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Comment by zyb09 | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t try the crazy diets like Atkins or the Maple Syrup diet. Anything that requires eating crazy stuff is probably bad for your health.

Now I'm starting to feel like an Atkins Zeolot, I've been defending low-carb on HN so much lately, but I can't let a statement like that sit on itself! There's tons of scientific evidence for Atkins and everybody I talked to that investigated it, agrees.

Furthermore "eating less" will not work, if you're eating mostly carbs. There's a high probability your body will just go into starvation mode. Meaning you'll store about the same amount of fat, while there's less energy to be spend for your body, making you sleepy and lightheaded. Graphing your weight won't change anything about that.

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The simple fact is that most people dramatically reduce sugar intake when dieting. That alone is likely to shift their insulin balance in a favorable direction.

Weighing daily and graphing simply promote awareness and can be motivating.

One of the things that makes low-carb believers like myself seem like crackpots is our unwillingness to acknowledge that moderate carb consumption can be a reasonable diet because we believe it to be suboptimal.

For the average individual, simply eliminating most dietary sugar and refined carbohydrates would generate enough significant weight loss and health benefits to encourage them to maintain such a diet (which is likely to be more varied and interesting than a strict low carb diet) for long periods of time.

If you read the appendix, you'll see that I do recommend staying away from processed sugars and other assorted white-bread-and-white-rice.

In my third iteration, I'm also tending to avoid the starchy stuff most of the time (not always though). In the first two, though, I happily ate a sandwich for lunch and potatoes for breakfast, and still lost plenty of both weight and fat.

I won't get into a debate about Atkins. I am naturally dubious of extreme diets (and Atkins is extreme, no matter which way you slice it), but it's worth pointing out that "what you eat" is only one third of this method. The first 2/3rds are all about motivation, and they're the important part. The third part merely suggests one way to "eat less".

OK, so don't get into a debate about it, but I would like to point out that extreme is relative. From an evolutionary perspective (i.e. What we naked apes evolved to eat...) I would argue that a standard american diet is FAR more extereme than an atkins diet (at least one that avoids fake low-carb foods) based around meat, green plants, many kinds of fruit, and nuts.

Indeed. For those wanting to learn (a lot) more about this, with references to all the studies, check out Gary Taubes's book Good Calories, Bad Calories.

Some pretty good notes to Good Calories, Bad Calories, approved (perhaps temporarily) by the publisher:

http://higher-thought.net/complete-notes-to-good-calories-ba...

A much better book, written by an actual scientist, is Life Without Bread.

Can you elaborate on what makes it "much better"? I thought Taubes's book was very well researched (I think he spent about 10 years on it) and very well argued. I'd love to see something even better.

Much more science, less story-telling, but extremely compelling research -- many more studies cited, not just weight but the effect of low-carbohydrate diets on things like gout. Graphs. Very much a "here's the science, here's why, make your own mind up" type of book.

Sounds good. Thanks.

I'm not sure I'm understanding this correctly:

5. Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating, and not sedentary behavior.

6. Consuming excess calories does not cause us to grow fatter, any more than it causes a child to grow taller. Expending more energy than we consume does not lead to long-term weight loss; it leads to hunger.

So if I didn't have this disorder I can over-eat and become sedentary and not become obese?

I think he's just reframing the levels of causation a bit. You don't say pregnant women gain weight because they eat more than they consume, although from a thermodynamic point of view this is strictly true.

Have you ever met skinny unhealthy programmers who are very sedentary and eat a lot of junk food? I have met many. The point is that different people have very different reactions to food, in terms of hunger, mental reward pathways, tendency to burn off calories through adjusting subjective energy levels (e.g. lethargy) and things like jittering, and hormonal responses. Some of this is affected by the kinds of foods we eat, and much of it is affected by genetics.

The real point is that we can do better than saying "just eat less and exercise more" by looking at things from a different perspective. (I'm speaking as someone who lost 45 pounds in the last year and am currently at about 10-11% bodyfat by the way.)

Thanks, that's clearer to me. =)

Can you share how you got to where you are now?

The other thing to say here is that the latest research indicates that carbs may actually be a leading cause of heart disease rather than fat. For example:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=carbs-again...

So low carbs can be healthy even if you're not trying to lose weight.

The study says refined carbs are bad — that's an important distinction. Also, some research (The China Study, for example) suggests that proteins (not fat) from animal-based foods are a cause of heart disease (and cancers).

Sorry, you're right about the refined carbs. Also, going further along the meat lines, there was also recent research differentiating processed meats (e.g. bacon, sausage, lunch meats, etc.) versus unprocessed meats. If I remember correctly, the unprocessed meats had no real links to heart disease and cancers (in moderation). However, the processed meats did show some links to those health problems. The researchers speculated that it was probably either the high salt content or the nitrates in the processed meats that were the culprits, but the study didn't actually look at that.

My most successful weight loss was on a low carb, Atkins-like diet. It's not something I could see doing for a lifetime; I like fruit and good bread too much.

The article contends that graphing your weight on a daily basis is a good motivator, and I agree with this as well. Doesn't have to be a computer graph either, a piece of graph paper posted on the bathroom wall by the scale does just fine.

I did the maple syrup diet if anyone is curious - documented here: http://mastercleanselemonadediet.tumblr.com/ I just wanted to see if I could do it. I made it. Lost 16 lbs and have kept off 10 lbs.

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