"It's like you're exploiting a security hole in your own body."

[robotech_master]

Read an amusing article on Salon (premium account or ad-view required) just now about low-carb dieting and geeks. It's not the fact of the low-carb dieting that's amusing...I've heard that Atkins can actually work pretty well. It's the way that the geeks who are doing it (including some high-profile geeks like BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow) see it in terms of geekly metaphors like "hacking" or "overclocking" your own body.

Doctorow, who lost 75 pounds by cutting out carbohydrates, sees a natural affinity between his brethren and the diet: "Read the alt.support.diet.low-carb FAQ, and you'll find people attacking their bodies like they would attack a logic board," he says. "Substitute 'faster bus speed' for 'metabolism,' and you've got something pretty close to an overclocking FAQ, he adds, referring to a practice popular with hardware hackers in which computer processors are tweaked so that they run faster than their out-of-the-box speeds.

Isn't it funny how people tend to see things in terms of familiar metaphors? And isn't it such an amusing metaphor?