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

[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.

[reddragdiva]

"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?

[tangent_woman]

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! :(

[skorpion]

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.

[tangent_woman]

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.

[jld]

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.