all were in perfect health and over 65. Over three years, there were 6 deaths among 60 study subjects and 13 deaths among 60 ad lib-fed controls, non-significant difference. Study subjects were in hospital 123 days, controls 219, highly significant difference. We believe widespread use of this pattern of eating could impact influenza epidemics and other communicable diseases by improving resistance to infection. In addition to the health effects, this pattern of eating has proven to be a good method of weight control, and we are continuing to study the process in conjunction with the NIH.

Huh. My question is: Am I skipping enough meals?