Sports Calendar

He was always an athlete, but he has been on his regime – it’s called Evolutionary Fitness – since 1984. The first benefit is that he is never ill.

“I’m not on any medication. I had a fair number of colds before I began this programme but I’ve only had two episodes of food poisoning since then – both were in high-end restaurants – and that’s it since 1984. My insulin is unmeasurably low; insulin is the ageing hormone – it tells you to go ahead, reproduce and die. My HDL [good cholesterol] is enormously high, my triglycerides are way down, my blood pressure is perfect, scans of my carotid artery show there are no lesions there, no build-up of plaque, so my brain is getting lots of nourishment. I was just motorcycle-riding with a gang of guys in Elba, riding all over the hills. I play softball; I was the only guy in the seniors to hit them over the fence. I can hit a golf ball 340 yards. I’m fast as heck, I’m very strong…”

And the testosterone? “We do have a lot of sex for a 70-year-old couple. I had to close the door the other night, she was screaming so loud – she sings!” Perhaps luckily, his wife, Carmela, is not around to be embarrassed by this: she is in Las Vegas for the day. But on the other hand, she probably wouldn’t mind. She went on Arthur’s diet after they married and dropped six dress sizes. “You don’t see many 70-year-olds who are a size four [UK size eight] and have such a cute, petite figure.”

This bouncy, clear-eyed, low-insulin, horny rebuke to unfit fat slobs everywhere was born in Davenport, Iowa, but his home town is really LA, where he finished high school and was signed to a minor-league baseball team. He was always fit but his sight wasn’t good enough for pro baseball. He started working out – primarily weightlifting – at 16 and has done so ever since.

Is functional exercise better than the gym?

Our writer tries out the new fitness craze that's sweeping America and finds it is demanding, but not impossible

BACKGROUND

• Top 10 ways to stick to your diet and lose weight

• The death-defying diet

• Diets? Don't bother

• Lunchtime fix: liposuction

• Is detox safe?

Ah, you’re thinking, he’s a fitness freak – no hinterland, no brain, all biceps; we may be slobs, but we’re smart. Sorry. Arthur studied economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and now, in retirement, he is professor emeritus of economics at the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He has written the most important works on the economics of the movie industry and he worked out the best ways of privatising the electromagnetic spectrum: broadcast frequencies. “It was the template for the establishment of spectrum markets throughout the world,” he says with charming egotism. “I am told I am a legend in Guatemala, for example.”

This isn’t just background, it is essential to an understanding of Arthur’s approach to diet and fitness. It is very rigorous and thoughtful – which is why Nassim’s advocacy got me on the diet. The first point is that economics happens inside the body as well as outside. His work is all about the dynamics of complex, adaptive systems; he calls himself a complexity scientist. Central to this is the overthrow of old statistical models. Basically, we have all been taught that events – human wealth, earthquakes, blockbuster movies – cluster round an average forming a graph in the shape of a bell curve. This is an illusion and the concept of the average leads to fatal errors.

In reality, almost all events of significance follow what are known as “power laws”. This means, to simplify, that what are thought of as rare events are, in fact, more important than any average. We think of bank crises, like the present one, as rare and the rest of the time the banks go on making money. In fact, they don’t. Bank crashes are so devastating that they wipe out all the investment profits of the banking system. Look at the average and you don’t see this; apply power laws and you do.

“The average,” says Arthur, “is always misleading and may not exist.”

The obsession with the bell curve and the average has corrupted us. We tend to think of stable models not just of the human world but also of the human body. Almost all dietary and fitness regimes are based on a homeostatic view of the body – meaning it is a self-regulating system that maintains itself in a continuous, stable condition. The average is the ideal. So we are told to eat regular meals consisting of a balance of the food groups and to take regular exercise, dominated by steady aerobic activity like cycling or jogging. This is all wrong.

But though Arthur’s economics feed into his Evolutionary Fitness regime, that’s not how he got there. He married his first wife, Bonnie, in 1957. They had three children, two of them adopted. Their biological son, Brandon, was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes at the age of two. “I went down to the Chicago University bookstore and bought everything I could on metabolism, including the big, thick textbooks, and I started ploughing through all that stuff.”

Some years later, Bonnie received the same diagnosis. By now, Arthur had decided most of what they were being told by doctors was wrong. “We had to neglect a lot of advice from doctors.”

He began experimenting with diets. Prolonged high blood sugar is fatal to diabetics.

Times recommends

• What took place in 2010...
• Can you really cure a hangover?
• Video: How to do glamorous smoky eyes