reddragdiva | A word on sure-fire fad diets that always work for everyone everywhere, except you.

A word on sure-fire fad diets that always work for everyone everywhere, except you.

A word on the slow-carb diet I'm on. A few people I know have been heartened by my example — it worked for me! — and tried it too. This is fine, but behooves me to note various important caveats.

tl;dr: It worked for me, it may be worth giving a go yourself, but take due caution and don't worry too much if it doesn't match your personal metabolism.

The real problem is that civilisation has more or less solved the food problem, but our genes don't know this, so we pack on the fat in anticipation of lean times that never come. To lose weight in a world of abundant food, we need to behave unnaturally. And different people's metabolisms require different unnatural behaviours.

Fad diets are generated by the following process:

Person does thing A.
Later, person experiences thing B.
Person concludes A caused B.
Person writes book generalising this as the solution for everyone else in the whole world.

This produces diets suffering certain fairly obvious and important epistemic and scientific deficiencies.

Just because the purported science behind what they say looks made-up doesn't mean it isn't their sincere understanding as such. People who assume correlation equals causation are often not the best at medical literature search and summary. Remember: "Assume good faith" is a nicer rephrasing of "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice."

Tim Ferriss (author of The Four-Hour Body, where I found the diet) is particularly bad for this. He's very smart and successful, so passes the practical exam at thinking in life, but his explanations for everything are a mix of actual science, plausible could-be science and fairly blatant magical pink unicorns. He is walking, writing broscience.

(My faith in Tim Ferriss' grasp of science and indeed joined-up thinking was fatally shaken by looking into his claim that the dangerously stupid ECA stack was scientifically proven to work [though he does flag it as dangerously stupid]. I was extremely interested by this, as I have worked on the Wikipedia article and found not even a consistent claimed mechanism from ECA advocates — what I could find gave a different mechanism each time, and was mostly terribly low-quality stuff on people's random web pages or eHow articles or FAQs that misspelled "freqently". That Ferriss said "The biochemistry was spot-on, and dozens of studies supported the effects. If E = 1, C = 1, and A = 1, the three combined have a synergistic effect of 1 + 1 + 1 = 6–10" and asserted a scientifically-backed mechanism — "The ephedrine increases cAMP levels, the caffeine slows cAMP breakdown, and the aspirin further helps sustain increased cAMP levels by inhibiting prostagladin production" — was great news! I could finally nail this thing!

So I sought out his references PDF (he doesn't put them in the actual book for space reasons) and looked up what he had ... no dozens of studies, just a long quote from an old version of the Wikipedia article. Except that that text was removed from the article because it was completely uncited, overall or in detail, and was peppered with "citation needed" tags. It's only one example, but I think quoting text that was deleted from Wikipedia for having been uncited rubbish as your crowning moment of evidence suggests deep problems with the concept of evidence.)

So, the diet. I went from 105kg to 95kg quite quickly and feel and look much better. I can keep to it because I like all the food on it. (That beer is on the forbidden list is an offence against God and humanity, but the results are worth only minor cheating on it.) And there are no portions — if it's not on the forbidden list, you can gorge on it. ("Hmm, half a pound of bacon is a permissible snack. I'll have to schedule that as a daily regular.") I appear to have just the right metabolism and tastes for this one to work. Free win!

The cheat day concept is brilliant: most people fail perfection at a diet and promptly give it up, so scheduling them greatly aids compliance. The rationale — "dramatically spiking caloric intake in this way once per week increases fat-loss by ensuring that your metabolic rate (thyroid function and conversion of T4 to T3, etc.) doesn’t downshift from extended caloric restriction" — appears to me somewhere between plausible and magical pink unicorns. And cheat days are nice, but by the end of them you really don't want to see another starchy thing ever again, or at least for the next week.

If you're a vegetarian it's largely made of arse — getting enough protein means you'll be living on eggs. If you're vegan, Ferriss recommends various horribly unappealing protein shakes which are widely considered to have the taste and texture of cardboard poo.

Oh, and if you're female your periods might stop. This happening on a diet is generally considered a bad sign.

Take it with a goddamn sack of salt, and remember there isn't a fad diet on Earth that failed to work for quite a lot of people, no matter the authorial imprecations.

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Your opening lesson puts me in mind of Beware of Other-Optimizing.

The fad diet process? Yeah.

I made this post based on evidence from last night (

pndc tried the diet and gave up after two days,

elpenguin is still on it and is having marvellous results) that I may have inadvertently risked other-pessimising.

I'm not on the diet you're claiming, I constructed something myself based on common sense, good science and a bit of gut feeling.

Essentially, I boosted my protein intake, cut out as many refined carbs as possible, limited myself to 1500-1800 calories per day and did a shitload of exercise, focusing particularly on muscle building. I ended up doing 'drop sets', whereby you go to the absolute limits of what you can press on each machine, do as many reps as possible, rest for 15 seconds, drop the weight by one notch, rinse and repeat until you just aren't straining anymore. The workouts for this are quite epically hard work, but I was losing about an inch every fortnight.

I fell off the wagon for 5 weeks but I'm back on it, but this time I'm cutting down to about 1200 - 1500 calories daily and I'm aiming to consume no more than 200 calories from fat daily. This time I'm going to do weights twice a week and fit in 3 sessions of cardio a week (not mixing cardio and weights into one session, bar the 5 minute warmup before hitting the weights i usually do).

Anyway, it worked for me, so I'm going to write a book /duck

-- elpenguin/james

Ah, sorry! I got the impression you were doing slow carb, somewhere after the third pint.

I didn't "give up", I just did an initial trial period, then ran out of tasty meat supplies.

Redefine chips as meat. Problem solved!

I should point out that the glutamate-guzzling I was trying last year made sqrt(fuck-all) difference to, um, anything.

Regular and small amounts of exercise and a positive mental attitude, on the other hand...

Yeah. The positive is that every fad diet ever seemed to work for its author, at least.

Isn't there a thing in nutrition where pretty much (sensible) every diet, ever, leads to am immediate loss of kg/lb which is a change in diet which is largely attributable to "change of diet" shock?

I have the figure of about 5kg but I can't recall where I picked up that figure.

Never heard of that, though I wouldn't be surprised. That's why I'm pleased mine has stayed off.

Usually the weight comes back on because people quit a diet, being psychologically unable to keep on it for whatever reason (e.g., starving on cardboard doesn't appeal as a lifestyle).

That has certainly been my observation.

I think it's related to the phenomenon that most people come back from traveling and are all surprised that they ate like a starving horse and either stayed the same weight or lost a bit.

But when you travel (IME) you have to pay for food (obviously) so you eat less and you walk everywhere, so you excerise more than every gym-bunny around you. (No offense, but I hate whole the "gym" concept).

I know one person for whom going to the gym has paid off. (I know a _lot_ of people who go or have gone to the gym.) I don't buy it either; the fit healthy people I know don't go to the gym, they ride bicycles [1].

[1] yes, selection effect, which way is causation, etc.

It probably isn't about the cycling so much as that they've found a way to carry out an aerobic activity on a frequent enough basis to make a difference.

Gyms are fine and dandy if you like that sort of thing. But most people's schedules are designed for maintenance, not change.

the fit healthy people I know don't go to the gym, they ride bicycles

And some people do both. In my case the gym is for weightlifting; the bicycling is for losing weight[*], and the weightlifting is for gaining weight.

[*] That, and letting me mostly not hate my commute. And mostly not hate the dismal p*bl*c tr*ns*t more generally.

IME, the exception to that is when I travel in North America, particularly in the States.

That's not because food there is intrinsically unhealthy, it's because I save up all my cravings for things that aren't particularly good for you and binge on them there. And the all-pancake diet, because I don't cook and they're just not the same over here.

Jodi

Having had a second look at his thing, I can't help but find it goes against "conventional" wisdom which is:
1. Eat breakfast within an hour of waking'
2. Never eat anything substantial after 8pm.

What's up with that?

And 90 minutes per day at the gym (undefined "sports training"). I can't help put think that's his main magic voodoo there, diet aside.

Er, it does say to eat breakfast within an hour of waking. Lump of protein within half an hour of waking, to be precise.

I don't do gym time. I find myself walking up and down stairs just because I'm revelling in the joy of feeling like using my body.

In any case, he claims that if you just stick to the food list and do a weekly binge day, you'll lose fat, and that the rest is optional enhancements. Like many body-obsessed people, he goes into ridiculously nerdy detail about the optional enhancements.

Er, it does say to eat breakfast within an hour of waking.

I just skimmed, but that would suggest he gets up at 9am. Slacker. That would explain his 10pm dinner.

Yeah, he's a late riser. He's an entrepreneur who specialises in starting little businesses that require very little human intervention once up and running (that being the thrust of his previous book, The Four-Hour Work Week). This gives him the time to get up whenever the heck he pleases and indulge in, as he puts it, "decades of full-contact abuse and overconfidence in all sports ending in '-boarding'".

Ah, so it's based on tweaking your metabolic rate, then? Won't work for me, in that case - my metabolic rate comes in the form of small white pills in a box marked 'Thyroxine' - the T4 mentioned above. And I don't get ANY T3 at all.

Obviously you are merely NONCOMPLIANT, which is a fad diet word meaning SINNER.

It also claims to work by cutting out starch and sugars so you don't get insulin spiking and telling your body "w00t, food! make fat, we might be starving tomorrow!"

These might be plausible and might be magical pink unicorns. In any case, fucking around with an actual medical problem you're on medication for strikes me also as ill-advised.

plus, eating breakfast within a half hour of waking is inconvenient if you need to wait half an hour after taking your thyroxine, unless you perfect taking your pill while still being asleep. SCNR ;-)

Remember that the success test for diets is not 'lose weight', which almost any diet will do (I once lost a significant amount of weight on a diet that was characterised by one of my friends as 'the four cream egg and a vitamin pill diet'), or even 'keep weight off for a little while; it's 'keep the weight off for five years'. Because well over 90% of dieters gain all back and more in five years. Perhaps 99%.

Which is certainly dispiriting.

I'm glad it's working for you, so far. I'll keep reading to see how it's going.

I'd not cope with the lack of carbs, but I mainly eat low GI carbs because I do not need a sugar spike, I need energy in 5 hours. I'm currently dropping weight, but I suspect my method would not work for most people.

And given you're a marathon runner who doctors nag to get some exercise, it's pretty clear you're a special case metabolically ;-)

Nah, just fat! *grins*

I enjoy the marathoning, so don't let being fat get in the way. It's funny, running isn't a great way to lose weight. For me, I need to run over 50km a week to be consistently losing weight. Which I have been doing, so I'm dropping weight. And then I have to be careful to be getting enough food in to sustain life.

(I ran 29km last Saturday, and didn't eat enough that day. Sunday, I was a zombie. Yesterday, I ran 32km, but had organised myself enough to have calorie dense food available. Ate it, feel good today. Hungry as anything, but mentally here. Of course, what did I really want to eat at the end of the run? A grapefruit.)

Medical doctors have a script, and when they see someone my weight, they generally tell me to do exercise: 20 - 30 minutes, 5 times a week. I generally ask if that's as well as, or instead the running. I've had medical doctors ask if I was sure I did the exercise I claimed.

(Life is also complicated by the old hormonal BC. My current BC has a reported side effect of weight gain, which I agree with. It's reached the end of its useful life, and suddenly, I'm dropping weight big-time.)

"Medical doctors have a script"

I recently found out the reason for this: it's the Quality Outcomes Framework. It is literally the case that doctors are paid to nag people over a certain BMI in certain prescribed ways. And you may notice that you get a lot of calls and letters from your doctor to come in in March because the numbers are calculated at April 1 and they need the cash.

(The QOF is where that strange government meme about "greedy doctors" comes from: the QOF was put into place anticipating 75% payout, and the first year it was a 90% payout and the second it was a 95% payout. i.e., they're whining that the incentive scheme worked too well. So now the QOF outcomes are being tweaked to make the game harder, thus doubly distancing them from anything that's actually good for patients. Yay politics!)

I just cut portions and calories gradually until I don't miss the extra food/calories/fat content anymore. And I've upped exercise from "not-at-all" to "every day, in one form or another" - but I still burn most calories at work. And it's taking a while - this is literally a sloooooow burn of calories resulting in my ongoing weight loss.

I was 160 pounds this time last year; now I'm 133. I'm undecided but I think I want to get to 120-125 lbs, then stop before I get too reedy (I have long, heavy bones, so I don't need to lose much more that that). I lose about, no kidding, just one or two pounds each month (so my way is not for the impatient nor the faint of heart, but I get enough to eat - in fact, everyone better get out of my way if I don't, 'cause I'm heading for the fridge even if I have to climb over everyone to do so - I cannot stand being hungry).

My job involves a lot of heavy lifting and I'm on my feet non-stop all day, and I don't get to eat until I'm actually starving most of the time, so that all helps. I cut out almost every high-fat food (but not "foods with fat" - I could never handle going that far), trimmed portions by eating more "mindfully" to figure out when I should stop, and that's pretty much it.

Honestly, I get kind of frustrated with how my slow weight loss is this way, but I've tried every other method/diet/exercise regime (as a former anorexic and yo-yo dieter on and off through my mid-20s, I've more than tried whatever you can think of), including Adkins, workouts, and outright starvation, and this method, if you could call it that, is easier and hopefully will result not just in taking the weight off but in keeping it off - like permanent lifestyle changes as opposed to any concept of "diet" or forcing myself to exercise when I don't feel like it (which, outside of when I feel like walking or dancing, is most of the time).

There's quite a lot of evidence that merely THINKING ABOUT YOUR FOOD is enough to affect your weight, e.g. swear you won't change your habits and write down everything you eat (or photograph every meal with your phone, or similar) and you'll actually change your diet enough to lose or put on weight, depending which you're going for.

The real problem is, of course, that Western civilisation has more or less solved the food problem, but our genes don't know this, so we pack on the fat in anticipation of lean times that never come.

"e.g. swear you won't change your habits"

Evidence does not work in my favor. If I swear I won't touch the wet paint, then I honestly will. If I swear I won't change my habits I'll binge and/or just give up. And I'm going to have to change something in *calculates, assuming 2 pounds per month loss* another 3 or 4 months or so, or I might never stop losing weight. Then everyone will say I look anorexic again when I'm not starving myself and I won't like the way I look, since I'm trying to keep some curves - just not all of them.

Eating to me is not about dieting anymore but fluidity - changing what needs to be changed as I go along. And I'm going to have to change it all around again - or at least tweak what, when and how I eat - sooner or later, or I might get too thin.

and write down everything you eat (or photograph every meal with your phone, or similar)

I wouldn't have time to eat if I did. When I was unemployed (which was when I gained most of the weight) maybe, but now...and if I became that obsessed, I would probably become anorexic again - seriously obsessing over calories/portions/anything about food has been a trigger-y thing since I was very young, so I intentionally build a little wiggle room into what, when and how I eat to keep myself from getting too - "excited" about it.

I guess this is one case where "different strokes for different folks" would most likely apply. :)

Western civilisation has more or less solved the food problem, but our genes don't know this

I was on the thin side until my mid-thirties, though (the dieting was more about my distorted body image than actually needing to lose weight, and started while I was still a single digit age - just six). I think all the stuff I put my body through with dieting, lack of sleep, over-exertion, eating too much, yo-yo dieting, and so on, wrecked my metabolism, which on top of that is slowing down naturally as I get older.

But I can see making a case for most people's genes don't know it, either way.

I've long held that people who are not overweight in our culture are either: ill/simulating illness, stressed /simulating being stressed or physically damaged/mimicking or simulating physical damage.

For deliberate weight loss, the "ill" options include diet pills/laxatives which interfere with metabolism rendering similar effects as parasitic infestation or chronic/recurrent illness. The "stressed" options include food deprivation to simulate famine and / or deliberately high exercise levels. The "damage" includes lap band surgery which mimics an abdominal injury or obstruction.

I was raised by the leader of a slimming club, and being *ahem* "big boned", I was subjected to all manner of weight loss approaches from an early age. My system is kind of screwed up in that when I eat bulk carbs (as with a rice or pasta based meal) I immediately feel ravenous. Even as my tummy is clearly very full, my system is screaming for more food. I believe this is due to excessive release of insulin as my body is desperately harvesting the carbs/sugars and laying them down as fat against the severe famines it has been trained to expect.

My weight has been coming down slowly since I threw away the idea that I *have to* have three square meals a day. My desire to eat fluctuates with my hormonal cycles and I have given myself permission to eat a whole pack of chocolate covered almonds in a day (approximately once a month) because I have at least a few days each month where I am happiest living on packet-salad, apples and mixed nuts. And it's okay if I don't like bread that much. And it's fine to go with my feeling that I really don't need so much rice/pasta/potato in my diet. And it's okay to decide I don't like certain foods very much, and not eat them. And that I would rather have a small piece of nice chocolate instead of half a block of average chocolate.

I also play about with the concept; "the care and feeding of primates". Reading about what zoos and the like feed our close relatives to keep them healthy and comparing that with the products presented in supermarkets for us to feed our selves and our children? That blows my mind. 95% of product options are things which should make up not more than 5% of our diet. Somehow I doubt that the volumes sold reflect the optimal balance.

"I also play about with the concept; "the care and feeding of primates". Reading about what zoos and the like feed our close relatives to keep them healthy"

Now, that is interesting. Have you written it up?

There's not much that's non-obvious to write up. The food pyramid for primates has a broad base of leaves. Lots and lots of leaves. Then some roots, shoots and tubers. Fruit, flowers and seeds where available. Near the top in very small quantities are nuts and bugs. Vanishingly rare is actual meat.

The relatively low effort items are low return, the high effort are high return. Time invested in low effort/low return is fairly high, but results are predictable and well worth the cost. Time and effort expended in pursuing rarer high nutrient foods is greater, as is the risk of expending more energy than is gained. I speculate that regular pursuit of high-risk foods may be related to status in some primate cultures, but that's tangential.

I think that a more interesting exercise would be to make an "in actuality" food pyramid for particular demographics of humans. I believe they would resemble those joke food pyramids which list meat, grease, salt, sugar and alcohol as food groups so closely as to make them un-funny. At a wild guess, I estimate that "sugar" would be close to the base of the pyramid in some Western subcultures because of the stunning amounts of soda consumed.

When I first tried applying the "would I be frowned on for feeding this to my pet ape?" test in selecting food for my household I was quite overwhelmed by the end of the breakfast cereal aisle. So much sugar! :(

Hi, I just re-read this comment, and still find it very interesting second time round. I had no idea what primates are fed, so can't agree that any of it's "obvious"!

The list of food types is interesting. Do primates tend to graze all day long on leaves? I'm wondering whether eating less often but slightly higher nutrient-dense food would come out roughly the same in the end.

Primates are optimised to thrive on the primate-appropriate foods most abundant in their environment. Primates have also evolved behaviours which cause them to seek and avail themselves of scarce, higher value sources of nutrients wherever possible.

Whether primates graze all day long on leaves depends primarily on the type of primate and secondly on the types of food available. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/476264/primate/51434/Diet has a good overview of the variety of diets primates have.

I believe it's clear that, yes, in an environment with small amounts of highly nutritious foods, creatures can eat less volume/devote less time to nutrition and still thrive.

My weight has been coming down slowly since I threw away the idea that I *have to* have three square meals a day.

I've been noticing something similar for myself. (Though not starting from three meals of any shape.) I started making a point of *always* getting lunch at my orkplace's cafeteria to go, even though I usually eat there and the takeout containers are more awkward to eat from than the proper plates/bowls. And it turns out that, most of the time, my body doesn't actually want that much food right then if I can take the leftovers with me — and then eat them in the afternoon instead of raiding the snack room. It's weird, because I was sure I didn't have the “must clean plate!” problem, but apparently I do. For that matter, I'm finding that many days I don't really want an actual meal in the evening. And sometimes I want a snack on the train (between the two fragments of the bike commute); sometimes I don't.

It's kind of an ongoing exploration; I'll see where it goes. Where it seems to be going is me actually losing weight again. I'd been managing a slowish but consistent pace after I started bike-commuting, and then I moved and started this job, and it stopped dead. I may have discovered why. But, like someone else said, the real test of this stuff is on the multi-year timescales.

I'll stop rambling now.

I love the word "broscience" and will now start to use it extensively. Thank you!

Also, the slow-carb diet sounds very much like the South Beach diet that Woof and I have been successfully following. The differences are that SB does not allow for a cheat day and does not rely on broscience, being designed by a highly-regarded cardiologist.

Lots of lean protein, legumes, vegetables and water works for me. I'm glad it works for you too. I suspect it would work well for almost everyone, but YMMV.

Handily, he preempts your criticism:
"Everything in this book works, but I have surely gotten some of the mechanisms completely wrong. In other words, I believe the how-to is 100% reliable, but some of the why-to will end up on the chopping block as we learn more."

... of course that's no excuse for rubbish science or logic, so I agree his work should be approached critically, and mistakes pointed out.

C made me aware of this post. The concept sounds interesting, have you written more about it? I had a look for tags but saw none.

No tags, but if you look back over the past month for mention of "the diet" then that'll be this. I only wrote this as due caution when I realised me doing this with success had caught people's attention. I am enormously pleased with my personal results, but it's blatantly faddy and full of magical pink unicorns and similar hazards and needs an extremely cautious approach.

OK, will do, thanks.
I'm not surprised: successful weight loss is seen as desirable, while being difficult to attain, a huge industry, and the focus of media attention.

Is it "blatantly faddy" over and above the level of all diets?

Not particularly more than others. "Subtract broad group of foods" is the bit that sets off the "fad diet" flag for me. The weekly cheat day is psychologically brilliant for helping compliance and I expect it to show up in other fad diets in future.

Ferriss is pretty gung-ho about the slow-carb diet (and says he lives on it himself and has done for the past seven years), and claims it works for everyone who's compliant, so I expect studies with a suitably sceptical eye will follow in due course if it gains any popularity.

I see your general point, but it may nevertheless be the right thing to do. I've recently come across the idea that there's something wrong with fructose, via here:
http://www.sarahwilson.com.au/2011/01/im-quitting-sugar-1/
http://www.sarahwilson.com.au/2011/02/i-quit-sugar-2-first-step-is-to-start-eating-more-fat-yes/
http://www.sarahwilson.com.au/2011/02/i-quit-sugar-3-why-sugar-makes-us-fat/
(apologies for multi-links, I can't remember which bit has the reasoning in it)
... and have started wondering whether that's the underlying reason that low-carb diets work, at least for some people.

I'm sure we'll discover what diets work for what people and why. Essentially, we're trying to hack a way to do something unnatural in a sustainable manner, because we have all the sugar, fat and salt we want readily available to us and gorging on them the way our genes tell us to (for what were excellent reasons for most of the last million years) will be bad for us. This is a much better problem to have, but of course it's still a problem: how to cope with abundance.

If you're a vegetarian it's largely made of arse — getting enough protein means you'll be living on eggs.

Whey powder dissolved in skim milk is strangely not-bad, I've been finding. Also works for lacto-vegetarians. (In my case it was that, after a bunch of times coming back from the gym and then an hour or so later realizing I'd guzzled the better part of a gallon of milk, I figured I could make that more efficient. I have however carefully avoided the blinged-out protein powders in favor of boring, minimally-decorated, unflavored whey.)

If you're vegan, Ferriss recommends various horribly unappealing protein shakes which are widely considered to have the taste and texture of cardboard poo.

HAIL SEITAN.

(Note that I'm not even vegetarian.)

I've been tending to gratuitous tuna, which is basically made of protein and very little else. Ideal breakfast too. YUM YUM.

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A word on sure-fire fad diets that always work for everyone everywhere, except you.

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