Book: The Economist's Diet by Christopher Payne and Rob Barnett

Payne, Christopher, and Rob Barnett. 2018. The Economist's Diet: The Surprising Formula for Losing Weight and Keeping It Off. Touchstone Books.

The book does not really provide a diet at all, in the sense of lists of things to eat or lists of calories to count. Rather, it describes the rules of thumb that a couple of humble and entertaining economists came up with in the course of their respective weight loss adventures. Some bits of advice will not surprise: simply eating less plays a big role in their success. They frame the eating less as having one "regular" (they call it square) meal each day and two small-to-medium meals, rather than three squares. Reasonable enough, and the next square meal is never too far away. They say not to drink your calories, except beer. But what if you are a member of the wine economists' association? And they recommend weighing yourself every day. Indeed, they ascribe great power and insight to the daily ups and downs that they study via their informal mental time series analysis. I was less convinced by this part; my sense has always been that day-to-day fluctuations in weight have too much other stuff in them to justify much in the way of substantive conclusions. Maybe you have to be a macro to buy into that part of the scheme.

Fun stuff and an easy read, plus a couple of useful mind games to play on yourself that I had not heard of before; if the title sounds interesting, you will probably enjoy it.

Amazon page.
Barnes and Noble page.