When I wrote the other day about the hormone hypothesis for weight gain and loss, I referred a few times to the work of Gary Taubes, Science journalist and researcher. I’ve made no secret of the fact that Taubes, in no small part, led to me losing 140 pounds.

Taubes makes a convincing case that dietary science has gotten some fundamental things entirely backward during the past several decades. The Overcoming Bias blog sums it up well:

For several decades, it has been the conventional wisdom that dietary fat (and especially saturated fat) contributes to obesity, heart disease, and cancer. Judging from Taubes’ exhaustive research — indeed, I’d be surprised if any other book examined bias within a particular scientific field in such detail — the conventional wisdom was based on unreliable and slender evidence that, once established and institutionalized in government funding, set a pattern of confirmation bias by which further research was judged (or ignored).

If you want the full-fledged scientific and historical case, you should really read Good Calories, Bad Calories. Taubes later condensed the book’s most important points for a lay readership in Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. It’s all worth digging into.

You can also see the basic argument in handy video form:

Here are my food photos for day 20:

Monday, Feb. 3

I woke up at 9:25 a.m. (after heading to bed at 1:55 a.m.).

Breakfast: 10:40 a.m. | 8 oz. beef, 2 beets, frisee endive, 1/2 sweet onion, 4 cloves garlic, 2 Tbsp. coconut oil, herbs & spices

Lunch: 2:00 p.m. | 4 oz. prociutto, 2 oz. kale chips

Dinner: 8:45 p.m. | 8 oz. ground beef, 1/6 bunch broccoli, 1 1/2 stalks celery, 1/2 yellow squash, 1/2 sweet onion, 4 cloves garlic, 2 Tbsp. coconut oil, herbs & spices

I ate half of the contents of the skillet below, saving the other half for breakfast.