My understanding is that diet RCTs generally show short-term gains but no long-term gains. Why would that be true, if the Regression to the Mean Diet is the main thing causing these results? I’d have expected something more like ‘all diets work long-term’ rather than ‘no diets work long-term’ from the model here.
I think they may be a negative correlation between short-term and long-term weight change on any given diet, causing them to pick in a way that’s actually worse than random. I’m planning a future post about this. I’m not super confident in this theory, but the core of it is that “small deficit every day, counterbalanced by occasional large surplus” is a pattern that would signal food-insecurity in the EEA. Then some mechanism (though I don’t know what that mechanism would be) by which the body remembers that happened, and responds by targeting a higher weight after return to ad libitum.
My understanding is that diet RCTs generally show short-term gains but no long-term gains. Why would that be true, if the Regression to the Mean Diet is the main thing causing these results? I’d have expected something more like ‘all diets work long-term’ rather than ‘no diets work long-term’ from the model here.
I think they may be a negative correlation between short-term and long-term weight change on any given diet, causing them to pick in a way that’s actually worse than random. I’m planning a future post about this. I’m not super confident in this theory, but the core of it is that “small deficit every day, counterbalanced by occasional large surplus” is a pattern that would signal food-insecurity in the EEA. Then some mechanism (though I don’t know what that mechanism would be) by which the body remembers that happened, and responds by targeting a higher weight after return to ad libitum.