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ChrisHallquist comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 1: Mainstream Nutrition Science on Obesity - Less Wrong
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Thanks for the feedback.
I was going to post this as one monster article, but as it approached 4,000 words with a couple long sections still to be written, I decided it needed to be broken up. Also, I've posted monster articles before on LessWrong, but in a couple cases I ended up feeling like the length turned off people from reading them.
When I'm done with this series, I'll probably do a post-mortem on how I could have broken it up differently.
By the way, is there a consensus view on low-carb diets and water retention? I've read in more than one place that reducing one's carbohydrate intake can cause fast temporary weight loss due to the body retaining less water. Not sure if this is a consensus view though.
This seems to be widely-accepted, but I couldn't tell you for sure.
It's not a huge point, but I think it's important because part of the hype of low carb dieting comes from the promise of rapid weight loss at least at the beginning.
It's true. It's said that for every gram of glycogen, you need three grams of water to store it. The average person has about 500g of glycogen, so you'd have around 2kg weight loss just in glycogen and water from starting a low carb diet.
It's a psychological effect. People start the diet, immediately lose 5lbs over a week, and think "OH MY GOD, this is working, I can stick to this!" They establish the habits and systems of losing weight. Then when weight loss slows down to the more reasonable 1-2lbs per week, they aren't bummed out because they know it's working.
When they cheat, their weight immediately shoots up -- and then when they stick to it, it immediately goes back down. This helped me a lot with getting back on track when I used a low carb diet to lose weight.
I basically agree, I'm just wondering if there is expert consensus on this chain of reasoning, i.e.
Low carb-dieting tends to produce stunning weight loss results in the first few weeks with far less actual fat loss.
As a result, many people tend to feel falsely that they have found the silver bullet for weight loss in low-carb dieting, i.e. a way to circumvent the calories in/calories out paradigm.
I personally am pretty convinced of the above two points, but I am wondering if there is expert consensus.