Definitely worth doing other experiments with other diets - but having tried both I think there is a qualitative difference.

I lost 10kgs twice in my life; the first time with a high carb, low fat diet and the second one with a no carb, high fat diet. Roughly same weight interval 84kg->70kg and roughly the same timeline (I was aiming at -1kg per week).

The high carb diet was tough: I was hungry all the time and I had to count calories precisely. Mentally I felt roughly like I did before the diet. Mostly tired. I didn't do much adjusting to my diet, I just had less food than before in order to create a caloric deficit.

The no carb diet was easy: I was never hungry, I had mental clarity for the first time in my life. After the occasional sleep deprivation I was feeling much better than before. I started eating twice a day with no snacks, then migrated to one meal per day with no hunger. Adjusting to the new diet came with some mistakes (eg. balancing elecrolytes to get the optimal level of energy) but after fixing them I was much better than before.

I was a world class yo-yo dieter (having lost and regained > 100 pounds four times) and I agree with you. After 50+ of years of trying many many diets I finally tried very low carb carnivore and that was the first thing that stopped the yo-yo. For 3.5 years now. I wish I had tried it earlier and life, but I was never a particular meat eater before, and an anti-meat vegetarian and vegan for years. It took extreme desperation to make me try it, and the benefits were almost immediate.

I can confirm that for this N=1, both clean vegetarian and carnivore diets are a large improvement over the standard American diet health wise, but the later has been much more sustainable.

"both clean vegetarian and carnivore diets are a large improvement over the standard American diet health wise"

I think this is why there is so many arguments about one or other, people get fired up over veg v carnivore.

Because they are both better than the Standard American Diet.

It is really important for people to note their starting position. If they were from Standard diet, almost anything is improvement.

Just like someone can be a vegan but is eating vegan oreo's, then that is not healthy. Or carnivore and just downing ribs all day.

Seems like just less processed is the best.

> Or carnivore and just downing ribs all day.

That pattern has been very successful for me. Beef short ribs are my favorite food now, and I have them for my main meal of the day (breakfast) on most days. I'm eating a plate of them as I type this. On that diet I've gone from morbidly obese to merely overweight, my diabetes is in remission, and my IBS has become manageable. The duration of the satiety from this meal is very high, so I'm not at all tempted to try to down them all day. I was a binge eater on carbs.

I wonder why you consider ribs to be carnivore junk food? Is it the fat? On any low carb program you're practically obliged to replace carbs with fat for energy. If it's the saturation of the fat, carnivores like me tend to disagree that it's unhealthy. Of course that doesn't work very well if they're covered in sugary BBQ sauce, but my breakfast has just three ingredients: ribs, salt and butter.

> carnivores like me tend to disagree that it’s unhealthy

Why don’t you think it’s unhealthy? Would you argue the reverse - that saturated fats are healthy?

The "lipid hypothesis" has been in retreat in mainstream medicine for years now. You can easily find lots of details, like:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18615352/

For a good popular treatments I recommend

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all...

and

https://ninateicholz.com/about/the-big-fat-surprise/

I wonder if you might have a microbiome problem, i.e. you lack the microorganisms necessary to break down certain foods such as fibres. There are now treatments which have been demonstrated to have success in restoring the missing microorganisms that lead to food intolerances, the most successful being FMT.

As I understand it the capacity of the human gut to break down insoluble fiber is quite limited, especially compared to ruminants that can turn cellulose into fatty acids in their rumen. I'm sure that a healthier gut than mine can handle insoluble fiber much better, but I'm skeptical that even healthy humans can do that by digesting a significant portion of their dietary insoluble fiber.

Humans can't really digest fiber (like ruminants), but fiber is metabolized to some degree by bacteria in the colon. Specifically the bacteria ferment fiber into butyrate which is important for immune system function and other things. If you don't get enough fiber then that is likely to cause gut microbiome problems.

https://peterattiamd.com/colleencutcliffe/

Guess my objection is generally the saturated fat, and the lack of fiber, and the sauces.

But you are correct. If it is just salt and butter, then ribs is a low processed food and probably not even as bad fat wise as other cuts. Probably also not the most fatty either.

Maybe a better carnivore 'junk' food example is like someone making a 'lasagna' with just layers of hamburger and a layers of cheese. So it is just all hamburger and cheese slop.

I've done both keto and vegan. And lost weight with both.

At the moment, I'm not sure I can define which one is better.

I tried so hard to relieve my IBS problems by increasing dietary fiber. That's the standard advice for bloating and constipation, and I had it bad ... to the point of suicidal thoughts. As a long time vegetarian who lived on big salads it was no problem upping my fiber. It just didn't work. It made things worse. The only relief I could find was in fasting.

When I finally tried the low residue approach of carnivore it relieved my symptoms by the next morning. As a result I've become skeptical that either fiber or carbs are health foods for me. I'm also much more skeptical of the epistemic capacity of nutrition research.

Could that be from Lectins (red beans, black beans, lentils)? https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/anti-nutrients/...

Seems like the conversation usually boils down to just the term 'fiber'.

I agree, taking extra fiber supplements can be bad, or overwhelm the gut. But you can eat vegetables, and get fiber, but at a lower volume of fiber before you get constipated.

I'm just on side that vegetables are important. And the carnivore diet people don't seem to get enough vegetables generally, and all the other nutrients in vegetables. Even thought, you can do Keto with low carb vegetables. It can be done. Thought difficult.

Also. Gluten. When I cut out Gluten, that also cut out a ton of carbs (no breads). If you just eat vegetables without grains, it is pretty low carb.

Maybe, by the time you eat just meat, or just whole plants, or even a combination of whole foods (meat and vegetables, minus grain), your are being much more healthy in general than the Standard American Diet.

really, just eating a whole baked potato can be considered low carb compared to someone downing oreo's.

Can I suggest you look at the FODMAP "diet". Go on the elimination phase to remove the potential FODMAP triggers, then if and when it gets better after a few weeks start re-introduction to see what the triggers are. For me its Garlic, Onion, Fructans in Soda drinks and most fruit.

After sorting that out I added some psyllium fibre tablets and I'm mostly sorted.

> Seems like just less processed is the best.

See how you made assumptions (not downing ribs) and watered down the analogy (oh it’s just not-SAD) in order to reach a different conclusion.

The “seems like” is a totally unrelated conclusion to the N=1 that GP was talking about.

Can you a bit more slowly highlight the signs of error you noticed in his argument please?

Also because the hard part of a diet is entirely in the mental realm. Dieting is extremely simple to “perform” on paper but no matter what knowledge or tools you have , you’ll end up feeling hungry and have to have the fortitude to deal with that. Consistently over months and years

The main problem is not tracking calories.

I am a month in right now on tracking every calorie I eat as close as possible in a spreadsheet.

It astounds me what I thought I could eat and think I am still in a calorie deficit. I would even say I had become completely delusional from diet misinformation.

All these gimmicks to cause yourself to restrict calories is so suboptimal to simply counting.

I think counting calories is unpopular though exactly because not counting calories allows for a level of self delusional. You can then mentally be in this super position of at the same time believing to be on a diet without actually restricting calories. Of course you don't lose any weight but you are on a "diet".

High carbohydrate diets do not do a good job of suppressing ghrelin levels in the bloodstream - meaning you stay hungry for longer. High protein diets (not necessarily high fat) do a much better job of appetite suppression.

This has been known for quite some time. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19820013/

Then again low carb vs high carb are worthless labels if you are drastically changing your protein consumption between the two diets yet fixating on another macronutrient.

Though those labels were always suspicious to begin with, especially since the carb in the “low carb” meme seems to only cash out into refined grains, not beans or broccoli.

> The no carb diet was easy: I was never hungry, I had mental clarity for the first time in my life. After the occasional sleep deprivation I was feeling much better than before. I started eating twice a day with no snacks, then migrated to one meal per day with no hunger. Adjusting to the new diet came with some mistakes (eg. balancing elecrolytes to get the optimal level of energy) but after fixing them I was much better than before.

I have no study to back me up but I think all anecdotes and studies about weight-loss without self-denial is bound to get more push-back than normal. Weight-loss and fitness above a certain level is “supposed to” (we think) involve hard work and sacrifice. No doubt colored by the hard workers who pushed through and have now have built a minor identity around how their strong character compared to their former selves.

At least for bipolar and schizoaffective people it's pretty much this. A big part of ipsrt is about eating & scheduling when to eat.

Right; for ADHD a keto diet did very little to improve my symptoms, but when I was doing it I was still eating quite impulsively and without a proper schedule or meal plan. Doing those things, creating a routine, regardless of what I was eating, made a big improvement to my symptoms in that it created a lot of structure, routine and planning that was previously absent.

Many elimination diets will help you lose weight. The main difference is sustainability over the long-term.

That's the thing, diets are temporary, long term sustainability require lifestyle changes.

Because that’s the causation that you prefer?

No? Scientific experiments should work to rule out alternative causes, that's the whole point of it. Introducing a lot of structure to someone's life that was previously very unstructured (as diet often is in mentally unwell people) could be part of the reason their symptoms improve, rather than necessarily the diet itself. It's an alternative cause that I think should be ruled out before assuming it's the content of the diet itself that caused the difference.

Control groups are not "whataboutism". If adding that kind of control showed keto was specifically helping these people, then that'd be great; but since the study doesn't seem to have done that, it's hard to be confident in the conclusion.

Instead, they gave the participants cookbooks, and assigned them a personal coach to help them plan and cook their meals and follow through with the diet change. Giving that kind of personal support to change habits and make more considered choices to someone with mental health challenges is bound to make them feel better, no?