The other day I was talking with someone and, out of nowhere, he mentioned that he’d lost 20 kilos using Seth’s nose-clipping strategy. I asked to try on his nose clips, he passed them over to me, and I promptly broke them. (Not on purpose; I just didn’t understand how to put them on.)
I’ll say this for Seth: I might disagree with him on climate change, academic research, Karl Popper, and Holocaust denial–but his dieting methods really seem to work.
P.S. to Phil: Yes, I’ll buy this guy a new set of noseclips.
P.P.S. Another friend recently had a story about losing a comparable amount of weight, but using a completely different diet. So I’m certainly not claiming that Seth’s methods are the only game in town.
P.P.P.S. As discussed in the comments below, Seth’s publisher should have a good motive to commission a controlled trial of his diet, no?
P.P.P.P.S. Seth points out that we agree on many other things, including the virtues of John Tukey, David Owen, Veronica Geng, Jane Jacobs, Nassim Taleb, and R. And to that I’ll add the late great Spy magazine.
Anecdotes about a fad diet — not the first thing I expect to find in a blog run by this author… with this title…
MVE: I'd love it if someone were to do a controlled trial of some of Seth's ideas. In the meantime, I'll make do with the anecdotal evidence that is available.
MVE: when you stop being curious about the world, you stop being a researcher.
Want a bad graph ? See here …
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd031210…
I know it is supposed to be a comic strip/parody, but the background demands it …
Andrew, you perfectly anticipated me with that P.S.
In case others are wondering, I have a large set of things-broken-by-Andrew stories. One of my favorites: he got into my car, groped around and found the seatbelt…but the business end was stuck behind the seat (it's one of those seats that can be made to tilt forward, which allows the seat belt to slip all the way through to the back). Possible responses: (1) say "Phil, the seat belt is stuck", (2) say "Wait a sec, I have to tilt the seat forward to free the seat belt", (3) try tugging firmly on the seat belt to see if you can yank it through the slot, or (4) Give two or three sudden yanks with as much strength as you can muster. Of course he chose (4), which broke the seat belt…which, considering these things are pretty over-designed, I thought was fairly impressive. The thing you need to know is that if anything like (4) is an option, that is always, always the option Andrew will take.
On the other hand, I did ruin the back cover of his copy of Low Life, so I am hardly without sin.
I lost 20 kg as well over 6 years and kept it off over the next 5 years, if this makes me eligible to give expert advice below is my suggestion. It is not easy but these are the fundamentals, (I am assuming the stuff above was supposed to be a joke or a call for some sort of throat infection…)
Cut down on everything that comes in a box except of course water, 100% whole grain XYZ. Remove as much as possible anything with added sugar or preservatives in it. So basically the motto is eat food, drink water. Run/lift/climb/ride etc etc… 6 days a week. You dont have to be a part time athlete just 30 – 45 minutes of lifting would count as a workout if done properly. The important point here is not to become a specialist but to do a multiple of sports. Otherwise the human body adjusts to workload and becomes more efficient at doing the sport's specific moves which is great if you want to be good at a sport not so great if you want to lose weight. I am guessing sports such as bouldering or basketball would be a lot more beneficial as they incorporate complicated schemas of movement. Repetitive use of course also leads to injury. I would have suggested crossfit but I am 180 degrees against their political stance but if you dont mind it yourself their work-out philosophy as far as I am concerned is great.
I actually became a competitive (not prof or elite just sub 3 hrs,2:52) marathon runner myself so I am not really keeping with my advice above but my story is different.
Best and Good Luck.
I see now that I made a mistake of assuming that a noseclip was a method to run to make the person using it run faster but apparently it was to make the food not taste and therefore remove the habit of overeating. This does not make my previous comment invalid except the part about throat infections but I really do not think such a method would be sustainable for most people. I am sure out of a 1000 people a small percentage would be successful just like a small percentage in any diet would as well be. I am still suggesting my method of eating "food" and drinking water and being active.
Best,
me: 10 easy pounds down on seth's idea (i wouldn't call it a diet) in 2 1/2 months. this after losing 10 pounds the previous year by major force of will. i am still 15 pounds overweight. (numbers: male, 45 years old, starting weight 215, now 195. losing approx a pound a week now, effortlessly.)
(for the sld wonks out there, i'm taking 2 1/2 tbsp of canola oil daily.)
I, for one, would not like to see a clinical trial of this. Everyone and their mother has an idea about how to lose weight using this method or that. And most do lose weight initially on these diets, but that is true almost every time you sit down and say "i'm going to keep track of your weight."
I think where weight loss is concerned people formulate (and accept) hypotheses faster than the science warrants.
Ian:
I'm not exactly disagreeing with you, because this isn't an area I know much about, but . . . is it really true that "most do lose weight initially on these diets . . . that is true almost every time you sit down and say 'I'm going to keep track of your weight.'"? My impression was that people actually have great difficulty keeping the weight off, even when they're recording their numbers.
In any case, that's why I'd like to see a clinical trial.
I'm not saying that NIH should fund it. I think someone could self-fund it: how expensive could it be? Unfortunately, Seth himself seems to have no interest in such a study, but couldn't somebody else do it? For example, wouldn't it be in the interest of the publisher of Seth's diet book to hire someone to conduct such a study?
Phil: I can't disagree with anything you wrote. But I do think that the brute-force approach is admirable in a statistician. I almost always prefer a direct solution to something tricky. (That's one of my problems with Tukey's work: many of his ideas are, in my opinion, too cute to be good.)
Andrew:
Your impression is spot on. People do have great difficulty keeping the weight off, but can lose a significant amount of weight over the short term.
In fact, last time I looked at the literature, there is no proven (controlled clinical trial) method of losing weight over a 5 year time horizon that doesn't involve surgery. Low fat, low carb, caloric restriction, take your pick. Over the long run they are either intolerable treatments, or don't reduce weight. Weight reduction is an unsolved problem, so often times we blame the afflicted (not that you are in any way).
I wish we lived in a world where it was in the publishers best interest to provide a solid scientific foundation for the claims of their authors. But if they wanted to I would certainly fully support that.
the five-year horizon is a real problem when it comes to use of anecdote. as someone using his diet i would be thrilled if i knew it had a reasonable chance of working over the long term. at this point i have the choice of losing more weight than the 20 pounds i've already lost. but i have no real idea if that is a good idea — will i regain the weight, and is -20 and then +20 better or worse than -40 and then +40?
"Seth himself seems to have no interest in such a study" — meaning a clinical trial of the Shangri-La Diet. There is some truth to this but also some falsehood. A professor at SUNY Upstate Medical Center did a "case series" about the diet — about 20 people all did the same thing. I would like to help her publish the results. Such a study is a step on the way to a clinical trial.
As for me doing a study all by myself, you're right, I don't think that is a good investment of my time. My approach is: For X amount of research effort, how can I learn the most? A better investment of that effort would be in tests of my ideas about nutrition and brain function. Such tests would be much much easier to do, mainly because they could be much faster and better controlled.
Seth,
I appreciate the evidence based self-experimentation that you have brought in evaluating what works for you. Unfortunately, so far as I can tell, you have the order of your science mixed up.
What it should be:
1. Formulate a scientifically plausible hypothesis for the treatment of a disease.
2. Evaluate whether that hypothesis is correct in your population of interest.
3. Disseminate the treatment to the world.
The state of your research:
1. Formulate a scientifically plausible hypothesis for the treatment of a disease.
2. Disseminate the treatment to the world.
3. Support others as they start the process of evaluating your hypothesis.
We don't send HIV vaccines out into the world before we have tested them clinically no matter how sound the basic science. Nor should trumpet obesity 'cures' before the clinical evidence is in.
I'm not saying that you are not right. Perhaps you have the cure for the millions (billions?) suffering from excess adipose tissue, but science is a harsh mistress. She demands her clinical evidence.
I want to give Seth credit where it's due, but I don't want to put words into his mouth, so I'll say my bit this way: one of the things I have come to appreciate through talking with Seth is the distinction between a weight-loss method that works over the duration that one can get funding to study — six months, a year, maybe two years tops — and one that works over a substantial fraction of someone's life. A treatment might well be "clinically proven to promote weight loss" while still being entirely useless in practice because people won't stick with it. I don't have an alternative to formal studies, and I definitely think you can't just say "try this, and let me know if it works for you" because there are huge selection effects. Just saying it's a hard problem, I guess.
But as for weight loss, I have two main points. First, people are really, really lazy. However lazy you think they are, you're wrong, they're much much lazier than that. And even if you adjust your thinking based on the past few sentences, you haven't done it enough, you're still underestimating how lazy people are. According to the American Heart Association "Statistics You Need To Know", 70% of Americans don't get any regular exercise. Judging from the Bureau of Labor Statistics exercise summaries, most of the other 30% get exercise only a few days per week, and at rather low intensity. Basically, at least 85% of Americans aren't getting any exercise to speak of.
Second, people eat a whole lot of food. I'm an active 6'4'' male, and when I eat a complete meal at a restaurant, I'm often so full that I barely have room for dessert. And it's not like they say "aw, he's a big guy, let's give him some extra." If I were a normal-height guy, I'd be huge, because I would still eat everything they give me, just like most people do.
I just can't help but feel that if most people got a whole lot more exercise, and ate less, they'd be thinner. Call me crazy. I know there's no clinical trial that shows that this would actually work, but I think that's because most people are really really really really lazy, plus we like to eat a lot, so most of us won't conform to a program that requires them to get a healthy amount of exercise and eat a healthy amount of food. You heard it here first.
Ian,
if a method of treatment has a lot of potential upside, not much potential downside and is too expensive to test yourself, disseminating it before comprehensive testing seems like the responsible thing to do.
A method of dieting seems to fit those criteria pretty well.
The potential upside is huge, since it's a solution for a very common problem.
The potential downside from nose clipping or ingesting a couple of tablespoons of olive oil a day is about as low as it gets. Experimental drugs are in a whole different ballpark when it comes to danger to the subjects.
Proper testing would take place over 5 years and involve a lot of people, requiring a very big investment in both money and time. So it's not unreasonable to not want to do that.
The only problem I see is that you can honestly only say something along the lines of "I think this diet works" rather than "I am very sure this diet works". As far as I can tell people who try the diet are generally aware that it's not based on a big study and are fine with that. From their POV it's a lot better to know about an alternative diet with a small chance of working rather than having to wait before hearing about it until it's been comprehensively tested (especially as they well might have to wait forever).
All I can say is that I'm still at my final weight of 189 (dipping various degrees below that from time to time) after starting the diet a long, long time ago. It is fun to observe it in others, and to observe who will keep it up and who will not.