The Longevity Diet: Discover the New Science Behind Stem Cell Activation and Regeneration to Slow Aging, Fight Disease, and Optimize Weight

by Valter Longo

Eat twice a day plus a snack. Unless your waist circumference and body weight are in the normal or low range, it is best to eat breakfast and one major meal plus a nourishing low-calorie, low-sugar snack daily.

Even if the meals contain 305 calories each, instead of the recommended 300 calories, that extra 30 calories a day, or more than 900 calories a month, means nearly 3 pounds of extra fat every year.

If you eat only two and a half meals a day, with only one major meal, it becomes much harder to overeat, particularly on a mostly plant-based diet. It would take large portions of fish, beans, and vegetables to get to the calorie level that would cause obesity.

For people trying to lose weight or those who tend to be heavy, the best nutritional advice is to eat breakfast daily; have lunch or dinner, but not both; and substitute for the missed meal one snack containing fewer than 100 calories and no more than 3 to 5 grams of sugar.

The advantage to skipping lunch is more free time and more energy. On the other hand, there is the possible disadvantage of restless sleep from having consumed a large dinner, particularly for those who suffer from acid reflux. The disadvantage to skipping dinner is that it eliminates the most social meal of the day.

Observe time-restricted eating. Another common practice adopted by many centenarian groups is time-restricted eating, or confining all meals and snacks to within eleven to twelve hours or less a day.

You should also not eat within three to four hours of going to sleep.

Practice periodic prolonged fasting: People under age sixty-five who are neither frail nor malnourished and are free of major diseases should undergo two periods of five days a year in which they consume a relatively high-calorie fasting-mimicking diet, or FMD.

Follow the eight points above in such a way that you reach and maintain a healthy weight and abdominal circumference.

Having a waist circumference of more than 40 inches in men and 35 inches in women doubled the risk of premature death, compared with having a waist circumference of less than 33 inches in men and 27 inches in women.

Having interviewed centenarians all over the world, I think the common denominator is not spirituality per se, but a sense of purpose, a will to live.

Molochian centenarians tend to live with their sons’ or daughters’ families. Because the younger generation has adopted a more modern diet, we speculated that transitioning to a higher-protein diet with more animal-based ingredients—which many of the centenarians did in their eighties and nineties—may contribute to their extreme longevity. In other words, maintaining a high-vegetable, low-protein diet for the first seventy or eighty years of life, and later switching to a diet richer in proteins but also animal-based foods like eggs, chicken, milk, and certain cheeses, may have slowed down aging and optimized the health of the Molochio centenarians.

What’s important is working all your body parts until you breathe rapidly and sweat for five to ten hours a week.

Walk fast for an hour every day.

Ride, run, or swim thirty to forty minutes every other day, plus two hours on the weekend.

Use your muscles.

However, several studies indicate that exceeding a daily protein intake of 0.33 grams per pound of body weight does not increase muscle growth and that consuming 30 grams of protein in a single low-carbohydrate or very low-carbohydrate meal optimizes muscle synthesis.7 For best results, the 30 grams of protein should be consumed one to two hours after resistance training, such as lifting weights or doing push-ups.

OPTIMIZING ENERGY IN SUMMARY Walk fast for an hour every day. Take the stairs instead of escalators and elevators. On the weekend, walk everywhere, even faraway places (avoid polluted areas as much as you can). Do moderate exercise for 2½ to 5 hours a week, with some of it in the vigorous range. Most of the beneficial effects appear to be caused by the first 2.5 hours of exercise, making the additional exercise optional. Use weight training or weight-free exercises to strengthen all muscles. To maximize muscle growth, consume at least 30 grams of protein in a single meal one to two hours after a relatively intense weight-training session.

For example, if we consider fasting as the period necessary to switch from a primarily sugar-burning mode to a fat-burning mode, then only periods of abstention from food lasting two or three days or more can be considered fasting. The same length of fasting appears to be necessary to trigger the activation of “regenerative” programs. This does not mean that shorter periods of abstention from food cannot be beneficial, but that we should not use words like “Intermittent Fasting” to include interventions that are very different and have very different effects just like we don’t want to place in the same category walking for fifteen minutes and running a marathon.