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

[ciphergoth]

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

[hirez]

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...

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[bohemiancoast]

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.

[emmasee100.livejournal.com]

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.

[marahmarie]

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).

[tangent_woman]

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.

[beckyzoole]

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.

[skorpion]

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.

[jld]

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.)