Read Taubes. It's actually not the opposite of every dieting advice ever. It's the opposite of most dieting advice for about the last 40 years or so, but prior to that this was the standard weight loss diet going back into the 19th century (the first time in human history where obesity was actually a thing, or enough of a thing for doctors to worry about it.) For a long time Robert Atkins was widely viewed as a crackpot, but he didn't actually invent the diet he put his name on. He was mostly just repeating what he had learned in medical school, and then used successfully in his clinical practice.
But yes it is scary, and Taubes explains in great detail how nutrition science went off the rails starting back in the 1930s and is only now beginning to recover.
So this year I've stopped working out, and my grades have improved drastically, but at the cost of losing muscle mass and gaining fat, and becoming physically slower and lazier just as I became faster and more active intellectually. One effect I especially noticed was the disappearance of that perpetual state of happiness/satisfaction that comes from frequent physical exertion, which I think had a tendency to get in the way of a feeling of urgency regarding studies; why bother with tiresome and frustrating intellectual exercise when physical exercise yielded results and pleasure/satisfaction much more easily and reliably?
Anyway, this got me thinking: "I need to figure out a training that is optimized for intellectual performance. Aspects that might be interesting to work on would be:
These ideas I'm throwing around from a position of extreme ignorance. I've tried hiring nutritionists, but their diets were optimized for bodybuilding, not for intellectual efficacy, and were incredibly troublesome to follow. These involved about five to eight meals a day, large amounts of meat or meat substitutes, which is expensive to sustain, and me in a perpetual state of either hunger or digestive lethargy, plus permanent muscular soreness from the training regime that goes with it... and then there's the supplements.
So, yeah, I'm no gwern, but I'd love to figure out a diet that allows me to work at maximum efficacy. Other concerns, such as feeling strong or looking attractive or even dancing well, are quite far behind in priority. How should I go about this? How about you lads and ladies? What's your experience with dieting/working-out? More importantly, what does the research say?
P.S. I tried to read "Good Calories Bad Calories", but I never managed to finish it: it spent so much time attacking the current paradygm that I grew tired of waiting for it to actually list and summarize its recommendations. If anyone here finished reading that and drew out the conclusions, I'd love to hear them.
P.P.S. The main post will update as the discussion advances; once enough proper information is gathered, a top level post might emerge.