The Accidental Diet | Hacker News Reader

The Accidental Diet

nytimes.com

40 pointstyn18 comments

I don't care so much about dieting, but I'm very interested in finding foods that are healthy and easy to make. I find I'm much more productive when I have a premade or easily prepared meal. I like having an obvious choice for a meal that I don't have to think about.

So far I've found:

* Non-fat Cottage Cheese and Apples/Applesauce

* Bean Burritos with a light amount of sharp cheddar (the sharper the cheddar the less you need to use), making about 5-6 in a batch.

* Rice-A-Roni Red Beans and Rice

If I could skip a meal each day without screwing up my metabolism or energy level (which this article seems to suggest), that could be useful.

Have you ever combined the cottage cheese and the apples?

Heaven in my mouth.

I like eating very large salads. 750-1000 calorie salads. It's extremely satisfying and it's very easy to change aspects of it to keep up variety. Here's how I do it.

Half of a bag of cut and washed lettuce. I usually go with Trader Joe's mixed greens. Bonus points if it doesn't come from a bag.

More vegetables, whatever you have around. I like carrots, green onions, and all kinds of peppers.

8-12 ounces of chicken cooked and seasoned to taste, pre-cooked frozen chicken is fine as long as it is actual non-nugget type chicken.

Cheese. I like Jarlsberg.

Croutons or any other type of crunchy carbohydrate. I like bagel chips.

Homemade Italian dressing. Google up some different recipes and keep playing until you get it perfect. But any dressing you make yourself with olive oil will beat the mass produced Italian dressing with sugar needlessly added.

I think the point of the article is more about the idea of self-experimentation than the diet itself.

"psychologist Robert Rosenthal, who has praised Roberts for 'approaching data in an exploratory spirit more than, or at least in addition to, a confirmatory spirit' and for seeing data analysis 'as the opportunity to confront a surprise.'"

I think it is a shame so many people frown upon this. I say that because I fiddled around with my diet for years and found out all kinds of things about how I work. It's interesting and I think i'm a better person for it.

For example, whole milk, greasy beef, and certain cheeses give me zits. Every single person I've told calls bullshit and says I'm making it up because "studies prove that what you eat doesn't affect your skin."

Well, that's great, I guess I could eat this greasy cheeseburger and show you what happens in 2 days, but... you wouldn't believe it, anyway.

What's my point? I think a lot of people would be better off if they took an active role in their health like this guy instead of relying 100% on "experts" and studies.

I don't really get the logic of this part of the article:

* Eating a food that's flavourful and familiar => your body says 'stock up' => you eat more.

* Swallowing unflavoured oil between meals => you gain calories but do not trip the 'stock up' trigger

* Roberts could eat whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and felt less hungry.

Yet, if he's eating the same familiar, flavourful foods, surely he's tripping the mechanism at mealtimes and ingesting extra calories between meals, meaning he should gain weight? If there's an additional logical step in the reasoning, i.e. eating oil makes your stomach full so you eat less, it should really have been mentioned.

(Before I'm told to Google it, I'm sure further literature on the diet explains the full logic; my point is that the article doesn't.)

I assume this does not work because the article was written nearly 4 years ago. Where are the results?

Well, it was enough for a New York Times Bestseller: http://www.sethroberts.net/

With the lazy "big results with no work" attitude of so many people when it comes to exercise and eating healty, you could could put that same "The No Hunger Eat Anything Weight Loss Plan" on the cover of a Cobol manual and still sell thousands of copies ;-)

I don't think the fact that a diet book is a best-seller says a whole lot, especially when you consider that the same people who bought this book probably helped to make the Atkins, South Beach, etc. diet books the best sellers they were.

Hardly anyone tries it, because it requires eating oil. Few people are willing to get over the yuck factor, I imagine.

I haven't tried it, either, even though I should be losing weight. One reason for that is the same reason I haven't tried appetite-suppressants: I don't typically eat because I feel hungry, but because I want to be eating, so removing hunger seems useless; I hardly ever feel it, anyway.

This is horrible advice, don't listen to it.

Buuuttt...

Look at hacking your body the same way you would look at hacking a computer. What makes your metabolism tick?

What you're going to find is that excersizing, and eating a LOT of proteing (so that your body doesn't metabolize muscle tissue [like your heart] while you're on your uber low cal diet) are the best way to lose weight.

Don't eat anything (or very little) for like 2 days and the thought of eating a black and blue burger will start to seem repulsive. This is when you start eating fruit and chicken.

This is not hacking. This is being a power user. These workarounds are the best you can do when you can't actually fix the system you're running on, and I agree that workarounds are helpful, but I'm hoping we can fix the system soon. :)

I've done it on and off for a while, but I can't say I've done it consistently enough to know for sure if it's working. It does seem to have some appetite suppressing effects when I do it consistently.

I actually tried it for a month or so a few years back (bought the book). I couldn't get it to work - the primary goal of appetite suppression didn't work for me. YMMV of course.

I wish I could tell other people how to gain control over their food-willpower so I could write a bestseller. I think I'll give it a try. http://www.diet-blog.com/archives/2006/09/15/how_to_write_a_...

Somehow, I did gain control over my food-willpower. I absolutely love food, healthy or otherwise, and I basically eat whatever I want, more protein than anything else. I've taken to drinking large amounts of fruit juice to make up a caloric deficit if I haven't eaten much. I figure fruit juice is the healthiest source of empty calories.

By now I have read a lot of criticism of fruit juice, though. Basically it just contains a lot of sugar, not that much better than drinking soda drinks (what are they called? coke and lemonade?).

There also seem to be a lot of cases were people just eat insane amounts of fruits to still get their sugar shock. I'd be wary of the fruits.

I was at a client's once and their young daughter around 5 or 6 was having a fit in the late afternoon, wanted some candy and the mom said no that it will ruin her dinner. She kept pouting and whining... then said mom can I have some OJ? Of course, mom said yes. I didn't have the heart to tell her she just got played by her daughter who needed a sugar fix.

not really a diet, more like a method for suppressing appetite.

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