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

[reddragdiva]

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:

1. Person does thing A.
2. Later, person experiences thing B.
3. Person concludes A caused B.
4. 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.

Comments

[greylock]

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.

[reddragdiva]

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'".