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.
I'm curious to know how many of us (I raise my own hand here) apparently have genes which do know this.
I've never paid much attention to diet beyond "eat what I want when I want", or exercise beyond "do what I feel like doing" (this does not mean "eat sugar all day and laze around", but it doesn't resemble Tim Ferriss' regime either), yet my weight has been around 120-130 pounds for all of my adult life.
Probably not appropriate to ask, but how tall are you? 130 pounds is very light I would imagine if you are a man.
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?