I don't want to be 200. I just want to be slim, happy and healthy while I am here

Of course Rosedale was speaking of the ideal potential for human longevity, maybe when it will be possible to carry out prowesses of anti-aging engineering. For the nonce, he just says that, by simple actuation of the natural body nutrients sensors (Insuline, leptin, mTOR) and by avoiding excessive glycation by excessive carbs, we can mimic the natural genetics of the centenaries who have an inherently metabolic setup which minimizes aging.
Such a proposal does not sound unrealistic.
Besides, the point is not reaching 150 years of age, the point in which we all agree I believe is decreasing the likelyhood of cancer, alzheimer, cardiovascular diseases.

Also, pls note that I understand very much the objections of those who are complaining about too little proteins for them. Tonight I would have eaten 4 eggs but I had to stop at 2 not to go over my personal estimate of the mTOR threshold. It just seemed like I needed that extra proteins to satiate myself.
One trick which I am following is to eat vegetables cooked in abundant fats (olive oil in my case), and dressing, which makes them satiating.
Also, once we receive an input and evaluate it with discrimination, we are free to follow our own compromises, if moderate proteins makes us feel sick we can always try and reduce it by little amounts and very progressively if we see it fit. Habit is a vicious beast.
I've just more than halved my intake of carbs and, even though I'm in the region of 90-100 grams per day, I started having cravings, never happened before but on occasional total fasts. Yesterday my craving was pumpernickel bread with butter and honey. I couldn't believe that. The power of habit.

My husband mccoy can be a real pain the the neck at times, when he gets obsessed with something, he obsesses big time! Now it's the turn of this nTOR thing, which I just cannot stand any longer, I was interested at first but too much is too much!

To tell the truth though, in my case I sort of noticed that large servings of meat for example tend to increase my weight or maybe prevent me from loosing weight.

It may be the insulinic power of proteins cited by Dr. Fung or this glucogenesis or what. I just resized my meat servings.
Ditto for cheese. I try and satisfy my hunger with olives and some nuts, vegetables sometimes. Not many cravings fortunately.
I think I owe my sanity to coffee . Pls don't try and tell me that it's going to increase my blood insulin, I might bite!!!

European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 68, 973-979 (September 2014) | doi:10.1038/ejcn.2014.123

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A Rietman
J Schwarz
D Tomé
F J Kok
M Mensink
High dietary protein intake, reducing or eliciting insulin resistance?

A Rietman, J Schwarz, D Tomé, F J Kok and M Mensink

Abstract

The protein restriction studies don't tend to restrict carbs. I guess maybe it helps to also restrict carbs.

A problem here is that Rosedale is sort of an expert in something that maybe nobody is an expert in. At any rate, if we can't measure mtor--we'll have to measure something else. If you find you're retaining your lean mass (by what measure? Muscle, or do you include internal organs) on a lowish protein intake, good for you.

With calorie restriction, you get some growth restriction. Mice aren't just leaner, they're smaller. Older mice don't get as much benefit from calorie restriction--is it too late to stunt their growth? Maybe that's what you would get if you started calorie or protein restriction at a young age--people a good foot shorter than people eating the western diet--like the Kitivans. On the other hand--with people calorie restricting at an older age, CRON adherents, most of the videos of them I've seen look sort of bony and anorexic.

Teaser, guess what but I was just about to post an excerpt from Dr. Attia describing the muscle mass concept you are underlining. That's an undirect but true measure of nitrogen balance.
The optimum strategy.
1-Maximize carbs according to tolerance (until you hit your glucose adn insulin ceiling- that's not so clear to me)
2-Minimize proteins according to tolerance (moderate but not so low that you loose muscle mass, that's pretty clear)
3-what's left, is fat.

Actually, if I get back to the various experiments I did and the various conditions in my life, I seemed to retain lean mass with moderate proteins, but I've never limited the amount of carbs (healthy, unprocessed sugars and starches). Whereas if the purpose is to loose excess weight, you must necessarily limit your carbs intake, so we might have two different scenarios. In my case maybe I instinctively followed Dr. Attia's suggestions and was hitting my glucose and insuline ceiling, being pretty tolerant to carbs.

Fact is that, carbs, especially sugars are tricky. You sort of become addicted to them and the cravings feed themselves in a vicious circle. And I have this small sliver of a doubt that at 56 now I might as well start some restriction. My wife started a very low carb regimen but I too have drastically cut carbs and the immediate benefit was less bloating after eating.

So what do you think Dr. Attia means exactly by saying 'hit your glucose and insulin ceiling'? How do I measure it?

Back in topic, we agree that the keyword for estimating our protein requirement is keeping a proper nitrogen balance and not to starve muscles, not to loose muscle mass. We do not know though at what percentile of protein requirement we are so we cannot decide a priori an optimum protein intake.
So, how do we know precisely that we are not loosing muscle mass? I was thinking about one of those scales measuring lean mass and fat mass. But are they reliable? Any other more accurate but unexpensive tools?
Or maybe just using a tape and measuring a few significant sizes, such as biceps, thighs, calves, chest.

I have the advantage that I'm not concerned about weight, I'm already at an ideal weight. So I'm thinking about starting a muscle size log and cut the proteins until size decreases, increase that a little and that would be my individual protein requirement.
A confounding factor is that I've recovered from some injuries and started to exercise with moderate weights so that may prevent muscle reduction (increasing my protein requirement). I have to ruminate longer about it.

So, how do we know precisely that we are not loosing muscle mass?

The 64k protein question.

For weight lifters and body builders it's relatively easy and that's what much of the muscle mass experiments focus on, Olympic athletes. They know "get at least X" and if they get more then that's akin to getting too much vitamin C, i.e. so what? For mere mortals like myself, idk. I guess how I feel?

I do come back to the point, so if I get 10g, 20g or 40g too much protein, what's the big deal? The admonishment that it might be metabolized in to blood sugar is silly to me. Does anyone really think that 20g of excess protein is turned into 20g of carbs? I hope not. So if it's turned into 15, 10 of 5g then we should just adjust our carb limit accordingly and move on.

Again, everyone with a smakeral of science agrees too little protein is bad. Practically, the ankerl calculator does a fair job estimating it and if it's off by 5-20g then it's no big deal.

With the muscle mass, I'd say just use the measurements available to us. They aren't precise. But if performance in the gym and the tape measure are behaving, things are probably okay there. Not perfect, but I think good enough that if there's error, loss of lean muscle is unlikely to be high enough to be of concern.

Thanks inflammable, the calculator was useful, even though I entered an high value for carbs. I found especially useful the visual comparative tables for bodyfat estimation.

I reviewed the WHO, 2002, technical report. n=232, mixed proteins (animal+plant based), mixed climates and populations.
I looked up the statistical distribution and estimated a reasonable lower bound and upper bound of the requirement values 8teh individual variability is large). these are the results.
Weights are always within the acceptable range otherwise have been normalized in teh study. They are ideal weights, that is weights with a reasonable amount of bodyfat, not high, nor low.

Modal protein requirement: 0.66 g kg-1 d-1 ideal weight
Reasonable LB: 0.44 g kg-1 d-1 ideal weight
Reasonable UB: 1.01 g kg-1 d-1 ideal weight

Values are pretty low, I concur.

My strategy for macro determination with the purpose of longevity (of course things woudl vary for other purposes, like weightloss, diabetes, ketosis) was the following (following dr Attia's suggestions).

1-Set a carbs ceiling. I tentatively set a ceiling of 100 grams. I should not loose weight with this, surely I won't gain. I'm already at an ideal weight.
2-Set a protein optimum requirement= zero nitrogen balance. This is the tricky part. I entered the initial estimate of my own individual requirements, based on the most frequent value of requirement across all individuals studied. My initial estimate is then 41 grams, which I'll round up to 50 grams daily because the exercise schedule I started.
With such values I'd be at carbs/proteins/fats = 20/10/70

I'll need then to adjust carefully the carbs ceiling and the proteins optimum by monitoring my weight and muscles sizes.

As soon as I reach the neutral point, that is no muscle loss and no weight loss, according to the ancestral model of Dr. Rosedale I have an OFF mTOR mode = body in longevity mode.

I might allow for some weight increase if muscle size increases due to weight lifting (a littel growth but not predominant in the prevailing repair 6 manteinance mode). I might measure my BS to have a more accurate estimation for my carbs ceiling.

I'm satisfied so far by the results of discussion and would like to thank all you guys who partecipated and gave an input to my ruminations, which are not at all conclusive.

In order that this thread be useful to all people, what is reasonable to believe is perhaps that you might set your optimum protein intake at the value where ketosis ceases, or at a value below which you feel you are not physically comfy with that.
In this case I'm sure everyone will be pursuing longevity by keeping at bay the more immediate hazards given by weight excess and diabetes. The longer term hazards will take care of themselves, if we really believe in Dr.Rosedale's hypothesis, we might try and decrease very progressively our protein intake down to a resonable optimum. Anyway, Dr. Rosedale's indications are valid for diabetes, since he had hundreds or thousands of diabetic patients, although he uses large supplementation with them.

The concept, as far as I understood, is that whatever our individual body construes as an abundant supply of amino acids, activates the mTOR pathway, favouring general growth and reproduction and devoting less energy to repair and manteinance.

Please note: the above applies to old geezers like myself.
young boy/girls should of course supply abundant proteins to the body and active mTOR since they are in growth mode.
Ditto for pregnant women and body builders when they want to increase muscle mass.

I think you might find Bintang's story interesting. http://forum.lowcarber.org/member.php?userid=169208

Since discovering the whole "optimal ketosis" story of Phinney and Volek was just made up I've become more intellectually accepting of approaches that reduce carbs but not eliminate them. It's now not clear to me that nutritional ketosis (morning ketones>0.2) has to be achieved at all.

Interesting study on herself, she was able to loose weight even if on a 90 grams carbs per day average diet.