thing that's being found that it's important to maintain
muscle mass as you age.
So, I think people need to be a little bit careful, you know, to take in sufficient
energy to maintain their muscle mass.
So, for example, the people in the Calorie Restriction Society may be overdoing it.
And, you know, the story of Roy Walford, who was in the Biosphere 2.
I do.
You can tell the story.
Okay.
I can't remember exactly when it was, '70s or '80s, or 1980s.
I can't remember.
There's something called Biosphere where these two people down in Arizona,
essentially, they built this bubble.
And they grew plants in there.
And the goal was to see if they could be self-sustaining for long-term.
And so, what happened was they were all right for a while.
And then, after a while, they started not being able to generate sufficient
food and they lost a lot of body weight.
And, you know, essentially, on the point of starvation.
And so, they had to finally come out of the biosphere.
And one of them was Roy Walford, who had also done a lot of important
work on calorie restriction.
Actually, a lot of very important early work with Rick Weindruch at the
University of Wisconsin, showing that calorie restriction can extend lifespan.
And then, Roy Walford...
So, as you get older, your perception of time is messed up.
Roy Walford died in, I like to say, like 15 years ago or something,
ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease.
That's a muscle-wasting disease involving degeneration of the
neurons that innervate those muscles.
And that was really interesting because I mentioned the study that we've done
with intermittent fasting and animal models of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's,
epilepsy, and we found it was beneficial.
But we also tried, every-other-day fasting in a mouse model of ALS.
And what we found is, it made it worse.
So, of course, these mice are destined to have ALS, so the abnormal processes
are already in motion when we put the animals on intermittent fasting,
but their motor function, we have ways of testing their motor function,
declined much more precipitously when they were on intermittent fasting.
So, I think that's the important...
And then, my own personal case.
So, I've always had a low BMI.
And I started doing daily time-restricted eating like 30
years ago, not eating breakfast.
And as kind of an endurance semi-athlete, trail running, mountain bike riding.
Actually, when I was a kid, I used to race motocross.
But, anyway, I did a lot of running.
And so, my BMI is always around, it's very low, like 18, 18.5,
you know, somewhere there.
And then, two years ago, I had a mountain bike accident.
And not to be too gory but, essentially, tore my rectus abdominis
muscle off my pubic bone, and had adductor partially coming off.
I had to have three surgeries, and I've had other issues.
So I've lost muscle mass, particularly in my legs, during this ordeal.
And I'm having trouble building it back up.
So, like, hindsight is always 20/20.
And like, you know, I couldn't have predicted I'd have a mountain bike
accident and have all this going on.
But in hindsight, I probably would have been better off...and I didn't
really do any resistance training.
Because when I was running, when I started running in the '70s like there
was no such thing as cross training.
It was like runners, the training is you run.
You stretch and you run.
And, somehow, I guess because I'm stupid.
I didn't pick up on, you know, people start doing cross training stuff.
I didn't pick up.
"Hey, I should be working my core.
And I should be, you know, keeping some muscle mass."
You know, so all these years, I've mainly just been doing the same thing.
But, anyway, so that's just like a personal anecdote.
And, you know, I guess what I'm saying is having a low bodyweight
can be good, but you have to be a little careful during aging to make
sure that you have a good muscle mass as part of that like the main...
Well, I guess I was mostly muscle mass anyway but, still, yeah, more muscle mass.