Hackers On Atkins

`Sean writes "Salon.com has published a story about Hackers on Atkins. Although going on a diet is the last thing on the minds of the stereotypical geek basking in the ambient radiation of multiple monitors for 15 hours per day, many hackers have been embracing Atkins because utilizing low-carb methods to modify the metabolism is analogous to hacking and overclocking the body. Others have been combining Atkins with other systems, such as John Walker's The Hacker's Diet. I've personally lost a hundred pounds so far and will toss in the obligatory if I can do it, anyone can ism."

Comments

Re:What about the dangers?

[Godai]

I can back this up. I've lost 65 pounds on Atkins (down to 215) and I have to say that, if anything, I'm eating MORE fruits & vegtables than I was before. YMMV though.

Why it works

[adjensen]

Okay, this is from the perspective of one who has done Atkins, and been successful at it. Not "I heard from this guy" or "my sister's friend told me". Real experience.

I've struggled with my weight since I was in high school over 20 years ago. I've been up and down, weight wise, for a long time. Tried low fat, exercising like crazy, and just failed at it.

Finally, in February of this year, I went on Atkins for the third time (first was just a fad that I didn't do seriously, back in the 80s, second took me from about 250 lbs to 230 about three years ago,) determined to finish the plan and get to my goal weight. I also began exercising by walking on my treadmill and walking when golfing instead of using a cart.

To do Atkins properly, you spend a minimum of two weeks on "induction," which reduces your carbohydrate intake to 20 grams a day or less. This forces your body to stop using simple sugars and other carbs for fuel and start burning fat. You will most likely feel like crap for a couple of days during this phase, but it will pass.

Right about then, two wonderful things happen very quickly which are what makes the diet successful for so many people. First, you will begin to notice, within those two weeks, that your clothes are looser and, if you are weighing daily, a pretty dramatic loss of weight. This positive feedback is mostly water weight, but not entirely, and you feel like you're making progress.

Secondly, and more importantly, changing from consuming mostly carbs to mostly fats and proteins has the effect of making you feel full on much less food. In addition, your blood sugar levels stabelize and most people see "food cravings" (like eating a box of cookies!) going away. A low fat diet simply replaces fat with sugars to make the food more pallatable, and you end up with a bunch of empty calories and you're hungry a short time later.

You're told that you can eat as much as you want, so long as you keep the carbs low -- I'm not sure that I agree with that, you still need to keep an eye on calories, but the point is that after a couple of days, you could eat ten burger patties, but you'll be full after two and won't want to keep eating.

Once you've gone through induction, you can either stick with it (as I did) or start adding carbs back, a bit at a time, until you're eating a more balanced diet but still losing weight. You do have to stay away from sugars and simple carbs, though, because that will screw up your blood sugar levels.

Now, onto the myths. First, I have never seen (and I've looked) any reputable study that says that kidney damage has resulted from a healthy person (healthy in that they don't have existing kidney problems or AIDS or something) following this diet. Pointers to such a report (not something sponsored by the "American Bread Makers Association") would be appreciated, if they exist.

Secondly, people will tell you that it's unhealthy because you can't eat anything but meat. That's crap. There are loads of veggies that you can eat during induction, and you can add more, plus fruits, as you progress through the diet. I stayed on induction for seven months, and enjoyed salad every day, along with green beans, cauliflower, broccoli, etc.

Again, the proof is in the pudding (sugar free, if you please) -- in September of this year, I finished the diet, weighing 180 pounds, the first time in about 25 years that I've been the weight I'm supposed to be for my height. Now, I just check my weight periodically, and if it starts going up, I watch things for a couple of days.

Finally, the greatest help for this (or any) diet is a website I'd encourage you to use. It's free, and it tracks your caloric intake, exercise and weight. It's at Fitday

Good luck to anyone trying to lose weight. Regardless of how you go about it, it's the best thing that you can do for yourself.

Re:Fundamental problem with most exercise...

[BrianH]

Personally, I consider that one of the best aspects of exercise. My day is full of enough nonstop distractions from ringing phones, clients "just stopping by", tight coding deadlines, meetings, wife demanding attention, kids demanding attention, yards demanding attention...it never ends. That 45 minutes of solitude every morning, when it's just me, my thoughts, and the foggy trail ahead, are the only things that keep me sane.

And for reference: A year ago I was 6' 285lbs. Today I'm 6'1" 179lbs. No fancy diets, no gimmicks, no body abuse. I just reduced the number of calories going into my body (1300-1600 a day depending on activity level) and made a point to exercise whether I wanted to or not. I don't pay attention to things like fat content, carb content, protein content, or any of those other distractions that make dieting seem so complex, I just watch the bottom line....daily caloric intake. It works for me with NO risk of health problems, it's worked for my wife (30 lbs in 4 months), and it's worked for everybody else who's tried it and stuck to it. The human body evolved to deal with two realities: 1) That people are constantly active. 2) That high calorie meals are rare. That we have eliminated these realities in the last 100 years says a lot for humanity, but the underlying fact still remains...if you want your body to operate at its peak, you have to subject it to the conditions it was optimized for. Just like computers. GIGO.

Re:Hacking And Overclocking - What?

[evilpenguin]

Now here's someone to mod up!

I think this is exactly the right answer. No one "diet" fits all. It is universally agreed that increasing exercise (at least from the typical American computer programmer level -- totally inert) is good for you. Now, if you are obese, you need to change the way you eat.

When I was quite young, I balooned up to just shy of 300 pounds. I went on Weight Watchers and dropped wieght like a stone. I got down to 190 pounds. Over the next 15 years, I gained wieght steadily (inert programmer lifestyle) up to about 270 pounds. Less than my max, but I got back to where just standing up for an extended period would make me perspire.

That is just not right.

Back on Weight Watchers I went. But I didn't lose wieght. I stopped gaining, but I didn't lose. Any fluctuation I saw in the scale was not only within normal variance for water weight, but frankly within the accuracy of the scale.

Atkins worked for me. I'm down to 210 and losing weight slowly.

I feel good and I look good (well, better than my former walrus-self).

The point is that to lose wieght, you must go into ketosis. Diets vary on how often and for how long. The insight that I think Atkins has that the rest of the world hasn't quite caught on to is the effect of wildly oscillating blood sugar levels on the pacreas and on the habituation of cells to insulin. I think his insight that it is better to eat lower on the glycemic index than higher, and better yet to let the body find its glucose through the longer slower lypolitic reactions is his main acheivement.

I scold him, though, for not being a scientist. He made an industry out of it, and more power to him, there's no reason not to profit from a good idea, but he didn't do the science. His work amounts to a collection of anecdotes.

His book cites a vast amount of scattered research that tends to support his thesis, but he had an opportunity to use his patients as a source of research data, and he never bothered. Heck, he could have had med students do the hard work.

Fortunately, studies on this approach are underway. The data will be there. But it will be ten to fifteen years yet before the data are in on possible negative effects (cancer rates, kidney disease rates, etc.). There's data on how it is good for heart disease, diabetes, artery disease. But there are long-term questions about cancer, kidney disease, and stroke that are simply not known.

That annoys me.

However, the risk of premature death from heart disease is so much greater than all other health risks (apart from toboacco -- the number one killer), that it seems reasonable to trade a small increase in colon cancer risk for a huge risk of heart attack.

Still, I think the person who "discovers" something like this should feel obligated to do the science.

Of course, I'm no MD. I get the impression this is a common dividing line: Research doctor versus practicing doctor -- similar to the line between law professor and practicing lawyer. It seems academic medicine and practice medicine are often separated.

Still, it is sad that Dr. Atkins' data aren't useful for population studies.

Re:You Can't Fool Mother Nature

[MoralHazard]

This old logical fallacy? Haven't you ever read "Candide", man? Modern civilization is THE TESTAMENT to the triumphs of technology over "Mother Nature". Try this on for size, ebusinessmedia1:

"Human beings did not evolve to hunt using guns, or to farm using plows. We evolved as hunter-gatherers who browsed and hunted for food without implements."

Fact is, evolution is NOT, NOT an intentional, planned affair, as your second sentence implies (and upon which your entire argument depends). Evolution produces, in each generation, an organism that can thrive in a range of possibile scenarios. The state of a current generation DOES depend on the conditions under which its parent population evolved, but that doesn't mean that the population can't deal with different conditions. Conditional changes occur in nature all the time that put organisms into environments that differ from the conditions under which those organisms evolved... in fact, that's what CAUSES evolution. They don't always deal well with it, but they thrive often enough.

So you build a "best of all possible worlds" fallacy on top of a confusion of "sufficient" conditions with "necessary" conditions, enough to reverse the factual relationship between the cause and the effect.

Look at the theoretical picture, by analyzing the whole class of phenomena: the human immune system didn't evolve in the presence of antibiotic treatments. But we're not objectively worse for the wear. Same thing with cars or horses (as opposed to walking). Sure, there are costs of these kinds of advances (pollution) or hidden risk-shifts (a population with substantially lower native bacterial resistance, after a while). And those costs may or may not outweigh the benefits of the technology. But by and large, technological advancement helps rather than hurts. As evidence, I would point out that the human race has generally exploited technology to minimize environmental threats and increase productivity, both of which contribute to a greater short-term and long-term survivability of the species.

I like the book "Hammer of the Gods" (ripped off as "Armageddon") for the super-example: the dinosaurs all died because they couldn't do anything about a massive asteroid impact. While humans may or may not be able to actually detect and prevent/minimize an asteroid impact, we can at least discuss the possibility and make a reasonable attempt. Give us 50-100 more years of technological growth, and we will certainly be able to stop an asteroid. We are the most successful organism in the history of the planet, because we have the potential to become nearly un-extinctable, as a species. All because we say "FUCK YOU!" and flip the finger to Mother Nature, and we try to take an active control over our destiny.

Oh, and for the record, I'm with you on the Atkins topic, specifically: they're just now starting to see cancer risk accumulations associated with regular pot smoking, but only over a 30-40 year span. I'll wait on Atkins until a substantially larger population has guinea-pigged it and found out the REAL risks.

Re:IT AINT FUCKEN EASY!

[abe ferlman]

jogging can be boring as hell, and more interesting activities like basketball leave you sore and injured often

This is why DDR is the best video game ever invented. It makes exercise fun, even when it's just you.

The only thing that could top it would be a hack & slash video game that worked both upper body and lower body, but I think we'll have to wait for holodeck technology for that one.

Re:IT AINT FUCKEN EASY!

[stefanlasiewski]

Another vote for bicycle.

Better for your knees & hips and you can actually get some upper body exercise.

Bikes let you see more of the world: you can go farther then jogging or walking, you see, hear & experience more of the world then you would ever see in a car (cars are very isolating).

Plus, a bike is pretty geeky. Alot of mechanical parts to tweak, tune your own gears, design your own lighting system, hook a generator up to your rims. Use your GPS, take a camera.

Re:What about the dangers?

[crazyphilman]

Here's something plenty of people probably haven't heard about: GOUT.

I went on Atkins, and was totally successful. I lost thirty pounds, and dropped a couple of pants sizes. I was totally happy. So far so good, right?

So one morning, out of the clear blue sky, I woke up in scarlet, hot-as-fire pain. My left big toe's joint swelled up and turned shiny and red, and it felt as though a metal spike had been pounded straight through the joint. Within a week I couldn't walk without a cane. I immediately stopped eating meat entirely, and started eating lots of cranberries, cherries, cranberry, cherry and grape juice, and loading up on carbs. Even with all that, and some NSAID horse-pills my doctor gave me, it took FOUR WEEKS for my foot to go back to normal. It was absolutely fucking horrible.

Gout is caused when an individual is sensitive to purines, i.e. he/she doesn't eliminate uric acid from his/her blood fast enough. A normal diet won't generally cause a gout attack, but Atkins is protein-rich, and protein is high in purines, which get turned into uric acid in the blood. So you're loading up on protein, and your body is building up the amount of uric acid in your blood, and before too long (maybe a few weeks) uric acid crystals start building up in the large joints of your feet. Which HURTS like NOTHING you have EVER EXPERIENCED.

Atkins is great for most people. BUT, if you're susceptible to gout, boy, oh boy are you in for it. And, there's no way to tell whether you are or aren't until you have an attack. It's only like about 1% of people who suffer this, but you should know it's possible before you start the diet.