I am not exactly health-obsessed. Although I’ve been married for six months, I still order pizza twice a week, and the drive-through guys at In-N-Out Burger know me by my first name. My job as a magazine writer with never-ending deadlines leaves little time for the gym, beyond the odd free-weight routine and maybe 20 minutes on the treadmill. Even so, I was OK with my 5′7″ 162-pound frame, and so was my wife. My only real worry, health-wise, was holding on to my teeth.

But recently I found myself obsessing over every calorie, every carb. At the suggestion of Men’s Fitness, I went on a diet that cut my calorie intake from around 2,700 to a meager 1,200 a day. For two weeks, I ate nothing but cabbage soup, steamed greens, and jicama. In other words, I deprived myself–extremely. Why would anyone do this? Because it just might help you live forever.

The Calorie Restriction Diet, as it’s called, is rooted in a 70-year-old Cornell University study, in which rats were fed at least two-thirds less than they normally would be and rived some 30% longer and appeared younger than their well-fed counterparts. Whether this translates into a longer life in humans remains a subject of debate, though an unusually high number of people in places where low-calorie living is the norm–Okinawa, Japan, for example–live past the century mark. More recent studies have argues that by eating the minimum number of calories to keep the body functioning, the metabolism rate is severely slowed, and with it the rate of cellular and genetic disrepair. In addition to helping you live longer, the theory goes, a low-calorie life could improve everything from eyesight to memory, while lessening the chances of cancer, diabetes, and heart failure. Not even the mega-popular Atkins Diet promises that.
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But calorie restriction is meant for the zealous, not the masses. The 1,200 or so members of the Calorie Restriction Society (calorierestriction.org) take the benefits of CR as a kind of gospel. “Your life is just better on this diet,” said Warren Taylor, a 58-year-old Californian, when I first asked him to guide me through a CR diet. “You have a much greater feeling of peace, self-confidence, and control. You’re not nervous, you don’t fidget, and you don’t wory.” A former powerlifter and long-distance runner, Taylor gave them up four years ago when he joined the group, since the calorie restriction life doesn’t include much exercise. Even sex is an iffy proposition. For anyone doing CR, the diet slows your metabolism to a crawl, and it has roughly the same effect on your libido as a Kirstie Alley film festival.

While I wondered how my 33-year-old body could survive on CR, Taylor delivered one of the pep talks that I would come to crave and loathe during the next two weeks: “Sure your energy level will be lower than what you’re used to. But when you realize all the benefits, you’ll be hooked.”

DAY 1 Taylor faxes me what he calls a CR free-choice diet, meaning I could eat anything I wanted from the list as long as I stayed within the calorie limit. I decide to consume all the nutrients I can muster based on his plan–collard greens, spinach, Belgian endive–to make up for the lack of beer, sausage, and everything else I enjoy. I am to avoid starchy vegetables like corn and squash and skip fruits altogether, save berries, where the sugar content is balanced by a bounty of dietary fiber. I go through two bags of bitter-tasting dandelion and turnip greens before noon. A few hours later, I graduate to Brussels sprouts–more peppery and flavorful than I remember. Dinner is frozen okra, which tastes less like snot when you dust it with curry powder. I go to bed hungry but not Survivor-level hungry. This is going to be easy.

DAY 2 I wake up at 6 a.m. with such hunger pangs, I’m convinced I’m giving birth. So as the sun rises, I begin to make the soup that is to sustain me for the next two weeks. Although my version of the recipe for “CR 3 Day Soup” is pretty austere–three 32-ounce cartons of organic chicken broth (60 calories total), equal parts water, and a pound each of cabbage, carrots, and onions–it does include the only meat I will have in the next 13 days, which today is a little less than a pound of chopped lean turkey breast. I eat soup for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That night, I worry that this may be the last chance to make love to my wife for the next 12 days, so I insist we give it a go. Afterward, I find myself craving roast beef.

DAY 3 One of the drawbacks of my job is a regular 6 a.m. deadline, which typically means I’m writing until about 5:57. With nothing but soup and collard greens to go on, I find my typing speed is cut nearly in half. The real problem is revealed when I read over my story the next day about a Hollywood event: ME: So what are you wearing tonight? STARLET: A vintage hunger from the house of Hunger. And I thought this diet was supposed to make me think more clearly.