In which we stay on the train too long, and end up in Crazytown...

This week, I went looking for advice on losing weight. I was shocked by what I found. 


     With my background, when looking for training advice, I inevitably start with weightlifting sites. With these, you need some patience and judgement, but you can find good information out there. Some, like bodybuilding.com, are a mixture of fairly good advice, occasional bad advice, and a lot of advertising. (To be fair, it's run by a commercial mail-order supplement company.) 

     There are some unexpected gems like muscleandstrength.com, even ironmanmagazine.com where you can find useful routines. (Iron Man, I'm glad to see, still has a column by Joe Horrigan, who writes very good sense about how the body works.) 

     For pure strength training, you can find sites about the Stronglifts programme, or Madcow, or (for the truly insane dedicated) routines with names like Sheiko and Smolov, and even Smolov Jr. There are still other sites which treat weight training as a pure expression of joyless rage; they may have good information, but life is too short to bother.

     What weightlifting sites don't have is useful diet information. Too many of them recommend vast quantities of supplements, and few of them are oriented toward losing weight. Their recommendations run largely to pharmaceutical diet aids, which tend to be either ineffective, overpriced,  or dangerous, or some unhappy combination of all three.

     So, y'r ob'd't correspondent takes a new bearing on his gyro-stabilized prismatic compass, and goes looking for strictly diet oriented information. Two of the best articles for my particular immediate purposes I found in general-circulation newspapers, here and here.

     I also found an interesting response/rebuttal to the Newcastle diet, with a headline that *ahem* does not reflect the content of the article, and content which diverges creatively from facts previously published. I shall not link it, because it's a sad bit of rubbish, but mention it as an example of the  noise that comes with the signal in this kind of research.

     Plunging on through the jungle, machete flashing over his head y'r ob'd't cartographer hacked through endless tangles of useless information 

("Eat a well balanced diet, and engage in moderate exercise, but not too often.")

 as well as some very small nuggets of useful information. 

     There's a lot of railing against fad diets by  serious nutritionists, for broadly defined values of "fad". The  serious nutritionists all preach moderation and restraint, and fear of failure (because failure is so much worse than not trying, right?) and fear of possible side effects (because obese people aren't already up to the Plimsoll Mark in possible side effects, right?)

      One superficially promising web site (which shall remain nameless for obvious reasons) publishes a thumbnail recap of the semi-infamous Sacred Heart diet. Whatever its origins and failings, it contains an interesting soup recipe. 

2 cans of crushed tomatoes, 
3 large green onions, 
1 large can of consommé, 
package of Lipton soup mix, 
a bunch of celery, 
a pound of green beans, 
2 pounds of carrots, 
2 green peppers, 
chop it up, cover with water, turn it into soup.

Well, fair enough, that won't hurt anyone, might have to try it...

     Encouraged, I wander on through the site, looking for what else may be there and find advice, like: 

• Don't eat between 7 at night and 7 in the morning. (Good idea for most people; prevents the mindless eating as you get tired at night, which messes up your sleep patterns, and can get through a lot of food that you don't even enjoy.)
• Stay up at least three hours after your last meal of the day. (There are many opinions both ways on this, but it doesn't hurt, and some people find it really useful.)
• Weigh yourself twice a day. (Doesn't work for me, but whatever floats your boat.)

And all that's cool. Some good advice, some kind of iffy, better than most I've found. Good reason to keep going, right?

     Then... suddenly, in the same post: Good advice, useful strategies, insightful tips on ... how to hide bulimia and anorexia from your family and friends.

Wot?

And now, my friends, we're in crazy town. As always, researching on the Intarwebs is like panning for gold. You'll find gold, but you'll also find a lot of gravel and beaver crap.

     That's it for the moment. Off to do a VO2 max test, and see if it detects life. Next time, the melodies of Wm. Byrd, and the making of chicken salad from chicken, um, feathers.