Obviously, the reason I tried and am trying multiple diets is that the experimental result is always that nothing actually works. Except that the Shangri-La diet worked for twenty pounds and then mysteriously stopped doing anything (i.e., abrupt cessation of the diet did not result in any significant change in weight trends) and Seth Roberts couldn't get it working again. Paleo was among the diets tried, and it didn't result in any weight loss or other detectable differences. Non-US-approved, powerful, dangerous drugs like clenbuterol, which are supposed to cause weight loss on the order of a pound a day, produced standard side effects but no weight loss in me. I figure that metabolisms vary at least 10% as much as minds, which is a HUGE amount of variance. It actually points up something I may post about at some point, which is that statistical science itself is often a dead end - you can publish paper after paper after paper about effects that show up in 60% of the population - but you don't know what separates the 60% from the 40% - and still have no real grasp on the phenomenon and no real ability to manipulate it.

Well, in my case I've found that The Hacker's Diet pretty much works for me: the number of calories I get seems to be way more important than where I get them from (provided I get them from something reasonable, as opposed to 2000 kcal's worth of Coke per day or something like that).