Health Hacking: Diet and Nutrition (Premium)

This past week, I marked the one-year anniversary of my low-carb (sometimes ketogenic) diet. Here's how it went, and why I will keep going.

First, and most important, I'm not a doctor, scientist, or nutritionist. I'm not even a dietitian. This means that I am not qualified to give you advice about health, nutrition, or dieting. That said, I am relaying facts that are supported by science.

And facts are in short supply when it comes to health and nutrition. Thanks to various powerful food industry lobbyists over a period of several decades, America and the western world have been sold a load of crap---literally---when it comes to what's healthy to eat. And the primary culprit is sugar, which takes two forms: Actual sugars and carbohydrates, which turn into sugar in our bodies and cause them to store fat rather than use stored fat for energy.

Yes. It's that simple.

A bit of background. I first came across this information in Gary Taubes' seminal long-form article What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?, which appeared in The New York Times in mid-2002. At that time, I was about 15 years into what has been an entire adult life of being overweight, and had been steadily gaining weight each year. I had tried everything---every diet, every workout plan imaginable---and fell into a now traditional pattern of short-term gains followed by setbacks that always led to me quitting whatever plan I was on at the time.

Taubes, an award-winning science journalist, followed up his article with a book called Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease in 2007. I don't believe I read that at the time. But I did read the follow-up, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. And in reading that, I knew that I finally had the answer.

So in early 2011, I believe, I set out on on a low-carb diet. I lost 26 pounds rather quickly, which didn't surprise me because the science was clear. But then the same thing happened that always happens: My weight---and weight loss---plateaued, meaning that I stopped losing weight. And after a few months of disappointment, I drifted away from the low-carb diet. Over time, I just resumed what we'd call a normal diet here in America. So I gained weight again, as before.

The issue, to me, was that Taubes had settled on the truth of the matter, the science, but he was decidedly lacking in the "how to" bit. That last book's title suggests that it will be full of advice about how to maintain the "correct" diet, but it's not. If you take a look at it, about 90 percent of the book is the scientific evidence and only at the very end is there any advice or how-to, and it's pretty vague on specifics.

Over the intervening years, I hoped that Taubes would turn his attention to this topic. But he hasn't. In 2012, he busted the bad science around salt in Salt, We Misjudged You in The New York Times. (Short version: Salt is not bad for you, unless it's in processed foods...

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