I thought the article was going somewhere different, but it appears the answer is "diet and exercise"...
I've been on a weight rollercoaster for the past 10 years, varying between 180 and 230 lbs and I've read many of the same books the author names, and while they all may lead to self-discovery on what makes YOUR body tick, none of them contain the mystical ONE THING that will cause you to lose 20 lbs in one week. In this I agree whole-heartedly with the author.
For those that are very overweight, I do highly recommend the advice to change your diet first, without starting an extensive exercise regimen. Many folks' regular diet is so bad that just eating healthy food and drinking water will cause them to lose 5+ lbs in the first week. You need to buy-in early on to the idea that exercise isn't about burning off the food you ate (as that's impossible) but about raising your metabolism and conditioning your body.
Harris-Benedict predicts that an individual should have an equilibrium bodyweight depending on their activity level and mean caloric intake. When your actual weight deviates from equilibrium, you will approach it along an exponential curve.
This means that if you alter your diet, your initial loss (or gain) will be rapid, while later losses/gains will be very slow. Graphs here:
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/weight_stability.html
He went in the "personality diet" direction, not just diet, which was pretty weird because he basically went paleo although is being very careful not to use the phrase. Tip toe all around it. I don't know if there's a legal explosion going on or what about the term, because I've noticed this elsewhere.
The Paleo thing is pretty easy to implement if you know anything about food, most of the time, the more recently it was added to the rich western diet, the less of it you should be eating. Just make a ranking and try to reasonably optimize at the store. Pretty simple and cheap and easy to implement. Tastes pretty good too.
It really pisses people off because there's no diet industry personalities to make money, no guilt inducing neo-puritanism, no weird expensive foods to buy. Kind of a post-capitalism diet, other than I have to haunt my produce aisle at the store about twice a week rather than once a week back when I mostly ate "psuedo-food" out of freezer boxes. I do spend less money on food, so what I waste in extra gasoline becomes just a rounding error.
I also enjoyed: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Debunking-the-Paleo-Diet-Chri...
Then in the article you "There was a period of fierce reading about nutrition" followed by a long list of interesting labeled diets where your chosen course based on research was to basically select the paleo-ish part of each different diet, resulting in a basically paleo conclusion, without mentioning it by name.
Combine that with the section of the article beginning "I started first with what I was consuming:" and the following read like a laundry list from Robb Wolf himself...
You're on the right path. Its a really good path. But there's a sign you haven't mentioned hanging over the trail reading "welcome to the more or less paleo diet". You don't have to read that sign, you apparently figured it out the hard way via research. I think its cool you found the path all by yourself with intense study. Great minds think alike and all that, Very encouraging results. But folks looking for it the easy way on google or whatever are going to find it a lot easier, if you just use the commonly accepted placename / label.
The Warinner presentation is pure straw dog. There's some hilarious rebuttals to be googled for. The important point is they're PR style debates not scientific debates. A lot of credentialism, one paleontologist vs multiple actual MDs, lots of focus on minor meaningless details. Its a very strange PR event. I wouldn't read too much into either her presentation or the rebuttals. Thats nice that you say the captain of the titanic should have steered a course of 15 degrees to avoid the iceberg, but I think a more correct value is actually 16 degrees, now lets distract the helmsman from making any change at all by arguing, as the ship plows directly into the iceberg.
Given that the presentation provides little information, it does however point out that an open mind toward research is a great outlook. This is not a revealed religion. I fully expect that within my lifetime the ideal % meat consumption will change by 5% or so, but up or down, who knows? The overall message will remain the same, you should mostly eat what your ancestors ate, more or less, and the western diet is a pretty horrible epic fail at that with some really nasty negative health and financial consequences.
Grains and legumes are a lot less expensive than grass-fed beef.
I will admit there is a societal trend to just relabel high meat low carb atkins type diets as paleo, and be done with it. That doesn't mean the paleo diet is "eat organic steaks every night".
As a programmer/hacker community the best analogy I can give is my impression of a venn diagram of a atkins/low carb type diet is the circle for the diet mostly contains meat and not much else. And the venn for a paleo diet also contains a small circle for meat, along with a whoppin big circle for fruit/veg/nuts. True both don't have grains/beans, and neither are vegetarian, but thats about it for similarity.
Another interesting analogy is the ideal stereotypical atkins low carb meal probably is a steak as per your example. The stereotypical paleo meal is probably a big ole salad full of veggies with a normal sized grilled chicken breast on top (not one of those mutant ones the size of your forearm).
Finally having fooled around with both diets a low carb ketone mode diet is super sensitive to what you eat; highly disciplined. Eat one apple and you've ruined days of work getting into ketone mode. On the other hand a paleo type diet has more to do with priorities and general trends. Always have more bags from the produce aisle in the cart than bags from the breakfast cereal aisle, that type of thing. I had a bowl of ice cream at a celebration for my son last night; under a paleo diet that's fine, once in a while... just don't eat that kind of stuff every day (or every week). Its not good for you. I drank a beer last weekend too.
Finally grains and legumes will make you fat then die, assuming you get enough of them (not starvation mode). If life's worth living, find a way not to fail at it. Right back to the first line, eat a carrot or something.
I eat an awful lot of salads and veggies and fruits, probably less meat than a "real american"... I just eat lots more pears than wheat.
Whole grains and legumes are pretty cheap. I don't think there is any source of protein from a whole food that is cheaper.
I would disagree on meat being overly expensive. The USDA theoretical diet claims 50 grams of protein is great. Sometimes I eat more than twice as that, or 100 grams. Its a uniquely american problem that we talk grams but sell in pounds or ounces leading to some weird ideas about portion size. I would suspect the average american thinks they need to eat perhaps 24 oz of steak to get a reasonable daily protein intake. The actual figure is a lot closer to a quarter pound. "a" quarter pound per day not two triple cheeseburger for each meal.
Broccoli stir-fry with thin slices of beef steak, mostly grilled veggie kabobs with some chunks of meat, salads with some meat on the side, that kind of thing. In the winter a homemade slow cooker mostly vegetable stew with some meat. Not meals that are 90% a slab of meat, or even 50% meat 50% carb.
I have not analyzed it but I believe I spend much more in the produce aisle than the meat aisle at the store. Sometimes in the winter my mostly fruit breakfast costs like $3 and I feel ripped off compared to what I pay in the summer, but they are flying this stuff in from another hemisphere so I guess its not so bad. If you're going to complain about expense, complain about $7 pints of organic blueberries rather than $5 little steaks because I eat more blueberries than steaks, by either volume or dollar amount. Out of season oranges flown in from Israel are another ripoff expense, although they certainly taste pretty good. Spinach is sometimes ridiculously priced also. Also sometimes bags of nuts have crazy prices like $8/pound... why decent quality walnuts sometimes cost almost as much as tenderloin confuses me.