Newsgroup: it.salute.alimentazione
Titolo: Hackers e low-carb: l'articolo

Siccome non è direttamente accessibile dal web (se non previ
iscrizione a pagamento), spero di fare cosa gradita inviandolo
sul ng. Purtroppo è in inglese.
Mentre lo leggevo mi è tornata in mente l'osservazione che si è
fatta spesso su questo NG relativamente al fatto che molti low-carber
sono ingegneri. Gli ingegneri sono gente abituata a chiedersi sempre
"come funziona?"
"It works very cleanly at a conceptual level. Technical people like
technical prescriptions, and Atkins offers them a pretty good technical
prescription."
HACKERS ON ATKINS
By Katharine Mieszkowski, Oct. 30, 2003
For Dave Sifry, 35, attending LinuxWorld in the summer of 2002 meant
more than just a chance to luxuriate in the latest insider buzz about
Red Hat, Suse and Debian. It also was an unexpected chance to learn
about a body-reengineering hack increasingly popular with computer
programmers and affiliated geeks.
When Sifry, now the co-founder and CTO of Sputnik, a wireless device
company, saw Cory Doctorow, the boingboing blogger and science-fiction
author, at the conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center, he almost
didn't recognize him.
"I hadn't seen him in a while, and he had lost so much weight with
Atkins -- maybe 35 or 40 pounds -- that he just looked like a changed
man," says Sifry, who founded the Bay Area Linux Users Group and
co-founded Linuxcare, a start-up aimed at providing support services for
Linux users. But Doctorow, a self-described "renaissance geek," wasn't
the only slimmed-down figure among the usual crew of techie
conference-goers. Doc Searls, coauthor of "The Cluetrain Manifesto," was
also looking svelter, from his own regime of low-carbing.
"To be perfectly frank, I thought it was nuts," says Sifry. "OK: You can
eat as many bacon cheeseburgers as you want, and you still lose weight?
Why doesn't this sound healthy? But when I saw two people who I respect
do it, it really forced me to take a second look at it."
"We see people when we go to conferences that used to be a lot wider
than they are now. Now, they're down to, like, one chin," says Searls,
who lost 25 pounds last year in time for the Linux Geek Cruise in
October, and has kept it off. "Cory blew my mind when I saw him. He
looks like a skinny kid."
Picking up dieting tips at a computer conference could sound like the
setup for a real groaner of a bad joke. Fairly or not, computer geeks
have become cultural stereotypes for their embodiment of the modern-day
version of the classic mind/body split: Many geeks tend to live their
"real" lives in the virtual domain, while their bodies become forgotten
blobs, crouched behind a monitor in some featureless room. Even the
iconic penguin that reigns over all things Linux has a bit of a cuddly
paunch.
But while there's nothing particularly bleeding-edge about eating the
hamburger but not the bun, now that low-carb dieting has gone
mainstream, the diet does appear to hold a special attraction for
hackers, programmers and other close-to-the-machine dwellers. For some
geeks, the low-carb diet is itself a clever hack, a sneaky algorithm for
getting the body to do what you want it to do, a way of reprogramming
yourself. Programmers, who are used to making their computers serve
their will, are now finding that low-carb diets enable the same kind of
control over their bodies.
Advocating eating protein in the form of burgers and eggs, while
avoiding bread and pasta, as a way to lose weight is a diet plan that's
drawn ridicule and sneers from mainstream nutritionists since the early
1970s, when the now-deceased Dr. Atkins started promoting the idea. But
Dr. Atkins and other low-carb adherents argue that without an influx of
sugar and carbohydrates for quick energy, the body is forced to burn off
its fat. And the zealous advocates of the diet make this controversial
claim: that when your body gets into this fat-burning state, dieters can
actually eat more calories than they could on a low-fat diet, and still
lose weight.
Doctorow, who lost 75 pounds by cutting out carbohydrates, sees a
natural affinity between his brethren and the diet: "Read the
alt.support.diet.low-carb FAQ, and you'll find people attacking their
bodies like they would attack a logic board," he says. "Substitute
'faster bus speed' for 'metabolism,' and you've got something pretty
close to an overclocking FAQ, he adds, referring to a practice popular
with hardware hackers in which computer processors are tweaked so that
they run faster than their out-of-the-box speeds.
"The low-carb thing is essentially a way of forcing control over the
metabolism much like coders, geeks and hackers tweak their code and
config files to make their machines run smoother," writes Sean
Sosik-Hamor, a 27-year-old systems administrator for Pepper Computer, a
wi-fi start-up in Lexington, Mass., in an e-mail. Sosik-Hamor says he
lost more than 100 pounds through such dietary tweaking, a feat that
took him down from 330 to 222 pounds, and which he blogs about here.
As digital-rights attorney Mike Godwin, who lost more than 80 pounds by
cutting carbs, says, "It's like you're exploiting a security hole in
your own body." He's quoting hacker Ian Goldberg, who should know --
Goldberg is famous in hacker circles for breaking the encryption on
Netscape Navigator 1.1.
Since the LinuxWorld conference last year where Sifry caught the
low-carb virus, he's lost 70 pounds, his blood pressure has dropped 30
points and his overall cholesterol numbers have gone down. And while
he's reluctant to declare victory prematurely -- "I don't know where I'm
going to be in a year" -- he's glad he's discovered this "backdoor" into
his own body's workings. "All of a sudden," he muses, "[I've] found a
new metabolic pathway."
Chat with low-carb dieters about their regimen, and they will soon bring
up "ketosis" -- the state where your body is forced to burn off its fat
reserves. On dieting message boards, they trade strategies about how to
get to ketosis faster, stay in ketosis longer, and get back into it when
you get off track, with all the ardor of teenage stoners on a quest to
achieve and prolong the perfect high. Ketosis is their version of
dieter's nirvana, where the weight is just steadily falling off, when
your body is getting its energy from stored fat reserves instead of
carbohydrates.
"Atkins makes this connection between reducing the amount of carbs and
reducing the amount of fat storage," says Searls. "It works very cleanly
at a conceptual level. Technical people like technical prescriptions,
and Atkins offers them a pretty good technical prescription."
But look up "ketosis" in the dictionary, instead of on a dieting Web
site, and you'll find all sorts of uncomfortable words associated with
it, like "pathological" and "starvation." Oddly, the negative
connotations of the concept perversely make it more attractive to
hackers, who delight in using unexpected means to achieve a solution.
"The true definition of hacking is that of simple problem-solving, and
making something do a task that it wasn't designed to do," writes
Sosik-Hamor. "Ketosis is not a natural body state so the sheer thought
of intentionally utilizing ketosis for weight loss is appealing."
There's also a subversive element. Go low-carb, and you're going against
the dietary establishment, against the conventional diet wisdom from the
USDA's food pyramid. You're doing something that you're maybe not
supposed to do.
Mike Godwin started low-carb dieting back in 1998, when he weighed more
than 300 pounds. He says he was "a little bit ahead of the curve" on the
low-carb thing, since back then, all the dieters he knew were "still
cutting their steak into 3-ounce portions" and avoiding fat like it was
the blubbery enemy. He'd tried that, but found that the low-fat regimen
of the likes of diet guru Susan Powter "was like eating grass," and it
wasn't working for him.
"I'm perfectly willing to believe that what everyone knows is true is
wrong, or at least might be wrong for me," says Godwin. "I had known
about Atkins' popularity in the '70s. Because it was so counter to what
everyone was saying I should do, I thought: I'll try it."
Sure, if you eat fewer calories and exercise more you'll lose weight,
but if, like so many dieters, you're unable to follow that advice, who
cares if it's an airtight theory? "If that's science, then it's science
that has yet to produce a lot of results because American asses grow
rounder every day," says Doctorow. "If you ask people to reduce their
caloric intake and increase their exercise, you won't get a lot of good
results. It's like going around complaining that people have crappy
passwords."
"The hacker ethic is not necessarily being a formally trained engineer,
not necessarily being someone who understands the science. It's a
reverse-engineering perspective: Sometimes you're right and sometimes
you're wrong, but it's based on empiricism," says Doctorow. "That's kind
of the low-carb approach, which goes against the conventional wisdom
about how you do nutrition and weight loss."
Scientific studies sanctioning the approach are just starting to appear,
but there's a still a sense that one is tinkering with one's own body to
somewhat unknown ends. "Maybe it will make us all grow third arms and go
blind in 20 years," quips Doctorow. "It's sort of hard to tell. It
represents a kind of hacker's approach, grounded as it is in jack-legged
engineering rather than science."
The most controversial aspect of low-carb dieting -- which is only now
being studied -- is the claim that you can actually eat more calories on
a low-carb regime than you could on a low-fat one, and still lose
weight. To borrow some jargon from the world of engineering: There's the
possibility that you can actually run your body at a "specification" it
wasn't designed for, in order to burn off more fat.
"I firmly believe that the low-carb system used by Atkins is a perfect
example of hacking your body," writes Sosik-Hamor. "Massive reduction of
carbs and carefully designing a balanced diet allows you to safely push
the body into a state of ketosis and excrete fat out of the system
faster than the standard burn rate of 1 pound per 3,500 calories. When
in full induction mode I can eat 3,000 to 4,000 calories per day and
lose up to 4 pounds per week."
But Searls warns against taking the hacking metaphor too far.
Overclocking a computer processor has negative aspects that he believes
don't have parallels in the low-carb dieting world.
"I think on the downside of what that metaphor suggests is that you are
operating your body out of spec," says Searls. "Overclocking says that
your body is specced for a certain performance speed, and overclocking
it gets you a tradeoff between performance and heat, essentially."
"In a way, you are in fact burning off some of your body fat, and in
that respect the metaphor is accurate. It's not accurate in the sense
that you may be damaging your body in some way. It raises the suggestion
that maybe you're doing something a bit unhealthy. And I don't think
that's the case."
Godwin goes even further: "It might be that we're designed actually to
operate that way, instead of eating a whole bunch of processed carbs.
[With a low-carb diet] it actually may be that we're gearing our diets
to how we should be eating. It might be a feature, not a bug."
But it's also useful to remember that no matter how attractive the
metaphor, or the algorithm, dieting, like programming, is about doing
what works, not the latest hot theory.
"We are not machines," says Searls. "It helps techies sometimes to think
of their bodies as a machine, but it really comes down to whatever works
for you."
=========
X.
-- 
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - 
http://www.Mailgate.ORG

your own body."
ROTFL !!!
Comunque articolo interessante e divertente (magari forse solo per me che
sono un programmatore)
Xlater che lavoro fai ?
Ciao
Giorgio

 "come funziona?"
Beh, io sono un "quasi" ingegnere, e oltre alla frase "come funziona?"
ritengo abbastanza ingegneristica anche la frase "piano con i facili
entusiasmi".
Ecco perché da una parte mi piacciono alcuni aspetti dell'approccio low-carb
e ho anche fatto una dieta low-carb per dimagrire, e dall'altra mi da un po'
fastidio il voler vedere tutte rose e fiori nelle teorie "nuove" e tutta
me**a in quelle "vecchie".
Ciao
-- 
Sculler,   ICQ# 147722075
"Ove c'č molta luce, l'ombra č piů cupa"
"Le cose che amiamo, ci modellano"
                               Wolfgang Goethe

 wrote in message
news:Kxwpb.404825$
R32.13...@news2.tin.it

Sono ingegnere informatico.
Ho un passato nello sviluppo SW, da programmatore e capo progetto.
Ora invece sono nel marketing, ma sempre nel settore ICT.
Xlater


 me**a in quelle "vecchie".
Ecco perché sei un "quasi"! :PPPPPPPP
Scherzi a parte, mi ritengo un "moderato" io stesso, e sono
tendenzialmente portato alla sintesi di approcci diversi, piuttosto
che all'estremismo integralista. Tanto è vero che la mia scelta
personale integra alcune indicazioni della Zona, alcuni concetti
della Metabolica, e altri spunti rubacchiati qui e la di altri
approcci low-carb.
Il problema è che mettere insieme il cosiddetto "nuovo" (che poi non è
per niente "nuovo") e il cosiddetto "vecchio" (che in realtà è solo
lo sconvolgimento operato appena una 30ina di anni fa, da parte
di nutrizionisti prezzolati, al modo in cui l'umanità ha mangiato
praticamente sempre e praticamente ovunque) è molto difficile.
Se c'è anche solo qualcosa di vero e di giusto nell'approccio low-carb,
significa per forza che le teorie vecchie sono tutte ca****e, o quasi
(si salva davvero poco).
Non si può fare una sintesi tra Tolomeo e Copernico.
