I have been on the slow-carb diet a few months now. It's working very well indeed ... for me personally. It's working because I like all the foods on it - it suits my personal tastes - and dropping 15kg in just a few weeks left me feeling enormously better and bouncier, which is strong incentive to keep to it.
Also, the Cheat Day strikes me as genius, just as practical psychology. I expect this to show up in fad diets in the future.
I wrote a long blog post about it, when I feared that telling friends had risked other-pessimising. Basically: a fad diet will work for its inventor, but not necessarily for anyone else - either because it just doesn't seem to match their metabolism (as you found with the Shangri-La diet) or because the subject finds it near-impossible to keep to (e.g. some friends on the Slow-Carb Diet).
(The real problem is that civilisation has more or less solved the food problem, but our genes don't know this, so we pack on the fat in anticipation of lean times that never come. To lose weight in a world of abundant food, we need to behave unnaturally. And different people's metabolisms seem to require different unnatural behaviours.)
It's plausible that it works for me because, like Ferriss, I have a lot of Scandinavian and particularly Danish ancestry - so stuff that works for him might work well for me too. Worth a try! I have no idea if it works for Ashkenazi Jews, but he doesn't say it doesn't ...
I haven't tried the exercise stuff yet, because I am lazy. I have taken to stairs rather than elevators or escalators and to walking a lot, though.
I must recommend strong caution concerning Tim Ferriss' grasp of what constitutes evidence. I tried tracking down his claim that the ECA stack (which he does correctly describe as a dangerously bad idea) was scientifically proven. When I traced back through the citations he gave - as detailed in my blog post - I ended up at text deleted from an old Wikipedia revision because it was covered in [citation needed]. So assume everything he says works for him, but test personally - any scientific explanation he gives may be correct, may be almost-correct or may be made entirely of magical pink unicorns.
Interesting coincidence, I hadn't seen this thread when it was posted, and yet I independently decided to go ahead with this and buy the book Monday (June 13) and start it the evening of the next day.
So far I'm just doing the slow-carb diet and the testosterone-promoting protein shake (whole milk + eggs + cinammon + almond butter). I haven't done the specific exercises he mentioned, but I did do some strength training since he mentioned it's important to go along with the shake.
No real noticeable progress so far, since I'm only about 3 days into it, but s...
I've just read the Four-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss. It seems on the face of it like ridiculously valuable material, if true - like what the completed version of Michael Vassar's proposed reboot of dietary science would look like at the finish point if dieting turned out to be more susceptible to Munchkinism than in my wildest dreams. Ferriss also talks the rationalist talk quite well in this book, much more so than in Four-Hour Workweek; he cites the experiments and occasionally says things like "I spent a lot of money on this and I expected it to work and it didn't work at all" or "I tried this and it seemed to work and I have no idea why it worked and I think it was probably a placebo effect."
Does the LessWrong hivemind have an opinion about 4HB? Has anyone tried it and found that it doesn't work, or that it does work, or that it works but not as well as Ferriss thinks it should work?