As you age, your body needs fewer calories. The more you eat, the harder your body has to work to digest what you ate. Free radicals are spawned as a result of metabolic processes. The less you eat, the less your body has to work. In a way, retirement should be not just retirement from work but from eating as well, if you can hack that.
My grandfather still has a glass of wine a day, swims laps in his community pool, but he eats very little. Coffee and toast in the morning, a light salad for lunch, and he often doesn’t even eat dinner. He’s 82 but appears no older than 65. I pray I live to the same age.
Makes sense. I know young people who fast whenever they have a cold because the work of digesting food slows them down.