My name is Matthew Lake, I’m 35 years old, and I’m from Wales in the United Kingdom.

CR Vitality (previously matts-cr.blogspot.com) was created to document my journey as I adopted a healthy plant-based, low-calorie diet to improve my health and possibly slow aging.

Over the years that I have been blogging, I have shared my experience with the diet: the benefits, drawbacks, as well as providing opinions and analysis of new studies that have come out regarding calorie restriction and longevity.

Calorie restriction is one of the best-known ways to slow aging in animals, and possibly humans, so I wanted to give it a go after reading a book by Dr. Roy Walford called “The 120 Year Diet.”

Research has been conducted on people practicing long-term CR and has shown many positive effects such as a reduced risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. The diastolic function of the heart muscle for people on CR was also measured at around 15 years younger than their biological age. You can read more results from studies in humans here.

I started CR when I was 18 years old, and then began a strict CRON (calorie restriction with optimal nutrition) diet when I was 20 years old.

I only began to experiment with a vegetarian diet and then a vegan diet a few years later.