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Comment by yungporko | Hacker News Reader

i don't understand what you're trying to say here, of course anybody who loses weight by changing their diet will gain the weight back if they go back to eating the way they were before, isn't that just common sense?

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Well, I guess I'm saying a "good" diet is one that can be sustained indefinitely. The fact that an extreme diet produces good results in the short term isn't surprising or interesting, because virtually nobody can (or should) follow an extreme diet for the rest of their life.

A diet that you can follow forever is called a lifestyle. For many diets and many people, it's really hard to convert into a lifestyle, because the of the restrictions and predictable cravings.

Side note, there's a thing called the Potato Hack [0] that proposes 3-5 day potato-only diets for short term fixes. A "potato fast" if you will.

[0] https://potatohack.com/

A lifestyle involves all sorts of non-diet things.

It is a bit odd, though, that we use “going on a diet” to describe a short term change.

But I think the most accurate phrase would be that you’ve “changed your diet,” (implicitly, permanently).

I don't think SMTM is proposing the potato diet as a permanent weight loss dilution, but think that there is something weird going on here that might result in a permanent dietary recommendation if understood. For example, we might find that the potassium is causing the weight loss and supplementing high doses of potassium could be something you do permanently.

There've been multiple studies that gave people potassium supplements and measured their body weight. (Primarily because potassium helps lower blood pressure). They haven't found that potassium causes weight loss. See my meta-analysis here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sR1T2Kb1X1fCLYeEE-U3Rwei...

That was just an example. They are doing this weird riff model because right now there are too many variables

Sometimes, though, an extreme diet to lose weight can allow you to make some lifestyle changes (such as exercising regularly) that do have lasting impacts. Being significantly overweight can really make physical activity difficult and demoralizing.

I agree that it they often aren't sustainable and need to transition into a more sensible long-term diet.

We really need multiple words for diet.

It means at least two different things:

It can refer to specific planned period of eating a certain way to achieve a certain end.

e.g. Atkins diet(please look up how he died before considering this), fodmap diet , low GI diet, potato diet

It can also refer to the normal way a particular person at particular place and time in history eats.

e.g The Roman diet, Celtic diet, American Diet, French diet, Pandas diet, Neanderthal diet ,Vegan/Vegetarian diets, Kosher/Halal diets

Atkins died of a head injury when he slipped on some ice, FYI

He also had congestive heart failure and his arteries were 30-40% blocked a year before his death. After he fell, he died during surgery to remove a blood clot in his brain. It's hard to say conclusively what caused his fall and ultimately his death, but we do know for a fact that he had heart problems.

I don't believe this matters either way, though. You shouldn't be basing your understanding of what a healthy diet looks like on the outcome for one individual. Experts in the field of human health do not believe that Atkins' diet was healthy, and that should suffice (though of course there are plenty of other unhealthy diets, some of which have problems that Atkins avoids).

I'm merely pointing out that internet rumors about his death are false.

I have no idea if he followed his own diet or if his diet is healthy or not, but if you have references to studies this thread is sorely lacking.

I would imagine extreme diets are for viable for those that require extreme weight lose. Someone looking to lose 100+lbs would be able to use it to lose enough weight to become active again and start to make lifestyle changes that will support long term weight management. People looking to drop 10lbs though are very likely to gain it back once they start eating like a normal human again.

He's saying that this is a well established fact regarding every fad diet. Usually in the sciences, a new method measures itself against a "control", which might be a placebo or non-treatment, but might be another well established treatment, such as a drug for the same disease. For a fad diet, a sensible "control", or "null hypothesis" would be another fad diet, not involving potatoes. One would only have grounds to say that this fad diet worked if it worked better than the best alternative fad diet.

I'd argue it's a well established fact of any diet, regardless of how it is lost. Changing your body's natural weight long term is very difficult no matter what you eat.

You'd think there would be some long term benefit to fad diets around the lines of hunger suppression or helping folks better recognize when they're "full".

IMO, there's a psychosomatic angle for restrictive diets that is similar to a placebo.

Do you think Wegovy/Ozempic/Mounjaro also work due to placebo effect? It seems that over the past decade or two we’ve discovered (some elements of) the sophisticated physiological mechanism by which we regulate appetite, and it involves the production of various hormones within our lower intestinal tract. When some fad diet produces sharp appetite reduction, my general question is: what’s more reasonable? To assume placebo or disruption of this mechanism?

At very least I think it’s useful to reinterpret these extreme fad diet weight loss results in light of this knowledge, rather than defaulting to the (now obsolete) understanding that appetite is primarily determined by psychological effects.

At least for the 70s fad diets, there wasn't any sort of long-term benefit like that. When they stopped, people would return to their original weight, or maybe even a little more. Then they would freak out and go back to the diet again -- the infamous "yo-yo dieting."

But I do think it's true that there are two different sensations: hunger, versus wanting food because it's yummy. Maybe some future diet will pair a restrictive diet with some sort of guided meditation helping you discern the different signals your stomach can send you.

Or maybe Mounjaro and friends will make the whole point moot ;-)

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