Also, the Cheat Day strikes me as genius, just as practical psychology. I expect this to show up in fad diets in the future.
It is a good indicator of your rationality that you have successfully expected the past. Cheat days are not new, they've appeared in fad diets in the past, and will almost certainly do so in the future.
http://www.zonediet.com/forums/aft/4522 http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/features_julieshealthclub/2008/06/pats-junk-foo-1.html
There are lots of other popular diets with time-restricted indulgence, like for example Ori Hofmekler's Warrior Diet.
Thank you, I hadn't heard of these. I'm slightly surprised I hadn't heard of cheat days before. The reason they strike me as brilliant is that so many people (I don't know a percentage, just that it's anecdotally common) break their fad diet then give up, and a cheat day channels the urge nicely for me and may do for others.
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?