Have people criticized your diet?
Some people close to me were worried about the weight loss. And I have heard, "You're too skinny. I like a woman with a little bit of meat on her bones," and, "Yeah, right, CR doesn't work. It's not scientific. My great-grandpa ate a gallon of ice cream every day for 40 years and he lived to be 100."

But I'm grateful for having understanding friends ‑- I know not everyone does ‑- and have gotten pretty significant interest when I describe CR and its benefits to them. Most people, I've found, are interested in being healthier, but don't know what to do about it. If I can offer my experience of going from unhealthy to feeling great, then it can serve as inspiration.

Has the diet changed the way you feel?
I was so amazed when I saw that everyone around me was getting sick, but I wasn't! I used to always be the first to get sick, and it would last for the longest time, too. A lot of what people think of as normal suffering (poor digestion, tiredness, frequent colds) disappeared. Now that I'm feeling great, I know I'll never go back.

What can't you eat? Do you ever feel deprived?
I can technically eat everything. What I choose not to eat is a different story: no white sugar or flour, no white potatoes. I take the standard advice: no processed foods, no red meat, not too much caffeine, a lot of fresh foods and a minimum of animal fat. Take the advice yo' mama gave you and run with it.

The amazing thing is that I don't feel deprived on CR. But even more amazing is how doing CR has made me aware of how I feel and what I really want. It's this awareness that allows me to satisfy myself. It takes a lot of learning about your own biology and how foods interact within you to realize what's going on. CR makes you think about it, and that's important. Before CR, I might have felt guilty over eating, say, a candy bar, because I knew it was "bad for you," but I never really knew why. So not knowing what it was doing to my body made it okay for me to eat it as a treat or an "I deserve it" thing. Becoming healthier and doing CR has helped me see how that candy bar is bad and what it's really doing to me. It only took that knowledge to push me toward changing, and I will be forever grateful for that.