Kesher Talk

The low-carb hack. Does this sound like anyone we know? Great geek metaphors:

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.

. . . says [Cory] 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."

. . . "I think on the downside of what that metaphor suggests is that you are operating your body out of spec," says [Doc] 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."

None of the geeks in this article mention exercise, which is a crucial part of a successful low-carb diet, and I've seen some weight-training programs that involve just as much tech tweaking as diet plans. In any case, hundreds of morbidly obese people seem to be morphing into height-weight proportionate people, which can only be a good thing.

posted by Judith @ 12/21/2003 01:48:35 PM