If you want to lose fat in 2014, how about we do it together? I need to work off some Danish butter cookies.
Last year, the Lift team helped me test The Slow-Carb Diet® with 3,500 readers. The result: 84% of people lost weight and the average weight loss was 8.6 pounds over four weeks. Many people lost more than 20 pounds. This didn’t surprise me, given thecase studies of people who’ve lost 100+ pounds.
Working alongside UC Berkeley, Lift is now launching the largest study of popular diets ever performed. You can choose from 10 different diets (Paleo, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc.), and the study includes control groups and a randomized trial. The Slow-Carb Diet is one option.
I will be participating, cheering you on…and advising. Here’s what you should do today:
- Download the Lift app for goal tracking and motivation. Lift now has Android and web versions, along with the original iPhone version.
- Visit the Quantified Diet homepage to choose your diet, or to be randomly assigned to one.
- If you choose the Slow-Carb Diet, join the community at 4HBTalk orReddit for support. I will pop in every once in a while to check things out. I’ll be following the diet with you, in addition to using biochemical cocktails I’ll share later.
- If you want the full monty, get The 4-Hour Body. You can lose a ton of weight without it, but the details in the book will prevent you from stalling and make everything faster.
For more background on this study, I asked Tony Stubblebine, CEO of Lift, to tell the story. Here it is! It’s a quick read, and I suggest it…
Enter Tony
A year ago, we ran 3,500 readers of Tim’s blog through a four-week study of the Slow-Carb Diet, tracking their progress through Lift.
The results were amazing: 84% of people who stuck to the diet lost weight and the average weight loss was 8.6 pounds over four weeks. Those stats are crazy, right? Some people lose 100+ lbs going Slow-Carb, but I never dreamed that people’s success rate would be so consistent.
After seeing the results, I wondered whether people fail to adopt healthy habits due to lack of independently testing. Getting people to change isn’t just about giving good advice; it’s also about giving them confidence in the advice. Our study showed that Slow-Carb definitely works. But what about the rest of the diet world?
As soon as we published the Slow-Carb Diet results, a young researcher at UC Berkeley reached out. The proposal: that we turn the Slow-Carb Diet study into a full blown scientific research project, or, as he coined it, “The Manhattan Project of diet research.”
Tim is unique, in that he had the vision and the guts to put his diet to the test. Very few (probably zero) other diet authors have tried this. What if we could replicate this on an epic scale with other approaches? Real objective data?
Unfortunately, academia doesn’t move fast enough to keep up with popular diets. By the time a study comes out, we’ve all moved on to the next thing. The research that we did on The 4-Hour Body was pioneering in its speed. Tim and I conceived the study in October, ran it in November, and published the results in December.
Taking that rapid, crowd-sourced approach to diet experimentation would be like dropping a nuclear bomb on the existing diet industry. This sort of research could completely change our notion of what works…and for whom.
Our UC Berkeley advisors had just one concern: we had to get more rigorous about our experimental design.
This second study, which we’re calling The Quantified Diet Project, includes a comparison of ten different approaches to healthy diet, a control group, and another group going through a randomized trial.
With your help, we can start getting scientifically-valid measurements for all popular diet advice. What works and what doesn’t? The results might surprise you.
When you join, you’ll be presented with ten approaches to healthy diet, along with two control groups. All of these approaches have been vetted for healthiness, but you’ll have a chance to opt out of any that don’t fit your lifestyle.
And, of course, if you are a strong believer in The Slow-Carb Diet, you can go straight to that option (Slow-Carb obviously works).
This is a chance to lose weight, increase your health, boost your energy, and make a real contribution to science. Join the Quantified Diet Study today! It could change your life and change how scientific studies are performed. Win-win.