In the past I've always followed what I call the "Thermodynamics Diet", which is, in its entirety: "Eat less, exercise more". Basically, it's all about energy balance, so if you consume fewer calories and expend more, you should lose weight. I can't prove this, but my strong intuition is that everything else, including details about what kind of calories you eat and when you eat them, is what we in the science biz would call a second-order effect -- much less significant than the big, main effect of how many calories (of whatever form) you eat vs. how many you expend.
The No S diet is very profligate with words by comparison, coming in at over three times as many words as the Thermodynamics Diet!
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No S really does seem to be working for me, though I haven't in fact been keeping track of my weight. My clothes feel a bit looser in places, and in general I feel better about how I'm eating, and that's all I'm really after. Snacking in particular was a huge problem for me, and that's now under control. (I'm even seeing the promised S-day spillover: the other day, on an S-day, I went to eat something between meals, and it struck me as an odd thing to be doing. Don't get me wrong, I still ate it, but it gave me pause, and I didn't eat much.)
Oh, and one more thermodynamics comment. Someone once told me that eating an extra hundred calories a day would cause you to gain 10 pounds over the course of a year. This does seem to check out: 3500 calories is the widely accepted figure for the energy content of a pound of fat, so 365x100/3500 = 10.4. I used to find this incredibly depressing, since you can get an extra hundred calories by eating a couple pieces of fruit! But more recently, I've realized that it really should be considered as a good thing, if you just flip it around: if you eliminate 100 calories a day from your diet, you should *lose* ten pounds in a year. Homeostasis is a razor's edge, but one that cuts both ways.
Anyway, I just wanted to say hello. Thanks for being such an active community, these boards make for some interesting reading.
Cheers,
Dave