I agree... the Rice Diet is a ridiculous diet unsustainable in the long-run for 90% of people who were on it, as shown by the very low rate of those who did somehow stay on it, perhaps by whipping.

OTOH, it would be interesting to see a study whether a PH could obtain the same benefits that Rice Diet was said to get, without nearly the malnutrition.

I came across Raymond Cool (Norm) a while back and read his blog with interest. He's lost nearly 300 lbs on HCLF as a volume eater. Then I found his journal on McDougall's forums where he's a little less inhibited and talks about struggles as he got down to his current weight. It was easy for him at first but as the weight went down, things got harder. He started to regain and had to restrict calories. He got cravings as well.

I don't blame his situation on his diet though. Anyone with that much weight to lose is going to have many more fat cells than the average person and when the individual fat cells get too small, they start sending signals that starvation is imminent - even though there might still be a lot of collective fat among them.

Ya, that's a good way to see it. I say for equal external signaling, two fat cells will have twice as much fat - or mass, however you want to see it - as one fat cell. That's to say if we want to get two fat cells to be as small as one fat cell, we have to starve them.

Can I just switch back and forth? A year of high fat followed by a year of high carb and so forth?

Just kidding.

Kinda.

Peter has posted a commentary on DM's article at http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot....-once-more.html .

If you want to avoid the detailed techie bits scroll down past all the coloured "doodles" and he summarises at the end.
He says when tested, this worked for 63% of subjects, no difference for 22% and got worse for 15%.
Some of the comments are interesting.

A linked article treats of the differing affects of various fats on Insulin secretion.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC508203/

Peter makes the point that for this HCVLF diet to be beneficial the drop in Insulin production in VLF must be more than offset by a rise in sensitivity.
I speculate that a failure of this coupling would be one possible mode of failure.

Well, you could try a rotation of one week of PH and one week of LC....

This is something that increased meal frequency might help with. There's a rebound of free fatty acids after an initial suppression, that can leave free fatty acids higher than they started. More small feedings of glucose=less of a rebound, greater insulin sensitivity over the course of the day. This might not work well on a mixed diet--because there, every meal brings with it both carbs and fat. On something like the potato hack though, it might help with that desired increase in insulin sensitivity.

I guess the problem with the a large dose of glucose vs lots of small ones might be an excessive insulin sensitivity. Drink 50 grams of glucose, insulin goes up more than if you sip it slowly for hours. Free fatty acids go lower after drinking it quickly--that's fine while the glucose is being absorbed, but then suddenly it's gone, since straight glucose is absorbed so quickly. But free fatty acids are still very low, and insulin is high--so there's insulin sensitivity, paired with still elevated insulin and no more glucose being absorbed--hypo, and the anti-hypoglycemic hormone response that comes with it.

About 10 or 15 years ago I was a member of a Yahoo group called "Overcoming Overeating," based on the book by Carol Munter and Jane Hirschmann. It's basically an anti-diet philosophy. Anyway, Judy Moscovitz, the author of The Rice Diet Report, who lost 140 pounds on the diet, joined the group to warn all the members off the Rice Diet. She also did so on several diet sites. She said that in the years since writing the book she had regained all the lost weight and developed an eating disorder!

I recalled this recently and searched the internet, but I couldn't find any comments by her, anywhere. I know I didn't imagine it, though, lol. Her comments stuck with me because I had bought the book and tried the diet back in the eighties. (It sounded great to me at the time, but I only lasted two or three days.)

Yikes! I'm sure she was sincere at the time, but a second book would be even more interesting.

There is a second book from her. The Dieter's Companion: How to Make any Diet Work.

Thanks, but it is still about what worked for her, not about what did not. Of course, it might not have been the fault of the Rice Diet. On the other hand, any regimen which involves whipping people to keep them on it... sounds unsustainable. For most.

Have to wonder when it stopped working for her, though. The review by Publisher's Weekly says she had maintained her rice diet weight loss for six years at the time of her writing that second book. Some nutritional deficiencies can take quite a while to develop. Or her nutritional needs might have changed with age. The People magazine article is from 1986.

http://www.people.com/people/archiv...0093829,00.html

a lot of water under the bridge since then. She was 44 then, now she's 73. Ability to absorb some nutrients gets worse as we age, that could make nutrients that were borderline to begin with downright deficient.

And it's admirable to maintain such a large loss for six years. I was never able to sustain my own losses until low carb.

Yes. She's beat my low fat maintenance record by at least five years.

I think I probably could have beat that number by switching to a low carb plan afterwards, though.

And Returns Again!! On the 10th anniversary of her first long critique of the China Study.

THE CHINA STUDY: 10 YEAR CRITIQUEAVERSARY


https://deniseminger.com/2020/07/08...YJXSniFmPUX3g1A

True to form, long, thoughtful and funny.