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JulianMorrison comments on The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet - Less Wrong
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What kind of rationalists are you? There is one way to lose weight with tons of research backing it, and perfectly valid molecular explanation how it works - one ECA pill every morning until you're done, if you're losing weight faster than 1kg/week definitely eat more as that's not very healthy.
You should behave like proper rationalists now, read some pubmed, order some pills, and lose as much weight as you want. No significant side effects observed, unlike "natural" dieting which causes hunger, loss of willpower, loss of energy etc. Your appetite will be so low you'll have to use alarm clock to remind yourself to eat, but it won't hurt when you do, so no willpower expended either way. Ask any random bodybuilder for advice if you need it, they mastered the art of getting rid of fat without harming rest of the body.
I'm 79 kg (bmi 22) down from 106 kg (bmi 30) five years ago, so unlike 95% of after-diet rebouncers I know what I'm talking about.
Do you know any studies showing effect on life expectancy?
ECA seems to work by throwing the body into Continuous Panic Mode. Surely that will burn calories, but just going by analogies to stress, it doesn't sound good for you even if you dodge the bullet of heart symptoms.
There are no studies on life expectancy effects of almost anything including peanut butter, orange juice, and French fries.
One big argument for ECA safety is that you don't have to take it continuously. Just figure out how many kilograms you want to lose, it's most likely going to take 1-2 weeks per kg on ECA (assuming your eat mostly when hungry and just as much as needed to satisfy that, you can obviously drink 5 litres a day of sugared drinks a day even with zero appetite, and still be gaining weight). Unless you're gaining weight very quickly on your normal diet (in which case you need to adjust that) you won't have to repeat that in very long time, possibly ever.
The main effect of ECA is down-regulating your appetite - something there are very few known proven methods to do, fen-phen comes to mind, but it was removed from the market (completely misguidedly I'd say). ECA also seems to have some effects on fat and muscle metabolism, and some mild stimulating effects, but it's not obvious from research that these are of much relevance to humans.
This is serious stuff, so if you have some heart condition or don't think you can use it responsibly, don't do it. But then the only other anti-obesity method with better research record is surgery.