"I firmly believe that the low-carb system used by Atkins is a perfect example of hacking your body," writes Sosik-Hamor. "Massive reduction of carbs and carefully designing a balanced diet allows you to safely push the body into a state of ketosis and excrete fat out of the system faster than the standard burn rate of 1 pound per 3,500 calories. When in full induction mode I can eat 3,000 to 4,000 calories per day and lose up to 4 pounds per week."

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Hack schmack. 3-4k and 0 carbs and you will gain weight. Inuit peoples are always in ketosis, and they ain't all skinny. This is hype. Ketosis works, but it works because fat makes you full... so a caloric deficit is easier to maintain. Atkins is no exploit. Active people generally find it hard to exercise on Atkins. Its more like... compiler optimization? :shrug:

This article kinda reminds of me the anabolic/androgenic steroid/supplement community, which definately has a hacker element. Fitness dweebs scouring pubmed extracts of physiology journals looking for studies on any compound, technique, or diet that will give them an edge. They're hacking their bodies with 6 or 7 compounds at a time, highly specific training, precise diet, all carefully selected to produce fat loss while preserving lean mass.

Naysayers have been trying to show Atkins is bad for you for about 30 years now and haven't a shred of evidence. Meanwhile there continues to be study after study showing that low-carb helps cholesterol, etc, etc.

I think its probably an uncontroversial fact of anthropology that we (Americans, anyway) are eating more carbs now than at any previous point in human history. Prehistoric man certainly did not have many carbs in his diet.

I've lost 30-35 lbs over the past 18 months or so by cutting carbs -- and I'm not nearly as low as an Atkins regime. It isn't that hard. Step 1: quit drinking regular soda.

I've been saying it for awhile now -- and there was a NYTimes article to this effect about 3 weeks ago -- that corn subsidies and agribusiness are the reason everyone is overweight. We have too much corn. So we grind it up into corn syrup and put it in everything. (Not to mention feed it to cows but that's another issue).

There is no question that Atkins works. And there are some signs that "mainstream" medicine is starting to come around; doctors are now starting to talk about glycemic index.

Obesity is starting to be recognized as the single biggest factor in heart disease. Being really overweight is about as bad for you as smoking!

Atkins is definitely a hack -- in the same way that a hasty shell script will solve some problem that probably should be done with a well designed C program. same results, but which is better for you has a lot to do with who you are and how disciplined you are at doing the design and learning the C needed to accomplish the task.

i did atkins for a while myself, and i certainly agree that you need a partner to get it done right... as much reinforcement as you can get really. I won't argue that it works either, i'm sure it does, and there's evidence to prove it in the many folks who've used the program to lose lots of fat.

What i will argue is that (for myself) it's not worth the cost, emotionally, physiologically or monetarily. I felt like crap the entire time i was on the program. I was completely sick and tired of bacon and cheese and ham and steak and was about ready to kill for a fucking banana or some spaghetti. on top of all that, i had no energy and was in a terrible mood, as happens to me when my blood sugar gets low, and i'm often angry even in the best of moods, so i was a pretty unpleasant person.

Atkins did help me though, in that it proved that there's one and only one correct solution to weight loss -- eat less, and eat better, permanently.

that being said, i wish nothing but good luck and best wishes to people who want to try it. the fact that i couldn't hack it isn't an indictment of the program, at all, just an indication of my will to endure discomforts such as those i encountered over my 15th ham and cheese roll.

Dolemite wrote:
] ] But while there's nothing particularly bleeding-edge
] ] about eating the hamburger but not the bun, now that
] ] low-carb dieting has gone mainstream, the diet does
] ] appear to hold a special attraction for hackers,
] ] programmers and other close-to-the-machine dwellers. For
] ] some geeks, the low-carb diet is itself a clever hack, a
] ] sneaky algorithm for getting the body to do what you want
] ] it to do, a way of reprogramming yourself. Programmers,
] ] who are used to making their computers serve their will,
] ] are now finding that low-carb diets enable the same kind
] ] of control over their bodies.
] ]
] ] Doctorow, who lost 75 pounds by cutting out
] ] carbohydrates, sees a natural affinity between his
] ] brethren and the diet: "Read the
] ] alt.support.diet.low-carb FAQ, and you'll find people
] ] attacking their bodies like they would attack a logic
] ] board," he says. "Substitute 'faster bus speed' for
] ] 'metabolism,' and you've got something pretty close to an
] ] overclocking FAQ, he adds, referring to a practice
] ] popular with hardware hackers in which computer
] ] processors are tweaked so that they run faster than their
] ] out-of-the-box speeds.
]
] I've been trying to convince Dementia to join me on a revisit
] to the land of Atkins after I get back from China, because one
] thing you do need is moral support. You gotta have someone
] that's in it with you. Anyway, I thought this was a very
] interesting article in the fact that (1) Cory Doctorow wrote a
] story about hacking his body and now we learn that he has
] pretty much done that and (2) it's timely in accordance with
] what I've been doing and want to ramp up in another week.

I'm with ya fat boy. :)