

Diet hacker data point - raleec
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html?hpt=T2

======
niels_olson
Doc here. I'm not surprised that an adult male carrying 33.4% body fat dropped
weight on an 1,800 calorie diet. Nor am I surprised that his cholesterol
stayed down. If you've every seen a patient on total parenteral nutrition or
g-tube feeds, they all move toward a normal BMI and then get scrawny. The
switch over to skinny is due to muscle atrophy from disuse. If they survive
and return to a normal activity level, they typically regain the muscle mass.

The take-away: don't eat too much.

Quiz:

1) what three food groups did he cut out of his diet?

2) What is the normal range of BMI for an adult male?

3) Fat is transported in the blood in various kinds of packets. HDL and LDL
are proteins that label the outsides of certain packets. If HDL goes up during
weight loss, where do you think those packets are coming from? Where do you
think LDL packets are going to? If Professor Haub's weight equilibrates with
his new 2100 calorie diet, what do you expect will happen to his HDL and LDL?

~~~
techiferous
I'll take a stab at #1. I'd say he missed the "fish, poultry and eggs",
"healthy fats/oils" and "whole grains" groups. He was eating from the "use
sparingly", "dairy" (from the shake), and "vegetables and fruits". Eggs are
often in the types of snacks he was eating, so it's possible you could argue
he was also eating from the "fish, poultry and eggs" group.

I'm using the groups as defined in the Healthy Eating Pyramid:
[http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-
you-...](http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-
eat/pyramid-full-story/index.html)

~~~
niels_olson
Upvote. I wish it was more obvious that I wasn't using food groups as a proper
noun. Since he wasn't eating fruit, you can see the friction between the
language of reality to the use of language in food politics. "Fruits and
vegetables" are different. Compared to stems and leaves, fruits are high in
sugar, low in fiber and complex carbs.

~~~
DLWormwood
I’m going to have to plead some confusion or ignorance I here. I’m well aware
that nutrition has become a political hot potato for the last few decades, but
I’m trying figure out _why_ you felt the need to bring it up in your response.
What do you mean by “not food groups as a proper noun?"

~~~
niels_olson
Because the pyramid defines a group "fruits and vegetables". I could define
any set of edible things I wanted in a small g group, but the pervasive
inclination to think about "fruits and vegetables" inhibits my goal of getting
people to think about them separately. Fruits are not the same as stems and
leaves.

~~~
DLWormwood
I think I see your point; when I was a kid I saw charts that handled them
separately. (I think it was during Reagan’s or Clinton’s term that they got
kerfuddled together.) But it doesn’t help matters that the terms “fruit” and
“vegetable” are problematic, at least in English. What a layman thinks is a
fruit can be drastically different than what a biologist or lawyer thinks is
one, thanks to a real mess of culinary and legal tradition. (The tomato is the
textbook example.)

------
spudlyo
_His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most
-- not the nutritional value of the food._

This should not be a startling revelation. Mind you we're speaking simply of
weight loss, not "healthy eating" or "good nutrition" or any of the other
topics that people often mix up with weight loss.

It seems that in Professor Haub's case that the benefit to losing the weight
outweighed the negative consequences of eating junk food -- at least in the
short term.

~~~
coffee
I think this is a startling revelation to MOST people.

Most people do, as you've noted, mix up healthy food with weight loss.

Have you ever told someone who wants to lose weight they should not add ton's
of fattening (yet healthy) olive oil to their salads? Typical response: "But,
it's healthy fat!" - yea, but it's fattening at 110 calories per tablespoon...

Weight loss and good nutrition are mixed together.

It's the premise behind a lot of marketing on food labels. Look how healthy
some food product labels appear. "I want to lose weight, and the label says
'healthy choice' so it must be okay for me to eat!"

A close review of the nutrition facts tells a completely different story.

But who really reviews nutrition facts?

I never looked at the nutrition facts, and I was always overweight. This last
year I started tracking my food and it's calories ( one example:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828786> ) - This is the first time in my
life that I've been decreasing body fat percentage and increasing muscle
percentage. No fad diet, hell, I drink beer and eat pizza. But the days that I
do, I make sure to keep my calorie count in a deficit.

It was startling to me, as obvious as it is now, that "healthy food" does not
equal "low calorie food." And the way to lose body fat is eat less calories.

Whodathunkit :)

~~~
byrneseyeview
As someone who is eating a delicious, olive oil-doused salad _right now_ , I
have to interject: your calorie sources do affect your weight gain, albeit
indirectly: if you're getting most of your energy from carbs, you'll
consistently crave food a few hours after eating. If you get the majority of
your calories from protein and fat, you'll get over this.

I consume a lot of fat and protein: two or three dozen eggs per week, fatty
red meat for most dinners, olive oil-soaked salads for lunch, etc. This has
led to significant weight loss, as well as a substantial energy boost. As this
is (fairly) close to the diet that humans evolved to consume, it's not
especially surprising that it works.

~~~
coffee
You're missing the point.

You are stating that if one eats the "correct types" of food, one will lose
weight.

 _Not true._

You can eat to many calories of the "correct types" of food and still gain
weight.

The article discusses a man eating Twinkies, yet still lost weight. You're
saying you eat fatty red meats, yet still lost weight.

The Twinkies guy, as well as you, have lost weight because you're in a calorie
deficit, regardless of the "types" of food you're eating.

~~~
mikeklaas
His point was that eating less carbs leads to eating less total calories
(through suppression of appetite). He didn't claim that eating two different
foods comprising the same # of calories lead to different amount of weight
loss.

------
ugh
I’m not surprised at all. I lost 40 pounds just calorie counting, changing
nothing at all about what I ate. (No happy ending here. You have to be really
disciplined for a long time to keep your weight and over the following years I
gained it all back.)

You will automatically tend to eat healthier, though. 200g of potato chips
make you happy for a few hours but you will feel terrible for the rest of the
day (because you cannot eat anything else). Carrots taste nearly as good and
you can eat a ton (not literally) of them.

~~~
mikeklaas
I don't see how you can honestly say that carrots taste nearly as good as
chips.

I will admit that people generally underestimate the satisfaction of munching
crisp raw vegetables, however.

~~~
ugh
They clearly don’t. That was a bit of hyperbole on my part. I do love them
very much, though, they are definitely the best non-fried vegetable.

------
rsheridan6
Why does a pregnant woman gain weight? Because she consumes more calories than
she burns. Why does someone with hypothyroidism gain weight? They consume more
calories than they burn. Why does someone on prednisone or antipsychotics gain
weight? They consume more calories than they burn. Why does someone on an
11-day meth bender lose weight? They burn more calories than they consume.

All true, but it's not the most enlightening way to look at it. The more
interesting question is why they eat so much/little.

In my experience, and the experience of lots of others, eating food like
Little Debbie's makes you want to pig out, whereas it's practically impossible
to pig out on steak or chicken.

I'm not surprised that you could lose weight on an 1800 calorie junkfood diet,
but I think it would be hard to stick with it, even by the standards of diets,
which are pretty much all hard to stick with. The fact that a doctor, a
profession loaded with people who are a few standard deviations above the norm
in terms of ability to delay gratification and self-discipline - a med school
professor, no less (same but more so) - has the discipline to do this for 10
weeks, is not surprising, and probably not relevant for the average person
who's struggling to lose weight.

~~~
xiaoma
_...whereas it's practically impossible to pig out on steak or chicken._

Speak for yourself. I've witnessed my ex-roommate eat in excess of 3000
calories of rotisserie chicken in a single sitting. Ditto for steak. And yes,
like most big meat-eaters, he was obese.

------
robchez
As someone who is pretty active in the health/fitness community I HATE n=1
studies like this that get so much press. All this does is give people yet
another excuse not to eat a healthy diet and it gets quite annoying.

Of course if you starve yourself of calories you will lose weight, but how
sustainable is that in the long term? The reason 90% of diets fail is because
people can't keep to them, and who can keep on such a calorie restrictive
diet. Never mind the fact that you will be losing muscle mass along with the
fat in a starvation type diet like this.

The Calories In = Calories Out dogma, has been ousted out of the hardcore
Health/Nutrition community (See Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories).
The quality and type of foods you eat, i.e the macronutritent ratios, are
infinitely more important than the total number of calories. That is not to
say that we can eat 10,000 calories of the right food, but you can eat to
satiety or to your BMR and still lose weight by eating food that in the right
macro ratios.

A diet like the one described here would be destroying this persons insulin
sensitivity and in turn his leptin sensitivity. He will be at high risk of
Type 2 Diabetes among other things.

If you want to lose weight and get healthy easily, cut your carbs
dramatically, eat protein and fat to satiety. Lift some weights and do some
slow steady cardio every other day (brisk walk etc.) Fix your sleep hygiene
(this is super important) and you will be blown away at how the fat will
disappear.

~~~
brandnewlow
Case in point: I started a diet like that about 3.5 weeks ago. No
bread/cheese/beer/soda/candy/potatoes. I eat a good deal of meat and tons of
broccoli, bean sprouts, and mushrooms each day. I also started a simple weight
lifting regime (3 times a week), and hit the bike a few times.

I'm down 15 lbs so far and feeling really good. The biggest problem with
sustaining this I think is going to be boredom with my food options. I'm not a
fan of how most vegetables taste.

~~~
robchez
Good work mate.

With regards to boredom, if you have the time, learn to cook. I can't tell you
how much my health has improved from just learning to cook. With the right
amount of olive oil (or bacon fat ;]) you can make some pretty awesome salads.

~~~
brandnewlow
Thanks. It's been a bit of a revelation. Two years of bootstrapping turned me
into a fatso. I'm getting back down to "fighting shape" and so far so good.

The first 4 days were pretty miserable. It's all been bearable since though.

The most interesting bit has been how my mood seems to have calmed down on the
whole. Tedious tasks that use to frustrate me are now more manageable. I
wonder if I had "carb rage" all these years that made my body rise up against
actions that weren't going to lead to immediate gratification.

------
jakarta
Warren Buffett is a big practitioner of this kind of diet. In his biography,
there is a segment about his dieting habits and he used a two pronged
approach:

1\. Calorie restriction but eat a food he loved - so ice cream or milk shakes
all day one day.

2\. Make it so if he didn't stick to the diet, he'd have to pay one of his
friends a large sum of money.

The combination of greed and eating what you love seemed to pay off in terms
of keeping his weight in line.

------
sleepdev
"For 10 weeks, ..."

For his own health I am glad that he didn't continue the diet much longer.
There are a number of confounding variables here that the article forgot to
mention, which most likely played a larger part in his weight loss than any
calorie counting:

Stress. Stress can cause sudden weight loss. This weight will come right back
if you give your body any time to catch up and yet the effect is significant
enough to provide "evidence" for the craziest of dieting fads. Eating debbie
cakes for 3 meals a day is going to put some serious stress on your body.

Metabolism is not constant. Michael Phelps eats more for breakfast than I do
in a week, and yet he is in much better shape. The scary thing about junk food
is not so much the empty calories, but more how it affects your metabolism in
the long term. If you draw out this sort of a diet for 2 or 3 years, then I
would expect that not only could you give yourself diabetes, but also you will
start craving more and needing less. That is when weight gain will start to
become a serious problem.

~~~
spudlyo
_There are a number of confounding variables here that the article forgot to
mention, which most likely played a larger part in his weight loss than any
calorie counting._

I disagree completely. Stress and metabolism are minor factors compared to the
repeatable, testable, and well understood calculus of calories in vs calories
out.

~~~
robchez
I'm sorry but in the Health and fitness community this has been disproven time
and time again. Someone can fix their sleep and eat at their bmr with good
foods and still lose heaps of weight. See good calories bad calories by Gary
taubes

~~~
niels_olson
Basal metabolic rate is something developed in hospitals for bed-ridden
patients on total parenteral nutrition. It is the calories you burn just
staying alive. If you, a healthy person walking around, eats at your BMR, you
will, definitely, loose a heap of weight. However, the BMR for the average
human is quite low.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate>

Also, on brief review, Taubes appear to thoroughly misunderstand the issue on
a variety of levels. I'm going through more of his material, if I am mistaken,
I will report my error.

~~~
niels_olson
On further review, I stand by my original statement: Taubes thoroughly
misunderstands the issue.

------
iuguy
I'm doing something similar to shift a few pounds. Two weeks ago I came home,
I'd been particularly involved and forgot to eat. In order to get my calorific
intake up to the minimum in my diet, I had to get some serious calories. So I
had a small pizza, 4 bottles of Sol and a wife with a very suspicious look on
her face.

------
mrj

      To curb calories, he avoided meat, whole grains and fruits.
    

Hmm, confounding. There's a lot of crazy stuff in meat, stuff that might well
have something to do with obesity rates rising.

There are many studies that show that the vegetarian diet is the most healthy.
His results may have less to do with Twinkies than with the meat he avoided.

Edit: Not sure why I'm getting down voted to oblivion? I eat meat... I have no
agenda here, just pointing out a deficiency in the article's reasoning.

~~~
ceejayoz
I think you're getting downvoted because it doesn't matter what he cut out -
it matters that he was eating a caloric number conducive to weight loss.

He could've eaten 1800 calories of steak, grains, and fruits each day and lost
weight, too. It's just a lot easier to count calories for junk food, as the
amounts are right there on the package.

This diet was by no means healthy. It was simply a weight losing diet. Long-
term, it'd be hell on your body, but it's an interesting approach to quickly
bringing weight down (after which one'd hope he'd switch to a nice healthy
diet).

~~~
mrj
Well, that's why I called it confounding, if he maintained the same diet and
cut calories, that would be a much better experiment.

Instead, he both cut calories and massively altered his diet, so there's no
telling why he lost weight. I mentioned cutting meat as confounding his
results, but the other alterations count just as much, too.

Both the article and the diet are sloppy. Yes, he lost weight but even the
nutritionist can't explain why, or even if it's a good idea to eat Twinkies
for meals.

~~~
tbrownaw
> there's no telling why he lost weight

Fat has about 3500 kCal/lb. If you consume fewer calories than you use, you
_will_ lose weight based on that ratio and your calorie deficit. Doing it
wrong just means that your body tries to work against you (makes you hungry,
makes you tired, makes you want to put on a sweater, etc) and you feel like
shit, but for as long as you manage to stick to it you will lose weight.

------
joshklein
Source: <http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cookie-diet/AN02051>

Question: The Cookie Diet: Can it help you lose weight? What is the Cookie
Diet? How does it work?

Answer from Katherine Zeratsky, R.D., L.D.: "The original Cookie Diet was
created in 1975 by Dr. Sanford Siegal to help his overweight patients lose
weight. The Cookie Diet limits calories to no more than 1,000 a day, which
come from six prepackaged cookies plus one meal, such as skinless chicken and
steamed vegetables. The cookies are made and sold by Dr. Siegal's company and
are said to contain a proprietary amino acid mixture that fights hunger.

If followed, a diet of less than 1,000 calories a day will likely lead to
weight loss. But such a restricted diet can make it hard to meet all of your
nutritional needs. In addition, it's difficult to stick with extreme diets
such as the Cookie Diet. As a result, any lost pounds come right back once the
diet stops.

The bottom line: To achieve and maintain a healthy weight, you need to make
permanent and sustainable changes in your eating and exercise habits."

------
tomazmuraus
It is no magic, in the simplest explanation it all comes down to the law of
thermodynamics and calorie balance.

If you are interested in this kind of stuff, check Lyle's website[1]. He has
many good articles about this kind of stuff.

[1]: [http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/the-energy-
balance...](http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/the-energy-balance-
equation.html)

------
joshklein
The thing that makes healthy food healthy is that you become full & satiated
on less calories. Proving that you can force yourself to eat 1,800 calories of
unhealthy food doesn't say much.

------
patrickgzill
I started to cook and eat more at home, with no particular plan or calorie
counting. Started to lose weight just from that.

------
MtL
Boom, there goes his insulin sensitivity.

~~~
niels_olson
No. Even with intense glycemic index spikes, the area under the curve isn't
enough.

------
vb6
Sugary snacks every 3 hours for 10 weeks. A trip to the dentist might be in
order

