This was originally going to be a comment on Zvi's excellent "How I Lost 100 Pounds Using TDT", but it ran rather long, so I expanded it to a top-level post. Hope no one minds.

The issue I took with Zvi's post was that there seemed to be a general assumption being made -- not just in the post, but in comments -- about improvements in health outcomes coming from sacrifices in food-related hedonic outcomes. This would make sense if we were all on some efficient frontier between nutrition and enjoyment of food. I think for most of us¹ this is blatantly false.

So then, here are three steps aimed simply towards enjoying food more.² Eat better food. Eat food you actually like. Pay attention when you eat. These steps may themselves mildly improve your health outcomes, but they are intended primarily to help you enjoy food. You can of course combine them with efficient trades between hedons and nutrition, and wind up doing drastically better for both.

Possibly Related To: Diseased Thinking, Thou Art Godshatter

There are 8760 hours in a typical year.  A typical 30-year old will spend about 2900 of those hours sleeping, around 160 of them impaired or incapacitated by illness and will experience perhaps 2000 hours of peak mental function.

As one ages, the fraction of hours spent sleeping decreases slightly, but eventually the annual hours of peak mental function declines as well, and the annual hours spent ill increases nonlinearlly until one eventually makes that final hospital visit.  

There is a hope that medical technology, accelerated via a Singularity, will advance to the point where we have full mastery over biology and can economically repair organ and cellular damage faster than aging accumulates it.  There is sufficient evidence to put a reasonable bet on that happening by mid-century.

But for most of us that still leaves an unnaceptably high risk of death in the cumulative years between now and then.  Cyronics enrollment offers a further hope, but in practice probably only results in a modest improvement in long term survival odds after full discounting for the technical risks and uncertainties.

In the end it all comes down to a die roll.  Wouldn't you like to get an extra +1 or two?

With a simple evolutionary health optimization, one can:

• achieve perhaps a 10% increase in peak mental hours per year
• slow aging and prolong expected lifespan by at least ten years (before considering future medical advances)
• significantly reduce chance of death before mid-century
• shift body weight to a healthier equilibrium, increase attractiveness, general mood and happiness

Evolution and Health

Our bodies are the collective result of countless layers of mindless complex adaptations, evolutionary godshatter from a bygone history.  The current sub-species or races of humans today are just a small sampling of a much larger space of genetically related human ancestors who roamed the earth for hundreds of thousands of years before the modern era.  Our modern genomes are a wide and highly irregular sampling of this diverse set of historical adaptations.