Authorial Presence
After 35 years of teaching college writing, I am convinced that the highest compliment I can put on students’ essays is that they wrote with authorial presence, which I would define as a confident writing voice that curates the argument, narrative, or any other kind of exposition with a distinctive point of view. This point of view rests on five major pillars: The student writes from a philosophical position that developing an essay as an academic exercise is morally repugnant; rather, writing an essay attempts to create a greater understanding of a murky issue that is relevant to the human condition.
Secondly, the authorial presence is generated from an informed opinion in which the writer did her due diligence, studying credible sources, and exploring opposite sides of a position before reaching her conclusion. Third, her authorial presence, or writing voice, makes it clear that living in the world of ideas is not an austere, boring place but rather one of the highest realms of human existence, the privilege of being engaged in the Cafe Society of the Mind. This Cafe Society of the Mind is not a place for smug complacency and mutual praise. Rather, we challenge each other. As such, we arrive at the fourth pillar of authorial presence: The writer disrupts our assumptions about life and ourselves by challenging us with contrarian ideas, or to use Kafka’s words, her writing “is the ax that breaks the frozen ocean.”
Finally, over time her authorial presence melds with her personality so that her speaking persona and her writing persona both come from the core of her being. In other words, her intellectual life has replaced the embryonic person she was before starting her intellectual journey. Her authorial presence reflects the different person she has become and this different person, unlike her previous iteration, is strongly defined, distinctive, and stamps her signature in everything she does.
The strength of her persona reminds us of Oscar Wilde’s famous, often misinterpreted adage. “The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second one is, no one has yet discovered.” I would argue this “pose” is authorial presence. But it is not the hollow pose of a dandy. Rather, it is a distinctive persona built with blood, sweat, and tears.
In Your Thesis, Be Sure to Address One of the Assigned Readings with a Signal Phrase
A lot of you are writing that dieting can be done with hard work and professional guidance (a sound, demonstrable thesis) and a lot of you are writing that dieting can often be a fool’s errand because of the physical and mental problems that result (also a sound, demonstrable thesis), but your thesis doesn’t have sufficient context nor does it address the assignment unless you use a signal phrase in which you respond to one of the authors in our assignment. Let me give you two examples:
Example of a Student Using a Signal Phrase to Disagree with One of the Authors
While Harriet Brown makes many compelling points in her essay “The Weight of the Evidence,” I would counter her point that dieting is a futile quest because a healthy approach to dieting can work if we take the focus off the Hot Instagram Bod and instead strive for health, if we increase our protein to stave off our appetites, if we develop a baseline of nutritional literacy, and if we can enjoy the health benefits from our weight loss.
Example of a Student Using a Signal Phrase to Agree with One of the Authors
While I’ll concede that a healthy approach to dieting can work for some people, I find that Harriet Brown makes a convincing case in “The Weight of the Evidence” that dieting is rooted in an unrealistic body image, fueled by the greedy weight-loss industry, doomed to wreak disappointment, failure, and low self-esteem on us, and to be responsible for an array of metabolic and hormonal disruptions so that we’re worse off than before our dieting quests.
Do You Want to be a Brawler or a Peace-Maker in Your Argumentative Tone?
In argumentation, we decide upon a rhetorical voice. We can be aggressive brawlers who take no prisoners in our argumentation or we can be peace-makers who try to arrive at a point of common understanding. One style is not better than the other. They are different, and both have good and bad points. The aggressive style can come off as being brash and arrogant, but it is very powerful writing when done well. The more polite style can show more decorum and show humility, but it may come across as being too tepid and boring.
Example of a Counterargument-Rebuttal That Is Aggressive and Forceful
Striving to eat a clean diet of whole foods, mostly plant-based, while eating 150 grams of protein a day and abstaining from sugar and alcohol is by no means a fool’s errand. Such a nutritional regimen could very well save one’s life. Opponents to my call for healthy eating are too focused on the folly and self-destruction of what I call Social Media Fad Dieters, those misguided souls who starve themselves, look for gimmicks and silver bullets and get hustled into buying supplements they don’t need, and gaining all their weight back after finding they cannot adhere to their crash course in weight loss. But these nay-sayers such as Harriet Brown make the fatal mistake of making the claim that just because 95% of aspiring dieters don’t do their due diligence and find a way to enjoy healthy eating that we should surrender a life of good health and happiness and resign ourselves to a life of slovenliness and gluttony. Harriet Brown and her ilk seem to be making the logical fallacy of Two Rights Make a Wrong: Since crash dieters are wrong in their approach and fail miserably, then it’s somehow okay to give up on a healthy approach to eating. Harriet Brown can give us several reasons for why diets fail, but she doesn’t give a hint at eating healthy. To be sure, I agree with her that unrealistic expectations and crash diets are bad, but there are joys, pleasures, and good health that we can enjoy when we can learn to eat clean whole foods rather than sob and feast on the pity party of learned helplessness.
Counterargument-Rebuttal with a Peace-Maker Tone
I would like to first make it clear that I agree with my opponents such as Harriet Brown that fad dieting doesn’t work and that the diet industry makes profits pounding us over the head with messages that we are never skinny enough. I would also like to make it clear that I agree with my opponents that losing weight and keeping it off permanently on any kind of diet is most likely futile and what could be called a “fool’s errand.” Where I’d like to differ with my opponents, though, is that I don’t think we should throw away the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. What is the baby? Healthy eating. And what is healthy eating? Consuming whole foods, 150 grams of protein a day, and abstaining from sugar and alcohol. Will such a regimen guarantee the kind of weight loss that will make us worthy of being Instagram models? Likely not. But will such a dietary regimen make us look and feel better? Indeed, it will, which is why I am not so mired in despair as my adversaries who seem so discouraged by the fad diets that they may have been over-eager to dismiss the healthy-eating diets as well.
For the last few semesters, my critical thinking students have been grappling with the argument: Is losing weight a fool’s errand?
Here’s what I’ve learned:
- Most students themselves have dieted or they know friends and family who have dieted for the purposes of gaining self-esteem, conforming to an unrealistic body aesthetic, improving their health, or taking orders from a doctor who has warned them that they are dangerously obese.
- Many students have horrid tales of aspiring dieters getting exploited and manipulated by the profiteering diet industry, which promises fast, unrealistic results and tries to make their clients dependent on their products.
- Most students know someone who tried the Single Food diet: eating nothing but bananas, potatoes, cabbage soup, etc., which surely is not sustainable.
- Most students find the losing-weight quest to be a Shame and Anxiety Dungeon where failure to adhere to some Strict Eating Orthodoxy banishes them to a life of shame and misery so acute that the diet cannot be sustained for long before people suffer a nervous breakdown.
- Some students have identified a Pathological Diet Culture based on neurosis, paranoia, narcissism, and addiction.
- Some students have smartly distinguished this Pathological Diet Culture from a Healthy Whole Foods Culture in which people emphasize eating whole foods over processed foods, but they don’t freak out when they have an occasional cheat meal.
- Some students have smartly rejected both extremes of dieting: Strict Orthodox Dieting on one hand and Nihilistic Throw-Care-to-the-Wind Gluttony Diet on the other and in rejecting both extremes, these students have embraced a common sense emphasis on whole and healthy foods with more emphasis on health than body weight.
Willpower Is Not the Problem; It’s Neuroscience
Metabolic Suppression
In Sandra Aamodt’s essay, “Why You Can’t Lose Weight,” she observes that we usually fail to lose weight, not from a lack of willpower, but because of neuroscience, which stacks the cards against us. By neuroscience, she is referring to “metabolic suppression,” which slows down our metabolism so we can be our body’s desired weight, what is called set point.
Ironically, the more effective you are at losing weight, the more your brain “declares a starvation state of emergency” and fights for you to gain your weight back plus even more than before. As a result, most dieters go through the yo-yo effect.
Dieting Doesn’t So Much Make You Fat as Being Fat Makes You Diet
One of the more salient points neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt makes is that you don’t go on a diet, lose some weight temporarily, and then get even more fat in the long-term; that is faulty causation. What happens is that fat people are more likely to go on a diet in the first place, so it’s not the diet that makes you fat. Being fat is what makes you fat. Some people’s bodies simply “want to be fat.” That is a hard and painful truth.
But Elite Athletes “Get Ripped”
Some will argue against Aamodt and say, “But what about elite athletes? They go on diets, cut weight, get ripped, and keep their weight off. What about them?” Aamodt observes wisely that the difference is that elite athletes are not fat to begin with. They don’t have the fat gene, so to speak, so they don’t have the chemistry that is going to make a diligent effort to constantly gain weight. But this is only partly true.
Excessive Dieting Can Make Even Elite Athletes Fat
However, Aamodt goes on to say that elite athletes are not out of the woods, so to speak. They can actually reprogram their bodies to be fat by excess dieting. As she writes: “Yet a 2006 study found that elite athletes who competed for Finland in such weight-conscious sports were three times more likely to be obese by age 60 than their peers who competed in other sports.”
A Counterintuitive Solution: Don’t Obsess Over Your Body
Aamodt makes the salient argument that we should not obsess over our body and our body weight. This obsession is a curse. If we can free ourselves from the bondage of self-obsession, we may be able to come up with sane strategies to manage our weight. As a case study, teenage girls with poor body images were counseled to not obsess over their unrealistic body ideals and self-obsession. As a result, they enjoyed better weight management than their counterparts.
As Aamodt writes: “In a randomized trial, the eBody Project, an online program to fight eating disorders by reducing girls’ desire to be thin, led to less dieting and also prevented future weight gain. Girls who participated in the program saw their weight remain stable over the next two years, while their peers without the intervention gained a few pounds.”
Why Dieting Is a Curse
Aamodt makes the cogent argument that dieting is a curse. For one, dieting leads to stress, and stress creates “fat hormones,” resulting in weight gain. For two, dieting leads to 12 times greater risk for binge eating.
Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
Aamodt, a neuroscientist, brings a lot of credibility to her argument. This credibility in a critical thinking class is called ethos.
Her argument is clear, logical, and easy to follow. It therefore achieves what we call logos in a critical thinking class.
Finally, she uses her own personal experience with dieting to bring more emotional power and sympathy to her topic. To amp up the emotion and sympathy in an argument is to achieve what is called pathos in a critical thinking class.
Aamodt’s Recommendations
Aamodt is not telling us to say, “The hell with it. Diets only make my condition worse, so I should throw care to the wind, and pig out on whatever I want.” Here’s what she is saying:
- Don’t deprive yourself of food that you really want because your brain will rebel and cause you to binge. It’s better to eat your “cheats” occasionally and in moderation than to be a binge monster.
- Don’t obsess over yourself. One way to stop obsessing over your body is to stop weighing yourself. Another way is to rethink your desire to have a “hot bod for Instagram.” How much joy and satisfaction are you really getting from that kind of virulent vanity?
- Don’t look at your weight as a risk factor for morbidity and poor health. Look at the real risk factors. As Aamodt observes: “Low fitness, smoking, high blood pressure, low income and loneliness are all better predictors of early death than obesity.”
- Do be mindful of the kind of food you put in your mouth. You would be well served to learn to enjoy healthy whole foods and enjoy your “cheats” from time to time.
- Do look for a fitness routine that you enjoy since exercise will make you crave more healthy foods, have a higher self-esteem, and put you at lower risk for morbidity.
How to Apply Aamodt’s Essay to Your Essay
As you know, your essay answers the question: Is it a futile quest to lose weight through dieting?
What Do You Mean by “Diet”?
How you argue the above question for your essay depends on how you define the word “dieting.”
Do you mean a book that prescribes very rigidly what to eat and what not to eat? That is what most of us think about when we think of the word dieting.
Attempts as such rigid adherence appear to be a fool’s errand, according to the research.
But what if by “dieting” you mean developing food literacy, learning to replace most of your food products with whole foods, eliminate most processed foods, and indulge in your “decadent eating pleasures” only on occasion. Is that a diet? Whatever it is, it’s what Aamodt is recommending.
Sandra Aamodt elaborates on the ideas in her essay in this YouTube Ted Talk “Why dieting doesn’t usually work.”
Sandra Aamodt’s “Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet” Champions Ethos, Logos, and Pathos
We will study “Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet” by Sandra Aamodt (published in the New York Times, May 6, 2016).
We will examine the effectiveness of Aamodt’s essay in terms of the following:
Ethos: credibility; earning the trust of the reader through credible sources and good writing
Logos: persuading the reader through clear logic, reasoning, and concrete evidence
Pathos: persuading the reader and engaging the reader’s attention through emotion and drama
A Study of Sandra Aamodt's "Why You Can't Lose Weight on a Diet"
In her introductory paragraph, Aamodt achieves pathos--emotional connection--by using a recognizable, high-profile TV show in which contestants typically lost over 120 pounds each in their competitions. Then they gained all the weight back and more. A TV show that championed the hard work ethic, good nutrition, and a “can-do” attitude was all show, no substance.
They seemed to have rebelled from their hard work and good eating and in fact have a more significant calorie excess in their post-TV life than the average American. As we read:
SIX years after dropping an average of 129 pounds on the TV program “The Biggest Loser,” a new study reports, the participants were burning about 500 fewer calories a day than other people their age and size. This helps explain why they had regained 70 percent of their lost weight since the show’s finale. The diet industry reacted defensively, arguing that the participants had lost weight too fast or ate the wrong kinds of food — that diets do work, if you pick the right one.
***
Like Harriet Brown in her essay “The Weight of the Evidence,” Aamodt criticizes the diet industry, which wants us to believe that diets work. But in fact, the industry exists not to help us lose weight but to make money and to perpetuate itself; but Aamodt counters the diet industry’s claims in a very clear and helpful thesis or claim. Notice Aamodt’s thesis is presented in a separate paragraph, which makes it more clear. Aamodt writes:
But this study is just the latest example of research showing that in the long run dieting is rarely effective, doesn’t reliably improve health and does more harm than good. There is a better way to eat.
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Aamodt’s thesis maps out her essay into parts. Unlike Brown’s essay, which is all doom, Aamodt’s thesis contains a glimmer of hope.
Let us break down Aamodt’s thesis.
She will present the following points, which she telegraphs in her thesis:
- In the long run, dieting is rarely effective.
- Dieting doesn’t reliably improve health.
- Dieting does more harm than good.
- There is a better way to eat (which she details later in her essay)
Aamodt’s body paragraphs will correspond to the above.
Aamodt’s first point is that dieting is an exercise in long-term willpower. The research shows that, in spite of the Motivation Bros on YouTube, there is no such thing as long-term willpower when it comes to dieting. When it comes to what foods we put in our mouth, neuroscience governs and controls our behavior.
In the realm of neuroscience, we learn that Aamodt is a neuroscientist. This gives her ethos or credibility.
Specifically, Aamodt addresses the notion of metabolic suppression and set point. This notion of set point is the weight your body “wants” you to weigh. As Aamodt explains with logic, examples, and evidence:
The root of the problem is not willpower but neuroscience. Metabolic suppression is one of several powerful tools that the brain uses to keep the body within a certain weight range, called the set point. The range, which varies from person to person, is determined by genes and life experience. When dieters’ weight drops below it, they not only burn fewer calories but also produce more hunger-inducing hormones and find eating more rewarding.
The brain’s weight-regulation system considers your set point to be the correct weight for you, whether or not your doctor agrees. If someone starts at 120 pounds and drops to 80, her brain rightfully declares a starvation state of emergency, using every method available to get that weight back up to normal. The same thing happens to someone who starts at 300 pounds and diets down to 200, as the “Biggest Loser” participants discovered.
This coordinated brain response is a major reason that dieters find weight loss so hard to achieve and maintain. For example, men with severe obesity have only one chance in 1,290 of reaching the normal weight range within a year; severely obese women have one chance in 677. A vast majority of those who beat the odds are likely to end up gaining the weight back over the next five years. In private, even the diet industry agrees that weight loss is rarely sustained. A report for members of the industry stated: “In 2002, 231 million Europeans attempted some form of diet. Of these only 1 percent will achieve permanent weight loss.”
***
In analyzing the brain’s “regulation system” and set point, Aamodt doesn’t succumb to rage, bitterness, or self-pity. She matter-of-factly presents neuroscience to prepare us for the best way to manage our brains and weight management in light of the evidence.
In contrast, there is implicit anger, frustration and bitterness in Harriet Brown’s rant-like essay, which offers no solutions.
Sandra Aamodt further presents her ethos and pathos in the subsequent paragraph in which she states her credentials, explains she has seen hundreds of weight-loss studies and presents her own personal struggle with weight loss to add emotional power to her essay. She writes:
As a neuroscientist, I’ve read hundreds of studies on the brain’s ability to fight weight loss. I also know about it from experience. For three decades, starting at age 13, I lost and regained the same 10 or 15 pounds almost every year. On my most serious diet, in my late 20s, I got down to 125 pounds, 30 pounds below my normal weight. I wanted (unwisely) to lose more, but I got stuck. After several months of eating fewer than 800 calories a day and spending an hour at the gym every morning, I hadn’t lost another ounce. When I gave up on losing and switched my goal to maintaining that weight, I started gaining instead.
I was lucky to end up back at my starting weight instead of above it. After about five years, 41 percent of dieters gain back more weight than they lost. Long-term studies show dieters are more likely than non-dieters to become obese over the next one to 15 years. That’s true in men and women, across ethnic groups, from childhood through middle age. The effect is strongest in those who started in the normal weight range, a group that includes almost half of the female dieters in the United States.
***
Rather than embrace despair, Aamodt ushers us toward hope by explaining that diets not only work but make us fat. To encourage us to abandon dieting, she shows that twins who diet gain more weight than their twin counterparts. As she explains:
Some experts argue that instead of dieting leading to long-term weight gain, the relationship goes in the other direction: People who are genetically prone to gain weight are more likely to diet. To test this idea, in a 2012 study, researchers followed over 4,000 twins aged 16 to 25. Dieters were more likely to gain weight than their non-dieting identical twins, suggesting that dieting does indeed increase weight gain even after accounting for genetic background. The difference in weight gain was even larger between fraternal twins, so dieters may also have a higher genetic tendency to gain. The study found that a single diet increased the odds of becoming overweight by a factor of two in men and three in women. Women who had gone on two or more diets during the study were five times as likely to become overweight.
***
To recap, dieting messes with our metabolism, stimulates bingeing, and can double the risk of becoming overweight by “a factor of two in men and three in women.” Worst of all is serial dieting in which case you are five times as likely to become overweight.
Whereas Harriet Brown responds to these dietary backfires as infuriating, Sandra Aamodt takes a different tact: She sees the ability to look at the inevitable harm of dieting as the green light to exit from the insanity of dieting. Harriet Brown is shackled by bitterness. In contrast, Aamodt is relieved to have an Exit Strategy. Aamodt’s more reasonable and healthy response gives her ethos, logos, and pathos more than you will find in Brown’s essay. Aamodt is therefore more persuasive.
To further reinforce her point that dieting is harmful and leads to weight gain, Aamodt focuses on athletes who are committed to keeping their weight down.
These athletes have the powerful motivation and incentive to not gain weight, but their dieting makes them more at risk.
The same is true with teen girls who have a negative body image. As they diet, they are at more risk for weight gain. As we read:
The causal relationship between diets and weight gain can also be tested by studying people with an external motivation to lose weight. Boxers and wrestlers who diet to qualify for their weight classes presumably have no particular genetic predisposition toward obesity. Yet a 2006 study found that elite athletes who competed for Finland in such weight-conscious sports were three times more likely to be obese by age 60 than their peers who competed in other sports.
To test this idea rigorously, researchers could randomly assign people to worry about their weight, but that is hard to do. One program took the opposite approach, though, helping teenage girls who were unhappy with their bodies to become less concerned about their weight. In a randomized trial, the eBody Project, an online program to fight eating disorders by reducing girls’ desire to be thin, led to less dieting and also prevented future weight gain. Girls who participated in the program saw their weight remain stable over the next two years, while their peers without the intervention gained a few pounds.
***
After giving us persuasive evidence that dieting leads to weight gain, Aamodt analyzes the main causes of weight gain from diets.
The first cause is that dieting results in stress and stress translates into stress hormones, which can be called “fat” hormones. The second cause is anxiety, which fuels hunger for fat and sugar. This hunger is so ravenous that we call it binge eating. This binge eating causes one to feel a loss of control or of being unhinged, which puts us in the Shame Dungeon. In the Shame Dungeon, we engage in shame eating or grief eating.
The Germans have a word for grief eating. The word is Kummerspeck, which literally means “grief bacon.”
The point is that grief eating leads to shame, which leads to anxiety, which leads to shame. Therefore, the dieter is trapped in a vicious cycle.
Again, Aamodt combines logos, ethos, and pathos by adding her personal story. As we read:
WHY would dieting lead to weight gain? First, dieting is stressful. Calorie restriction produces stress hormones, which act on fat cells to increase the amount of abdominal fat. Such fat is associated with medical problems like diabetes and heart disease, regardless of overall weight.
Second, weight anxiety and dieting predict later binge eating, as well as weight gain. Girls who labeled themselves as dieters in early adolescence were three times more likely to become overweight over the next four years. Another study found that adolescent girls who dieted frequently were 12 times more likely than non-dieters to binge two years later.
My repeated dieting eventually caught up with me, as this research would predict. When I was in graduate school and under a lot of stress, I started binge eating. I would finish a carton of ice cream or a box of saltines with butter, usually at 3 a.m. The urge to keep eating was intense, even after I had made myself sick. Fortunately, when the stress eased, I was able to stop. At the time, I felt terrible about being out of control, but now I know that binge eating is a common mammalian response to starvation.
***
Aamodt observes other causal links between dieting and weight gain. One is that dieting encourages binge eating, which is paralleled in rat studies. Dieting is registered in the human body as starvation. When we go into starvation mode, we seek to compensate by bingeing.
Another link is that when we diet, we succumb to following diet rules rather than listening to the hunger inside our brains. As Aamodt explains:
Much of what we understand about weight regulation comes from studies of rodents, whose eating habits resemble ours. Mice and rats enjoy the same wide range of foods that we do. When tasty food is plentiful, individual rodents gain different amounts of weight, and the genes that influence weight in people have similar effects in mice. Under stress, rodents eat more sweet and fatty foods. Like us, both laboratory and wild rodents have become fatter over the past few decades.
In the laboratory, rodents learn to binge when deprivation alternates with tasty food — a situation familiar to many dieters. Rats develop binge eating after several weeks consisting of five days of food restriction followed by two days of free access to Oreos. Four days later, a brief stressor leads them to eat almost twice as many Oreos as animals that received the stressor but did not have their diets restricted. A small taste of Oreos can induce deprived animals to binge on regular chow, if nothing else is available. Repeated food deprivation changes dopamine and other neurotransmitters in the brain that govern how animals respond to rewards, which increases their motivation to seek out and eat food. This may explain why the animals binge, especially as these brain changes can last long after the diet is over.
In people, dieting also reduces the influence of the brain’s weight-regulation system by teaching us to rely on rules rather than hunger to control eating. People who eat this way become more vulnerable to external cues telling them what to eat. In the modern environment, many of those cues were invented by marketers to make us eat more, like advertising, supersizing and the all-you-can-eat buffet. Studies show that long-term dieters are more likely to eat for emotional reasons or simply because food is available. When dieters who have long ignored their hunger finally exhaust their willpower, they tend to overeat for all these reasons, leading to weight gain.
***
After explaining why diets don’t work and are harmful, Aamodt is considerate and thoughtful enough to address those who are desperate to lose weight because of health concerns. She observes that being overweight to a certain degree does not match more virulent risk factors: low income, low fitness, and low friend count (loneliness).
As a result, Aamodt encourages us to abstain from restricted calorie diets and instead exercise regularly, make friends, and focus on a viable career. In other words, you got better ways to spend your time and money than on calorie-restricted diets. In the words of Aamodt:
Even people who understand the difficulty of long-term weight loss often turn to dieting because they are worried about health problems associated with obesity like heart disease and diabetes. But our culture’s view of obesity as uniquely deadly is mistaken. Low fitness, smoking, high blood pressure, low income and loneliness are all better predictors of early death than obesity. Exercise is especially important: Data from a 2009 study showed that low fitness is responsible for 16 percent to 17 percent of deaths in the United States, while obesity accounts for only 2 percent to 3 percent, once fitness is factored out. Exercise reduces abdominal fat and improves health, even without weight loss. This suggests that overweight people should focus more on exercising than on calorie restriction.
***
Not only does Aamodt encourage exercise and living your life in such as way as to reduce the morbidity risk factors, but she also encourages mindful eating and defines it as learning to listen to your body for hunger cues and know why and when you’re hungry. As she wisely writes:
If dieting doesn’t work, what should we do instead? I recommend mindful eating — paying attention to signals of hunger and fullness, without judgment, to relearn how to eat only as much as the brain’s weight-regulation system commands.
Relative to chronic dieters, people who eat when they’re hungry and stop when they’re full are less likely to become overweight, maintain more stable weights over time and spend less time thinking about food. Mindful eating also helps people with eating disorders like binge eating learn to eat normally. Depending on the individual’s set point, mindful eating may reduce weight or it may not. Either way, it’s a powerful tool to maintain weight stability, without deprivation.
I finally gave up dieting six years ago, and I’m much happier. I redirected the energy I used to spend on dieting to establishing daily habits of exercise and meditation. I also enjoy food more while worrying about it less, now that it no longer comes with a side order of shame.
***
Concluding Thoughts
I find it fascinating that Harriet Brown’s essay is a despair fest that encourages dietary nihilism and while Sandra Aamodt draws from similar information and studies about the failures of dieting, she arrives at a more hopeful plan about the pitfalls of dieting and presents us with an alternative that makes us feel free and empowered.
A Counterargument-Rebuttal Example
"Why 'moderation' is the worst weight-loss advice ever" by Tamar Haspel, published in The Washington Post, October 210, 2020
If you ask people about weight-loss attempts, you get a lot of similar answers. Most people try a diet — a particular way of eating that’s supposed to help you lose weight — and it works, almost regardless of what the particular diet is.
And then, of course, it doesn’t.
What happens? Life, usually. I asked my Twitter people to send me their stories, and I heard some of the many ways life derails diet: illness, pregnancy, bike crash, new baby, new job, menopause, bad work situation, even a church breakup. But sometimes, it’s just that you get really tired of not eating bread. Or of tracking every meal. Or of eating things that are different from what your friends are eating.
The common thread running through the stories I’ve heard — not just this time, but in 20 years on this beat — is also what study after study has confirmed. People can lose weight until they can’t. They go on a particular diet, and as long as they stick to it, they succeed, but they usually can’t stick to it forever. “Regain happens when we decide to come back to our comfort zone,” one tweeter told me.
Weight loss is, for most people, a toggle between diet and not-diet. Diet = weight loss, not-diet = weight gain. So why on God’s green Earth are we spending all our time arguing about the difference between this diet and that diet, when people lose weight on all of them? The obvious, stare-you-in-the-face problem is the difference between diet and not-diet.
The difference is rules.
Diets have rules. Eat this, not that. Eat now, not then. Eat this much, not that much. Eat this with that, but not with the other thing.
The rules insulate you from the come-hither, obesogenic, food environment known as normal. Instead of going out into the world of tasty, convenient food with a hazy idea of moderation, you go out with a plan. And it works.
What if normal had rules? What if, instead of “moderation,” you had specific strategies to navigate normal?
In 2017, researchers recruited 42 volunteers and put them on a “low-calorie powder diet” (appetizing!) for eight weeks. Participants lost an average of 12 percent of their body weight.
This sounds like a setup for the same old story: They would all regain the weight, and then some, over the next couple of years. And some of them did gain; 20 regressed over the year they were tracked, although not quite back to their original weight. An additional 13 maintained their weight loss, give or take. But nine continued to lose.
What did they do that the regainers didn’t? In this study, unlike most, the researchers conducted detailed interviews and included quotes from the participants. The results are striking. The weight losers made rules.
“Monday to Thursday I eat 1,200 kcal [calories], and Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I eat what I want but still reasonable.”
“I can buy the chocolate today, but I will not eat it until Saturday.”
“Candy is a treat for me, and at weekends I reward myself for not eating it the rest of the week.”
“I have a maximum limit of 2.5 [hours] between my meals.”
“Each main meal must not contain more than 500 calories.”
The regainers struggled.
“To resist a craving is like trying not to breath[e]. At a certain point you have to surrender.”
“If I am tired or have had a hard day at work or have controlled my food for some time then I feel like I deserve it, then I eat crisps, and chocolate — sometimes several days in a row.”
We’ve all been there! It’s tough, struggling with the call of food. And diets fail because rules are hard to follow. So the key question is: How can you find the rules that you’re most likely to be able to stick to?
Try every diet!
Example of a Counterargument and Rebuttal
Tamar Haspel makes some good points about resetting one's eating with rules and guidelines. This new eating structure that she and her husband have adopted seem to have benefited them to some degree, and their weight loss does complicate the arguments made by Sandra Aamodt and Harriet Brown. However, Tamar Haspel's personal account is problematic in two ways. First, it is merely an anecdote. It is not a broad study and therefore has no real data to draw from in making any conclusions about dieting. Secondly, Haspel and her husband have been on their diet program for an undetermined time. Haspel didn't give us a start date, but we it is likely fewer than five years ago. It takes five years or more for weight gain to occur after dieting, so Haspel's narrative is incomplete. To conclude, I would concede that adopting healthy eating principles is a good thing, but adhering to rules, as Haspel is encouraging us to do, may have a backfire effect according to the body of research that we have.
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