The dumbest article on weight loss you’ll read this week

Lindsay Beyerstein points us to this piece in which Slate managing editor Rachael Larimore announces to the world that she’s available to purchase your fradulent goods and services. The short version is that Larimore recently decided, in the name of shedding “10 to 12 pounds” for her 20th high school reunion, to submit herself to a demonstrably insane diet that requires its marks patients to bang human chorionic gonadotropin on a daily basis while hacking their caloric intake to .5 kcal/day — roughly one-quarter of what someone like Larimore should be consuming — for several weeks. For those keeping score at home, hCG is a hormone derived from the urine of pregnant women and is used in the treatment of infertility; during the 1950s, however, a physician in Rome (Albert Simeons) became convinced that it could be used to fool the bodies of obese young boys into mimicking the early stages of pregnancy. He developed a notion that hCG basically “freed up” adipose tissue so it could be burnt off, since (by his theory) the recipient’s body — believing itself to be pregnant — needed the energy to, say, develop a placenta. Undeterred by the batshittery of his theory, Simeons produced an entire weight-loss regimen based on it. The catch was that Simeons happened to combine the hCG “treatments” with a starvation-level diet, so the fact that his subjects lost weight was less than remarkable.

Paul noted a few months back that the diet is essentially indistinguishable from anorexia, but Larimore seems convinced that her behavior isn’t pathological or dangerous because her OB-GYN — whom she actually names in the article — tells her that it’s completely fine to live on two apples, a handful of vegetables, a bowl of spinach and a few slivers of “lean protein” each day, so long as your Bataan Death March diet is accompanied by subcutaneous injections of a hormone that has never been shown to provide any specific weight-loss benefit whatsoever.

The entire piece is a masterful defense of consumer gullibility and scientific illiteracy — indeed, it’s so poorly reasoned that I’m not even confident the Huffington Post would accept it. As Lindsay points out, Larimore simply doesn’t care that no scientific data exist to support the diet she’s undertaken; but her doctor (who is perfectly happy to separate Larimore from her “iPad money”) recommends it, so who is she to argue? After all, there are results to contend with! Specifically, Larimore congratulates herself for losing 18 pounds in 6 weeks — a pace that well exceeds all the clinical guidelines for weight loss, especially for someone who claims (as the author does) to be interested in shedding a dozen pounds at most.

So to sum up: Larimore embarked on a scientifically-baseless crash diet, lost an inadvisably-large amount of weight in a short period of time by creating enormous calorie deficits, and somehow emerged from the experience feeling “sane.” Never mind that someone could achieve the same results by eating 500 calories and reading nothing but Instapundit every day for six weeks. Though I suppose if presented with the option of reading Glenn Reynolds or shoving off-label hormone treatments into your arm, the choice is kind of a wash . . .

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