Defining Dieting and Thesis Statements

Defining Dieting and Thesis Statements

Defining Dieting

When addressing the question “Is dieting a fool’s errand?” we have to define what we mean by dieting and look at motives.

If we are defining dieting as a fad diet, a crash diet, or a self-punishing diet that can’t be sustained over the long haul, then the argument is too easy to write: Of course, dieting is a fool’s errand.

On the other hand, the transition from junk and processed foods to whole foods, which won’t make you necessarily lose weight but is by all accounts an excellent way to eat, is a more reasonable type of diet worth examining for your essay. 

Motivation

Then we have to look at motivation. Do we quest for health or to be an Instagram star like the Liver King, an Instagram star who by all accounts takes PEDS? 

Body Dysmorphia

If we are crash dieting so we can look like an Instagram model, then most likely our goal is not realistic and the deprivations to achieve that goal cannot be sustained, so again such a diet is a fool’s errand.

To aim for the Instagram Hot Bod Look is to go down the rabbit hole of body dysmorphia where no amount of slenderness or muscularity can measure up to an unrealistic ideal. 

As an aside, Instagram is causing millions of people to aspire to look the same as analyzed in Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker essay, “The Age of the Instagram Face.” The “Duck Lips” facial look is now ubiquitous. As we read in Tolentino’s essay:

Ideals of female beauty that can only be met through painful processes of physical manipulation have always been with us, from tiny feet in imperial China to wasp waists in nineteenth-century Europe. But contemporary systems of continual visual self-broadcasting—reality TV, social media—have created new disciplines of continual visual self-improvement. Social media has supercharged the propensity to regard one’s personal identity as a potential source of profit—and, especially for young women, to regard one’s body this way, too. In October, Instagram announced that it would be removing “all effects associated with plastic surgery” from its filter arsenal, but this appears to mean all effects explicitly associated with plastic surgery, such as the ones called “Plastica” and “Fix Me.” Filters that give you Instagram Face will remain. For those born with assets—natural assets, capital assets, or both—it can seem sensible, even automatic, to think of your body the way that a McKinsey consultant would think about a corporation: identify underperforming sectors and remake them, discard whatever doesn’t increase profits and reorient the business toward whatever does.

Smith first started noticing the encroachment of Instagram Face about five years ago, “when the lip fillers started,” he said. “I’d do someone’s makeup and notice that there were no wrinkles in the lips at all. Every lipstick would go on so smooth.” It has made his job easier, he noted, archly. “My job used to be to make people look like that, but now people come to me already looking like that, because they’re surgically enhanced. It’s great. We used to have to contour you to give you those cheeks, but now you just went out and got them.”

There was something strange, I said, about the racial aspect of Instagram Face—it was as if the algorithmic tendency to flatten everything into a composite of greatest hits had resulted in a beauty ideal that favored white women capable of manufacturing a look of rootless exoticism. “Absolutely,” Smith said. “We’re talking an overly tan skin tone, a South Asian influence with the brows and eye shape, an African-American influence with the lips, a Caucasian influence with the nose, a cheek structure that is predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern.” Did Smith think that Instagram Face was actually making people look better? He did. “People are absolutely getting prettier,” he said. “The world is so visual right now, and it’s only getting more visual, and people want to upgrade the way they relate to it.”

This was an optimistic way of looking at the situation. I told Smith that I couldn’t shake the feeling that technology is rewriting our bodies to correspond to its own interests—rearranging our faces according to whatever increases engagement and likes. “Don’t you think it’s scary to imagine people doing this forever?” I asked.

“Well, yeah, it’s obviously terrifying,” he said.

***

The Instagram Face and the Instagram Body

However, to argue against a fad diet with the purpose of looking like an Instagram model is too easy to be an exercise in critical thinking.

Where the argument gets difficult and worthwhile as a critical thinking exercise is when we look at the proposition of changing from an unhealthy diet to a healthy diet for the purpose of losing weight for health reasons.

 

Losing Weight and Eating Healthy Foods Are Not Foolish Goals

Losing weight is not a foolish goal. There are a lot of people who for health reasons need to lose weight. A big gut spells metabolic syndrome, which is a precursor to diabetes, stroke, and heart attack. It is no fool’s errand to try to change one’s eating for the purpose of having a slimmer gut and general overall health. 

Everyone can agree that to be healthier, we should not eat processed foods, we should not eat sugar, and we should become food literate so that we know the difference between processed foods and whole foods. 

Everyone can agree that transitioning from processed foods to whole foods will make you healthier and probably result in some weight loss.

But even if you eat only whole foods, you will find weight management extremely difficult because even whole foods are a drug, our body has a SetPoint, losing weight and keeping the weight off is a full-time job that can be too exhausting, and dieting can be a social liability resulting in ostracism from family and friends. 

It’s great to go off of processed foods and eat only whole foods. But even whole foods can do what processed foods do: Feed our emotions, become addictive, and be used as a drug though probably not to the same degree as processed foods that are larded with fat, sugar, and salt.

Therefore, there is nuance in this debate.

Personal Example

I’ll give you an example. Ninety-five percent of the foods I eat are whole, not processed, foods, but there are whole foods that I love that I overeat: I love bananas and apples with peanut butter. I could easily eat two bananas and apple slices smothered with gobs of peanut butter throughout the day. I could easily bulk up snacking on bananas and peanut butter to the weight that I would be if I were eating processed foods.

Food that we like is a drug. Food becomes a reward. Food becomes a way of managing emotions like depression, anxiety, and the gnawing emptiness that makes us needy for some kind of gratification. 

Set Point

Not only is food addictive, but our bodies also have something called Set Point, which is the weight our body wants to be regardless of our dieting.

The other thing about losing weight is that it is a full-time job, and eventually you’ll find the responsibilities of life infringing on your all-consuming job of dieting and running for hours on the treadmill like a hamster. 

The fourth factor about dieting is that you become a social liability. You go to a restaurant and go, “Is this gluten-free? How many grams of fat?” Then you go to family events, and you have your frozen garden burger in a baggie. “Hey, Uncle Wimpie, can you put this garden burger on the grill?” You become a drag, a buzzkill. You’re the dude who’s always dieting, taking selfies, and posting about your new amazing salad on Instagram. 

I will with clear eyes tell you to renounce all processed foods and eat only whole foods, I will tell you to become food literate so you can know the difference between processed foods and whole foods, and I can tell you that you will be much better off for doing so.

But I can’t promise you that you’ll lose weight to your desired goal because there are whole foods that can serve as a drug, become addicting, and pile on the daily calories to the point that we sabotage our weight management.

Weight management is tough because even healthy food can provide comfort, feed our emotional needs, and in the end become a drug that compromises our weight-management goals.

Should you eat whole healthy foods and become food literate so you know the difference between whole and processed foods? Yes.

Sample Thesis Statements

 

Defining a thesis:

 

A thesis is a meaningful claim or argument that is the central focus of your essay, that you can defend with credible information, that will outline an essay of 1,200 words or more, that is challenging enough to be appropriate for college-level writing, that has high stakes, and that defies simple analysis. 

 

• The thesis or claim is the central focus of your essay. It is the reason you are writing your essay. To stray from your thesis is to betray your original intention. 
• The thesis is based on an informed opinion based on credible research. Your research has been peer reviewed and is rooted in reality. To look to “research” based on a fever swamp of unproven conspiracies and misinformation is to present an essay that is disconnected from reality. We live in an age where even facts and reality itself are disputed. This is a very specific crisis called the epistemic crisis. You can read about this crisis in Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge. 
• A strong thesis may have reasons contained in the sentence. These reasons are also called mapping components. They outline your essay’s body paragraphs. Observe the following example: Working from the home is more viable for most companies because working from the home saves your workers from commute time, doesn’t expose workers to illnesses resulting in lost work time, reduces work theft opportunities, reduces company expenses such as heat, AC, lighting, etc., and takes advantage of the technology that’s cheaply available to make your employees’ home office an efficient business office. 
• The thesis can generate an essay that is 1,200 words or more means the thesis is demonstrable: You can defend the thesis with reasoning, logic, examples, and research. 
• Your thesis has high stakes. You present an argument and the listener or reader doesn’t feel compelled to say “So what?” Rather, you have chosen a topic that is relevant, vital, and urgent to the human condition. 
• Your thesis defies simple analysis. You are avoiding the obvious and factual such as “What the world needs now is love.” Rather, you are focusing on debatable topics. 

 

Sample Thesis Statements

 

Sample #1 offers no mapping components and may or may not be demonstrable:

 

Suppose your Western Diet, an endless buffet of sugar, processed food, and sodium, is presenting you with various health afflictions that are so extreme that you have a variety of morbidity factors. In that case, you have to push Harriet Brown’s pessimism aside and manipulate your eating environment and recalibrate your eating habits in such a way that your diet is not a fool’s errand but a necessary step in saving your life. 

Sample #2 with mapping components

If you’re discouraged by your lackluster build and pudgy contours and aspire to look like a chiseled Instagram model, you will most likely find that your austere dietary program will give you short-term results, but in the long run, your diet will be a fool’s errand because willpower can only last so long, environmental and social pressures to indulge will break you, high-density-calorie foods are in abundance, and sugary, fatty foods are an irresistible drug that provides an escape from the stresses of modern life.  

Sample #3 with mapping components

While it’s true that long-term adherence to a proper diet is difficult and that sugary, fatty foods can indeed become an irresistible drug from the stresses of modern life, I propose that a healthy whole food diet over the long haul is more viable than the self-destructive Western Diet because a healthy whole food diet can be adopted through habit, economic wellbeing and prove to be necessary for the fight against depression, diabetes, and other comorbidity factors. 

Sample #4 with mapping components

While Harriet Brown in “The Weight of the Evidence” makes many compelling and persuasive points, her essay suffers from a lack of persuasion because of problems in ethos, logos, and pathos.

Sample #5 without mapping components is probably demonstrable. 

While Harriet Brown’s “The Weight of the Evidence” suffers problems in ethos, logos, and pathos, her main argument about the futility of dieting remains insightful, compelling, and persuasive.

Sample #6 with mapping components 

While Harriet Brown’s tone is a bit glum and some of her studies seem cherry-picked, she nonetheless demonstrates persuasively that dieting is a fool’s errand because of unrealistic societal expectations, money-driven skinny aesthetics of a fraudulent dieting industry, the inevitable failure of willpower, and biological impediments. 

Sample #7 with mapping components

While Harriet Brown makes many insightful and irrefutable points, I find her essay offensive and harmful because she cherry-picks studies to support her claim that being fat is not a health risk, she doesn’t leave nuance in the realm of healthy eating as an alternative to throwing care to the wind and eating “whatever,” she doesn’t offer any success stories to provide a counterbalance to her doom and gloom, and she offers no encouragement for at least eating healthy whole foods so that as a whole her essay leaves a sour and putrid taste in my mouth.