The Longevity Diet: Discover Calorie Restriction--the Only Proven Way to Slow the Aging Process and Maintain Peak Vitality

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Amazon rating of 4.5 out of 5, Amazon sales rank: 148

At last, here's a book that synthesizes the increasingly popular CR (Calorie Restriction) diet for the layperson. CR is not a diet primarily about weight loss, although readers will lose weight. CR is about eating highly nutritious foods to extend your healthy years.

Here's the concept: eat fewer calories and choose foods more carefully. This will reallocate how your metabolism uses its resources to convert food into energy; in other words, what goes in will be used more efficiently. You will feel better and function better—and the big bonus: the CR diet slows aging. CR lengthens the periods of youth and middle age and substantially reduces the risk of virtually all the diseases of aging.

Brian Delaney and Lisa Walford, two longtime CR practitioners, will take you on a handheld stroll through the process, including an introduction to CR, how to do it, some of the key issues in the current dialogue, and the skinny on superfoods.

Reader Reviews:

*****
I really liked everything about this book: the personal stories, the simple explanations, the research-based (not hype-based) nutritional advice. Basically, the Longevity Diet can be summed up as eating less overall, and coping with hunger by eating better quality food so that you don't experience malnutrition and food cravings. The value of buying the book is that when you're done reading it, you feel more MOTIVATED to do this.

I am very familiar with current nutritional research, and appreciate having a concise summary of timely information like this book. Another great thing about it is that it's very, very flexible, encouraging you to listen to your body and to find a way of eating that is right for you. It gives, in the personal examples, illustrations of how people apply the diet so that you can see how to customize healthy eating to fit your lifestyle.

Although you will lose weight, the orientation of the book is primarily on being healthy and living a long, high-quality life.

At one point in The Longevity Diet, it makes the point that many people will choose to continue eating to excess because it is what they enjoy, and it is the quality of life they choose to make their life meaningful; they also state that this is a valid choice, and do not make people who take this path "wrong". This book, however, is for those of us who have tried eating to excess, have tried being obese, have experienced food cravings, and want something different and doable. I would give this book my highest recommendation, and think that everyone should understand the information in it, then make a choice that works for them!
***** The Longevity Diet isn't one of the many fad diet, but a well balanced diet with the focus on proper nutrition. It is a book that helps you make more sensible food choices. This is due to well explained basic nutritional principles. I liked the common sense approach without any hype and overpromising. Another very good book (if not even better) on this subject is "Can We Live 150 year?" by M. Tombak. Check a lot of excerpts from the book at the author's website.I've been looking for a book like this for a long time. Calorie restriction - which the authors are also referring to as "the longevity diet" - is the only way of slowing the aging process and becoming more youthful (at least so far!). I had been hearing about the diet for a long time, but it always seemed too extreme. CBS had a special calling it The Starvation Diet: "it will help you live 30-40 more years, but would you really want to?" But Walford and Delaney explain that the diet can be followed in less extreme forms, and they present a lot of evidence (without blinding me with science) that milder versions of the diet have extraordinary benefits as well.
The second section of the book explains how the diet works in practice. I've already tried some of the recipes and suggestions. The "CR" phenomenon really isn't that complicated. The book explains how you can sort of "ease into" the diet, taking it to whatever level you want. There are no weird quantities of fat or protein, no complicated supplements or seaweed from distant parts of the planet: just common sense eating informed by science.
My only disappointment was that there wasn't more discussion of non-dietary findings in anti-aging research. They explain the science of CR so lucidly, I'd want to see more from their pens about related matters. Maybe that will come in the next book.

I'm already losing weight and feeling better. I probably won't take the diet to an extreme, but having the book around keeps my motivated.It seemed to me he was just trying to get people to eat a healthy balanced diet of 2,000 cal. Easy to read and understand. I wanted more.I had been hearing about this "CR" Diet for several on the news, but never really understood what it was about. After reading this book, I think I finally do. I do not believe that any diet can make me live to be 150 years old but after reading this book, I believe I have to tools to maintain my youth and my mind much longer than I otherwise might have. Whether I actually stick with it is a different question....
I also bought Beyond the 120-Year Diet, which is an excellent book, but Roy Walford seems too much like a True Believer. What I liked about The Longevity Diet is that it seems more realistic. It gives a lot of evidence for this diet being able to improve health, even if in mild forms the diet won't add another five decades to your life. Roy Walford focused on people who wanted to take the diet to an extreme. Delaney and Lisa Walford focus on more normal people.
But the main thing I liked about the book is that, after reading it, I had new motivation to think about what I eat: my health. And the simple, but fairly thorough explanation of nutrition somehow "stuck," and made it easy not to buy the container of ice cream on my way home from dinner. Having in my head this clear, simple explanation of excess Calories and their effect on health is changing my life. Not a huge amount, but enough to make me feel much better.
The one minor criticism I have is that the Resources section had only a few entries. But maybe they'll use the Web link they give to provide more resources. If the authors are reading this, I'd like to say: please use the Web link to provide more resources!! (Or write another book!) I'd like to learn more.
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