Fasting and the Dangers of Silicon Valley’s Trendy Diets

I am sad this guy only lived to 51 years old, but given that he started his fast weighing over 450 pounds and died almost 25 years later, I am having a hard time deciding what was his downfall :(.

I think the average article in the Atlantic was clickbait. I saw some irony in an Atlantic article recently that pronounced the Atlantic as one of the few successful quality publications in the digital age.

I thought the Atlantic was great in 2000, but today I think the article generation process starts with "let's pick a clickbait topic" and then "let's write a clickbit headline" and they go from there.

I think

https://tedium.co/

is an example of a quality publication for the web, and it's good enough that I can no longer mock Medium by calling it "Tedium" because "Tedium" is actually better!

Intermittent fasting does not equal caloric restriction. It is only an arrangement on when you eat, not how much you eat.

To me, the main advantage of intermittent fasting is diet adherence. I find it much easier to eat less if I eat less often. Plus, for some reason, skipping breakfast helps me avoid being hungry around 10-11 AM. So win-win I guess.

I've been looking around a bit into diets, and it seems that "all diets work", if they have you eat less calories than you need.

But it would seem that that if is a tall order. Apparently people have a tendency to underestimate how much they eat, so just a basic "don't eat more than X calories" doesn't really work in practice, unless people are willing to do calorie counting, which isn't always practical. And if the diet is "strict", as in "you eat these things in particular and nothing else", there's a psychological (for lack of a better term) component that comes into play.

On the one hand, there's the calorie deficit. At the limit, you will probably not adhere to a 0 calorie diet. So the deficit should be "reasonable". I guess defining what that means is the hard part.

Then there's the "wants" part, and also the effect some foods have on your appetite. Eating X calories from only Mars bars is not the same as eating a "balanced" diet. In the former case, you'll probably be miserable and feel hungry all the time. In the latter, you'll probably feel OK, though at first it will probably be tough.

There's also the fact that some foods are very palatable and just make you want to keep on eating. I think this is very, very important to bear in mind. Just because food X is "healthy" and / or has low calories, it doesn't mean you can eat a ton of it without gaining weight. Fruit is one example that comes to mind, bananas in my case.

Many have free cafeterias or free catered lunch and catered snacks.

There are startups that deliver food to other startups, printing revenue numbers using the same VC’s entire portfolio of companies, therefore sloshing around the exact same dollars in order to get an attractive revenue multiple and exit.

Understanding that makes understanding the whole of Silicon Valley much easier.

It’s quite common and predates Google.

Common, but not universal. It’s much more common in smaller startups, and often fades away as companies scale and costs go up nonlinearly. At a 20 person company, you can throw a pile of burritos on the conference room table. At 10k employees, you need a full kitchen staff, dishwashers, food safety team, etc.

Of the FAANG, I believe only Google and FB have free meals on a regular basis.