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gwern comments on Open Thread: October 2009 - Less Wrong
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The real costs of caloric restriction are very high. We experience all sorts of negative symptoms, like lack of attention/lack of sexual function and physical pain when we are hungry. I am quite certain that I couldn't achieve a true CR diet if I tried. Even if I made a strong effort, there is still a fair chance I will wind up in an unhappy medium, in which I don't achieve the benefits because I couldn't pass some threshold at which CR becomes effective.
In fact, for most people, CR is probably impossible. Most of us do not even have the willpower to keep our weights in the "acceptable" range in spite of the fact that we idealize lean, low-fat bodies. We're battling millions of years of evolutionary programming.
However, we might see some of the same benefits from taking resveratrol or the forthcoming sirtuin drugs. Resveratrol is pretty cheap, much cheaper than CR (in terms of suffering), so I bet that would be a better candidate for most people than attempting (and likely failing) CR.
knb: but what about IF? You get all the calories you want there. From my college days with the buffet, I remember on more than a few occasions I would simply not eat for a day and then the next day I would gorge. (I wasn't losing weight during this time, just to be clear, and I was also more athletic than my norm.)
That's actually really interesting. When I was an undergrad, I "accidentally" used intermittent fasting as well. I was about 20 lbs overweight when I started school one year, I managed to lose 25 lbs on accident, in spite of the fact that I regularly binged after 24 hours of being to busy to eat.
My (limited) understanding implies this kind of thing is unhealthy and leads to suboptimal mental functioning.
If there's any unhealthiness to it, I didn't notice. It seemed to work out fine with my fencing & Taekwondo.
But mental functioning I really don't know. I ate pretty healthily even in the binging phase, but I know from my N-backing and polyphasic sleep experiments that one can be utterly unaware of even large deficits (or surpluses), and I was using no mental benchmark or task back then, so I would have remained unaware.