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1. Based on all available empirical reports on the diet, the failure rate shouldn’t exceed 5%. This is incredible by any conventional measure of diet compliance.

2. Nearly all reported failures are due to not following instructions.

If we include only those people who followed directions exactly and provided feedback, the success percentage is as close to 100% as I’ve seen anywhere.

Discussion of Results

How should you read these data? How should you plan or change your diet based on these results?

Let’s look at where you might make common mistakes. This is a practice run of our Spotting Bad Science 101 training.

Taking a first glance at the data, there are a few things we might conclude produce greater fat-loss, especially if we’re presented with impressive-looking graphs that omit important details:

Based on the data, here are some knee-jerk conclusions we could make about variables that result in more weight loss (bolded below):

Eating just two meals per day, vs. five meals, the second-most-common number of meals (39- vs. 23-pound average loss)

Eating a vegetarian diet (23- vs. 21-pound average loss)

Counting calories (27- vs. 20-pound average loss)

Skipping breakfast (23- vs. 21-pound average loss)

Those of you who’ve been paying attention will realize that, for most people, I recommend the opposite of these four conclusions. Did I just get it all wrong? It wouldn’t be the first time.

But let’s look at those bolded conclusions again.

This time, the numbers in parentheses before 194 (X/194) indicate how many people (X) did what is mentioned out of the total number of subjects (194).

Eating just two meals per day vs. five (39- vs. 23-pound average loss) (8/194)

Eating a vegetarian diet (23- vs. 21-pound average loss) (10/194)

Counting calories (27- vs. 20-pound average loss) (35/194)

Skipping breakfast (23- vs. 21-pound average loss) (29/194)

Remember that it’s impossible to determine cause and effect from the above. These are correlations. The next step would be to test them with both control and experimental groups.

But in the meantime, let’s look at two of our bolded knee-jerk conclusions:

EATING TWICE A DAY SEEMS LIKE A NO-BRAINER, BUT IT’S NOT.

39 pounds lost vs. 23 seems to paint a clear picture. But let’s ask ourselves what we don’t know: how many people tried two meals and dropped out because it didn’t work? Only eight of 194 people ate two meals a day. Also, how big were the people who ate twice a day? Perhaps they were 250–300 pounds, making it easier to rack up total pounds lost, even though the weight lost as a percentage of body mass was more impressive for other smaller people. The vast majority of the total (144), those who averaged 19–20 pounds lost, ate three or four times per day, as recommended.

COUNTING CALORIES SEEMS LIKE A NO-BRAINER, BUT IT’S NOT.

27 pounds lost vs. 20—again, the conclusion may seem obvious: calorie counting helps. Alas, it just ain’t that simple. First, more than in any other cohort in these data, this is where I suspect survivorship bias applies. 35 of 194 respondents counted calories. How many tried to count calories, which I do not recommend, and quit the diet altogether after finding counting tedious, impossible, or inconvenient? Second, do calorie counters really lose more weight because of counting calories? Or is it because they’re more attentive to the tracking in general and hold themselves more accountable? I suspect these calorie counters did a better job, on average, in more important areas like tracking protein intake and recording exercise progression.

Does this mean you shouldn’t track calories? Not necessarily. Feel free to test it. It’s possible you’ll be in the minority who benefit. If not, and if you’re in the majority who find it boring and awful, just be sure to stop the calorie counting and return to basics before you quit the entire program.

Conclusion

Though the data can point in interesting directions for further testing, I’ll let someone with more budget and interest attempt the controlling. The upshot is: The Slow-Carb Diet