"Your Diet is so Extreme!"

In defense of extreme dietary measures.

To everyone’s surprise, I’m not normal

People routinely tell me that my diet is “extreme” and “not normal.” This has been happening for at least 10 years through paleo, keto, and now, of course, all that heavy cream. Oh, did I mention I was a fruitarian for a little while?

Trust me, I’d love to eat a “normal” diet (whatever that means). It’s just that it doesn’t work for me.

You eat twinkies and chug coca cola all day and never gain a pound? That’s, like, super interesting. But I’ll be over here doing what works for me.

There must be some confusion, where eating a “normal” diet leads to normal weight. This seems to work for some people. Maybe these people then assume that, because it worked for them, it must work for others.

Like many biological phenomena, susceptibility to obesity seems to follow a normal distribution, also known as Gaussian distribution or bell curve. It’s that nice curve we all remember from stats class.

There are 4 types of people (oversimplified)

There’s a certain cohort of people who can binge drink 4 times a week, load up on fast food, haven’t cooked a meal in their life, and still don’t seem to gain an ounce of fat. The vast majority of actors, fitness models, and so on comes from this small sliver. But it’s not that what these people do causes them to be lean, it’s a selection mechanism. Industries that require lean people hire largely from this cohort.

Most people are somewhere in the big bulge in the middle. They range from “I stop drinking for a few weeks to get into beach body shape” to “2 hours of cardio per day & eating a lot of broccoli keeps me just below the obesity zone.”

Good for them. I’m not pushing those people to chug heavy cream or go on a ketogenic diet. If what you’re doing works for you, bravo. But, unfortunately, these people tend to be the most non-understanding of extreme dietary measures. Since “working hard” works for them, they seem to think it must work for everyone. They can burn off those extra carbs on the treadmill, or count calories really hard to fit into their fancy suit. So, surely, you can do the same?

Graph of people becoming less normal over time.

This graph indicates that it’s not that easy. Unless adults in the U.S. somehow became a lot more lazy and worse at counting calories. The latter part is unlikely because there were practically no nutrition labels on foods up until around 1970. People couldn’t have counted calories if they tried.

In fact, if you go by this correlation, it appears that counting calories is what caused obesity in the first place, as obesity rose sharply after the introduction of the labels.

Who did obesity?

It was Mrs. Linoleic Acid with the endocannabinoids in the modern era.

Wonder what caused obesity? You and me both.

It seems clear from the historical data that whatever causes obesity is an environmental factor, not genetic. But it’s also clear from the distribution of obesity in the current population that there are large genetic factors involved.

The easiest mental model for me is that we’ve always had various genetic factors that made us susceptible to obesity, but that the triggers to activate those pathways weren’t always as common. Something in the modern food environment activates them, and whenever a diet miraculously works for someone, it fixed the specific pathways causing the issue in that person.

Might not even be just 1 cause. Maybe it’s slightly complicated, and there are several pathways to obesity in the modern era. Maybe some people have no susceptibility to any of the pathways, whereas others have all of them. I probably have a lot: I don’t seem to do well on carbs, high protein, or seed oils. Maybe my ex150 diet works because it pushes those 3 buttons at the same time. Maybe low-carb works for some people who are only susceptible to the carb pathway, and just cutting seed oils for those who only have that one. There’s also the hypothesis that seed oils cause metabolic dysregulation in carbohydrate and protein metabolism, therefore being a root cause of the other pathways failing.

Extreme problems can require extreme measures

It’s not “normal” to be 300lbs unless you’re Andre the Giant. Nobody accidentally ends up being morbidly obese by slightly overeating, or not spending enough time on the treadmill. There are more severe factors afoot.

A “normal” diet these days consists of insane amounts of added sugar, seed oils, and who knows what else. I’m not 100% certain which of these factors cause obesity in whom, but there seems to be a lot of evidence for all of them, anecdotally, mechanistic, and epidemiological.

What if every person randomly has from 0-3 of these issues? If you have 0, good for you. See you on the cover of Men’s Health. You have 1, you’re just pretty normal. Try not to overdo anything crazy and keep active, and you’ll be fine. If you have 2, you could spend your whole life fighting it with starvation diets & intense exercise, but I’d personally try to find the culprit. And if you have 3, good luck. You absolutely have to figure it out or you’ll end up at the very far end of the bell curve.

Cut out one at a time. It’s not that difficult. If you cut out more than 1, it’s probably going to look pretty “extreme.” But that’s something I’m personally willing to be called if it makes me fit into regular people pants.