Showing posts with label Diet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Diet. Show all posts

Chuck the XXXX Diet! Go Random!



The other day I ran into this aunt of mine and she said, "Betaaaa..You are always in control of your waist size? Do you workout or diet?" ( For the uninitiated, I belong to a obese south Indian brahmin family. Obese-ness has been forever considered a sign of wealth in our part of the world. However, the new wave of health & fitness has dawned upon my good old Hydy, and these days it is common to see joggers and walkers at 4 am in the morning. The numbers are very small compared to a more cosmopolitan crowd in Mumbai or Delhi. )

What interested me about the comment was the word "diet"? Do they really work? And, If they do, what is the best one for a statistically average person? When I say "Statistically Average Person", I mean a person who lies in the ballpark of the mean of a gaussian on fitness-index.( 5th or 6th decile for the statistics-aware)

It got me thinking, or more appropriately googling. So I came across various diets online for example the Atkins diet, Banting Diet, Stone Age Diet, Air Force Diet etc. Most of them are Low-Carb Diets i.e. they are low in carbohydrates. When the concept of dieting was first introduced diets were also low in fiber which frequently led to constipation. So the appropriate cover-up was made and today most diets are rich in fiber. There is a lot of skepticism regarding the benefit of any of these diets.

Since every one has a diet named after themselves today I create the "Ram-nid Diet" (I like the way it sounds. Close to Random). So, what follows is my hypothesis:-

Make a list of all the cuisines of the region you hail from. For instance, if you are South Indian, the cuisines would include Andhra Food, Tamil Cuisine, Malayali Cuisine, Udipi Cuisine and some smaller cuisines.

Run them through a "random generator" after you categorize the food items into breakfast, lunch, dinner. (More granular segmentation is necessary in reality i.e. appetizer, maincourse etc. But, for the sake of argument lets simplify the example.) Pick the menu suggested by the random machine and eat it.

This encompasses the "Random Diet".

I personally have been using the Random Diet for years now. I just eat whatever I come across. I try not to like or dislike any of the food-items. In other words I do not go by taste. I just eat what happens to be available at my disposal when I am hungry. And to be frank, its worked out for me. So I want to first see proof that XXXX Diet does better than my Ramnid diet.

I am shocked that when I google "Random Diet" or "Probabilistic Diet" no work has been done in this area. Because I believe its very important to establish that some strategy A(in this case a diet) is better than strategy-random to be of any real value. However there is no research in this area so far. (At least I could not come across any research/documentation regarding this.)

Since random is such a preferred mechanism by nature in many scenarios, I think one should give a serious thought to the Random Diet idea and try to reason the soundness of it or dismiss it.

So any of you guys want to go on a Ramnid Diet?








Phiction: No entry for Me

Chapter 1

Part1 Part6

Part2 Part7

Part3 Part8

Part4 Part9

Part5 Part10

Digg it!!!!

Stumble

Follow me on Facebook.. Some motivation always helps :P

Tweets

    follow me on Twitter