Sex and Calorie Reduction

A devoted and disciplined subculture swears by extreme calorie restriction (CR) regimens as a way of extending their lifespan. It might work, but there are some serious tradeoffs in quality of life. Aside from the obvious one (you get really hungry), most men experience a sharply diminished sex drive on CR. From a Psychology Today interview with CR advocate Dean Pomerleau:

Many CR practitioners lose their sex drive. How is that healthy?

Obviously, it's not for everyone. When you're on the high testosterone side of the fence and your libido is going strong, it's virtually impossible to see the appeal of the side of the fence that I'm on now. Some veteran CRonies, but not all, have observed this virtual disappearance of sexual desire. Like most men, I used to think about sex many, many times a day. It's inconceivable to think about not having that as a large focus. Now, however, it's very hard to see the appeal of going back to that testosterone-driven way of life. I don't miss my libido one bit.

One of the biggest difficulties for my wife is that I'm not as attractive and she isn't as attracted to me as she used to be. But psychologically and emotionally, she's much more attracted to me now. I'm a much more considerate husband and father than I was prior to starting the diet. My testosterone is extremely low, in the ballpark of an average woman.

Julian Dibbell wrote a mildly skeptical but mostly positive piece on the CR movement for New York magazine in 2006. Over dinner, a group of CR proponents discuss the diminished sex drive effect, which they acknowledge but downplay.

Not everybody on CR complains of lessened sexual desire, for one thing, and none of those who do, it seems, are women. (“If anything, women have the opposite problem,” April observes.) Nor are the reported side effects nearly as bad as what the “normal” aging process does to midlife sexual function. “Remember,” says Paul, “Meredith and I are in our late fifties, and we do know the sexual habits of people around our age.” The calorie-restricted middle-aged couple very likely doesn’t have the clogged arteries, sluggish endocrine systems, and other buzz-killing problems that conspire to extinguish many an older couple’s sex life.

All the same, says April, after all the record-straightening is done, “it’s not entirely a myth”: CR can in fact do strange things to the male libido. And, by way of illustrating the point, she begins to tell us what is probably the CR community’s best-known love story—her own.

Click through if you want to hear the CR community’s best-known love story (it's not all that interesting). Meanwhile, if you still think extreme self-denial might be worth a few extra years of lifespan, it's worth noting that CR has plenty of skeptics. Athena Andreadis at H+ Magazine argues that there's no significant evidence that extreme calorie restriction will improve human longevity.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

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