Because I didn’t shave my beard off as promised, I now have to lose a few pounds elsewhere, so as from today I’m messing with my eating habits. Not a diet, because everyone knows diets are bad, you just end up yo-yoing your weight and biting everyone’s heads off (mm, delicious heads, full of low-carb brains). No, I need to do a little gear-shift to a lifestyle that perhaps doesn’t involve random mealtimes whose name is determined by how long I can be bothered to use the microwave for (hot pizza == dinner. warm pizza == supper. cold pizza == breakfast!).
Getting up the motivation change my bad (but delightfully familiar) habits is hard for me. Like most geeks, I mostly feel that my body is just something that keeps my cerebellum from dragging in the dirt. Still, some things get me going. As you may have deduced from this blog, I have a fascination with those who wander off the mainstream in ways that I both admire and gawp at, so I’ve been drawing a lot of inspiration from Ray Kurtzweil’s Fantastic Voyage (mental note: what a great parody show title that would make).
The three word summary for Fantastic Voyage is “The Singularity Diet”.
Everyone who, like me, was promised that John Macarthy and Daniel Hillis were seconds away from booting up Skynet in 1983 and creating a glorious hive mind as soon as their were as many Commodore 64s as neurons in the human brain, has become slowly resigned to the fact that infinite lifespans and the serious planning of a Far Edge Party was, and is, always going to be another 20 years away for the forseeable future. Kurtweil , who also wrote The Singularity is Near, is self-evidently more optimistic, but even he is running out of spare decades.
Therefore, he and his medical advisor Terry have made the sensible decision to simply stop aging until life-extension reaches the crucial “average life expectancy increases one year, every year” point.
If you were going to make me stop and pay attention to a diet, hinting that it might freeze my decrepitation long enough to allow me to download my brain into a Moravec Bush is probably going to win me over. As in all transhuman endeavours, the science of Fantastic Journey is so magnetically attractive (and heavily cited) you almost buy in, and then, bang!, suddenly they’re off wandering off talking about drinking six barrels of alkine water a day and sitting in a room for a day a week have nutrients injected intravenously into their perfectly pickled bods.
Jon Ronson would love and scorn this nuttiness, but really my sympathies are more with Julian Dibell’s attitude, which is more there but for the grace of God — oh shit, even with the grace of God and an attachment to contemporary mores in my favor, I’m almost with you. Stop messing with my mind!
Yes, [it] flies in the face of common sense, but it’s got the preponderance of scientific evidence on its side. Yes, it’s a little crazy, but the crazinesses it requires are only those already endemic to our age and area code.
No matter how you feel about the Singularity, reading about someone who takes hundreds of separate pills every day so that he can live for a thousand plus years does at least make you think about eating a salad sometimes.
Well, it’s day one of not eating crap, and I should say that I’m already more sceptical that at any point reading the book. Point one: shirataki soy/yam noodles maybe the cutting edge of low-carb nutrition, but I’m currently thinking their “authentic aroma” may just be too high a price to pay for a bazillion years of bliss. Someone upload me a doughnut!
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:07 am
fine then! you live forever, I get all the ice cream!
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:27 am
There’s also the people what eat like 700 calories a day because apparently starving yourself extends lifespan by slowing the aging process. But it’s not much of a life, is it?
September 23rd, 2008 at 2:33 am
riana, it’s only until we figure out how to *not* starve yourself and still slow the aging process.
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:38 am
The only thing I always do is have bran flakes for breakfast with a dollop of live yoghurt on with the milk. I have it every single day, which means I never have to think about it or vary it or expend any bran energy thinking oooh, what shall I have for breakfast?
You’re kind of set up then, I reckon. As long as you don’t follow up with lard.
September 23rd, 2008 at 8:21 am
Plus, as a woman, it’s your official food!
September 23rd, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Ah this is true! Although biodigestibleprenutrientculture drinks are also aimed at small humans of either sex in the UK.
In my defence, I have been eating live yogurt every day since I was 14 and had to go on penicillin for 3 months.
September 24th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Amber and I just finished reading “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes. It isn’t actually a diet book, and doesn’t contain any actual recommendations about actual foods that one could acquire, prepare, or eat, but it is the definitive history of the science and public policy behind everything that you have been taught about nutrition during your life, and it is also the definitive text of the current paradigm shift in the science itself.
That is: it is not a diet book, but it is both a fascinating history and analysis of science and public policy, and it is the science book that all future nutrition research will need to either embrace or refute.
So, I highly recommend that you read it. Really highly. The only drawback is that it is thick with names and dates and citations and careful, detailed, redundant explanations of the evidence and the arguments. So it can be slow going. But it is important. If you read that book and you *don’t* thank me for recommending it then I’ll buy you the most delicious steak and/or donut that we can find.
September 24th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
P.S. To hopefully entice you further with relevance to your blog post, part of “Good Calories, Bad Calories” is about aging, cancer, alzheimer’s, dementia…
September 25th, 2008 at 4:19 am
@Cait – I love the notion of “bran energy”