Paragraph 1: using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase Derek Thompson’s essay “The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable.”
Paragraph 2, your thesis: Develop a claim that explains how one or more of the above shows or documentaries supports Thompson’s major points about Workism.
Paragraphs 3-7 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 8, your conclusion, is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Your last page, Works Cited, is in MLA format and has a minimum of 4 sources.
Notice the above outline has no counterargument-rebuttal. Why? Because you're analyzing the causes of Workism rather than arguing how persuasive Thompson's essay is.
Review the Causes of Workism:
Causes of Workism
FOMO
Reptilian competition (lizard brain wants to dominate)
Groupthink or peer pressure
Lack of rewards in home and community life and the seeking compensation for that disconnection at work
Needing to justify the cost of education with "The Job"
Fraudsters manipulate us
The narrative the "finding our life work gives us meaning"
Working long hours is a status symbol
The job is part of a self-actualization myth and an origin story similar to character arcs in Hollywood film scripts
Our "intrinsic value" is measured by our job
Social media conditions us to curate our idealized selves to the public
Our identity is synonymous with our job
Ubermensch ideal
We become "meaning junkies" at work as a counterpoint to the slacker stereotype or the "smartphone zombie"
Diminishing religious, family, and community life make a bigger space for Workism
Alternative Outline and Thesis Approach That Focuses on an Argument
Paragraph 1: using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase Derek Thompson’s essay “The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable.”
Paragraph 2: Develop a thesis that critiques, agrees, or disagrees with Derek Thompson's essay based on ethos, logos, and pathos.
Paragraphs 3-6: Explain your objections to Thompson's essay in terms of ethos, logos, and pathos.
Paragraphs 7-8: Counterarguments and rebuttals
Paragraph 9: Conclusion
The last page is your Works Cited with a minimum of 4 sources.
Objection #1: Failure to provide context
I concede that Thompson does a good job of showing the turnaround regarding leisure time as an asset of the rich and privileged. Leisure time used to be the main objective of success, but now Workism makes being overworked a success symbol and a way of achieving domination in one's field. However, this choice to engage in Workism needs context. For example, if a small number of upper-class workers are ditching leisure time for the status symbol of Workism, why should we care when the majority of workers are suffering overwhelming forces, such as abuse on the job, that lead to real job burnout?
Would not Derek Thompson achieve more ethos (credibility) and pathos (sympathy) if he framed Workism in the context of real job burnout?
Objection #2: Proportion Fallacy
How widespread is Workism compared to real job burnout? If Workism is small compared to real job burnout, why should we care? Should not Thompson put Workism in the context of real job burnout to gain more credibility and sympathy for his argument?
Objection #3: Monolith Fallacy
Is it lame to lump all Workism in the same category? Is not Thompson's argument weakened by his failure to discern between healthy, mindful Workism (which he himself does) and mindless, reckless, self-destructive Workism? Is not treating all Workism as one type, a monolith, a convenient way to support his argument when this monolith contradicts reality?
Objection #4:Extreme Fallacy
It is self-evident that if you give extreme cases of anything, the thing is unhealthy. Workism in the extreme is unhealthy, but so is eating.
We need food and we need meaningful work, but extreme approaches to eating and working are not healthy.
Is this not so obvious and self-evident as to not even require our attention?
Objection #5: Mountain out of a Molehill Fallacy
Is not Thompson creating a false issue, making a mountain out of a molehill, to write a clickbait essay for The Atlantic? How much should I care about professionals choosing to work themselves to death when there are greater numbers of workers with less privilege suffering job burnout for reasons they cannot control?
Objection #6: Failure to Blame the Primary Cause
Thompson cites the fall of religion and community as the cause of a spiritual vacuum that is filled with Workism, but what if there is a cause behind the fall of religion and community? What if the failing American dream causes workers to burn out and leaves them no time for religion and community? We could conclude that Workism is not a moral choice but a survival necessity.
Building Block #1 Assignment for Workism Essay
The Assignment: Summarize the Major Points in "Workism Is Making Americans Miserable" due on October 8
Using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase the major points of Derek Thompson's "Workism Is Making Americans Miserable," which will be your essay's introductory paragraph.
Workism Sample Thesis Statements
Strong Thesis Should be Demonstrable, Defensible, and Debatable
Demonstrable: The information in the thesis generates body paragraphs or “reasons” for supporting your thesis, which will be the bulk of your essay.
Defensible: You can defend your thesis with logic, reasoning, evidence, facts, statistics, and credible sources, and as a result, achieve logos, pathos, and ethos.
Debatable: Your argument has two sides; therefore, you are not presenting a claim that is so obvious and self-evident as to be fatuous.
Sample #1
Derek Thompson in his essay “The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable” makes the persuasive case that the current work environment pushes young employees down a rabbit hole of being overworked in the name of “Workism,” an oppressive phenomenon characterized by Groupthink, fraudsters who effectively manipulate their workers, social media popularity contests, and college debt.
Sample #2
“The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable” is Derek Thompson’s compelling clarion call that urges us to pull out of Workism, a false religion that will lead to our ruin evidenced by ______________, ___________________, ______________, and _______________________.
Sample #3
As Derek Thompson and expertly and deftly illustrates, in our current zeitgeist we are being tempted by the deleterious allure of Workism, a phony religion defined by __________________, ____________________, ___________________, and _______________________.
Sample #4
While Derek Thompson makes several helpful insights about what he sees as the false religion of Workism, his essay is severely flawed in several respects.
Sample #5
While Derek Thompson makes several helpful insights about what he sees as the false religion of Workism, his essay is severely flawed in several respects, including the fact that he treats Workism as an oversimplistic monolith when in fact there are several Workism iterations in gradations of good and bad; he doesn’t acknowledge that certain types of Workism are necessary for innovation and success, and he fails to acknowledge that Workism is less a false religion than a necessity in today’s brutal “Squid Game” competition.
Sample #6
Derek Thompson has falsely framed Workism as a fake religion when in fact the drive to make work a place of meaning and societal change is a noble and worthy endeavor that defies Thompson’s attempts to demonize it.
Sample #7
Derek Thompson’s 2019 thesis that Workism is a disease that is stealing the lives of American workers collapses under the weight of the post-pandemic work trends, which point to The Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting, societal waves that render Thompson’s thesis both irrelevant and obsolescent.
Sample #8
I find it rich that privileged, highly educated, and highly successful public intellectual Derek Thompson, a man whose life has borne fruit from Workism, is eager to find clickbait for an online article that bemoans the very type of all-consuming work that he himself is beholden to. “Don’t do as I do; do as I say” is the lame and fitting epitaph to his grotesque and obsolescent essay.
Sample #9
While I will acknowledge that Derek Thompson’s essay has many flaws, including the hypocrisy that he himself is a disciple of Workism, his essay is a helpful and insightful anodyne to the wave of fraudsters who are hellbent on using the trappings of Workism to oppress their employees.
Sample #10
Derek Thompson’s notion of Workism as this “superman” approach to work is presented as a novelty, some kind of new and remarkable phenomenon that signifies the ascent of the tech industry, and yet it is precisely the way Thompson frames Workism as all-consuming work that shows his grotesque failure to acknowledge that tireless work is nothing new at all, but rather a key feature of immigrants coming to America. Therefore, Thompson’s thesis smacks of ignorance and a tendency to dismiss immigrant work, which as a whole diminishes the ethos of his claim and makes his essay contemptuous and unpersuasive.
Sample #11
While I acknowledge the Thompson critic in Thesis Sample #10 who is chafed and irate that Thompson failed to acknowledge the herculean hard work of immigrants who come to America and while I acknowledge that this immigrant contribution to the American workforce would have provided valuable contextualization of Thompson’s essay, I must defend Thompson’s thesis because there is nothing about the undeniable hard work of immigrants that contradicts Thompson’s claim, Thompson’s essay has a very specific focus on rich tech entrepreneurs and to cover the hard work of immigrants would have caused him to stray and meander off topic; finally, the oppression that results from Workism is a warning that helps immigrants and non-immigrants alike. Therefore, the Thompson critic who wrote Thesis Sample #10 needs to “cool it,” put an end to his self-righteous rhetorical excesses, and assess Thompson’s essay on its own terms.
In Support of Derek Thompson: The Pressure to be an Employee Ubermensch
Then compare the idea of Workism, especially how employers rely on manipulation and Groupthink to exploit their employees, in relation to one or more of the following documentaries and TV shows: WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, and Severance. For your comparison of Thompson’s essay and the documentaries or TV shows, develop a thesis that addresses the claim that fraudsters rely on Workism and Groupthink to create a colossal breakdown of critical thinking that causes employees, investors, and customers to become dangerously gullible to the false promises of these mad grifters. As a result, the employees are exploited. Is the following claim legitimate? Why or why not? Explain. Be sure to have a counterargument-rebuttal section in your essay before you reach your conclusion.
Suggested Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Derek Thompson’s essay about Workism.
Paragraph 2: Your thesis: Develop a claim that the causes of Workism are the following:
The rise of the fraudster who relies on a mythical origin story about creating disruptive change that makes for a better world.
The prevalence of Groupthink in the workplace makes workers malleable.
The prevalence of toxic positivity in the workplace is used to manipulate workers.
The prevalence of pseudo-spirituality in the workplace tethers employees to work while they disconnect from family and community and this creates a vicious cycle.
The prevalence of the Ubermensch ethic as described by Anne Helen Petersen chains employees to a burnout work cycle.
Paragraphs 3-7 address the above bullet points.
Paragraphs 8 and 9: Counterargument and Rebuttal
Some will argue that economic necessity in a hyper-competitive field that makes success a zero-sum game to be the real reason of Workism, not the above. Do you concede that point? Do you reject it? Why? Why not?
Paragraph 10: Conclusion, a reiteration of your thesis.
Works Cited with 4 sources in MLA format.
In Support of Derek Thompson:
Work Pray Code Study Guide Part 1
Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley
Part 1
Work as a Religious Community
Carolyn Chen writes that work has become the new religion, a place where employees go to find meaning, transcendence, and deep connections with others.
This meaning quest seems like an excuse to abandon family and community and become a workaholic. As workers find “meaning” at work, they become more disconnected from family and community, and this compels them to insulate themselves into even more work, thus creating a vicious cycle.
So Workism is really not a meaning quest. It’s a canard or a smokescreen for blind ambition dressed up with the perfume of fake meaning.
There are consequences to turning work into a religious place of sacred worship.
Some argue that The Great Resignation is a sign that workers are abandoning Work-As-Religion, but Carolyn Chen in her book that the hunger for finding meaning and community at work has never been stronger, based on her interviews with people who work in Silicon Valley.
The Whipped Cream of Fake Spirituality
Many of these employees and employers hire Buddhist mindful counselors and spiritual advisers as if having such spiritual leaders is a requirement for both substance and image in such workplaces.
Even Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and Walmart hire chaplains to address the employees’ spiritual needs.
An argument can be made that this veneer of work spirituality is evil because it encourages workers to kiss the butt of blind ambition while consoling themselves with pretentious notions of spirituality through cheap and hollow adages, aphorisms, and quotes from holy texts.
In other words, these employees are gaslighting themselves with cheap religious bromides.
Why Is There Religion or Pseudo Religion at the Workplace?
In 1990, 8% of Americans said they have no religious affiliation. Today that number has jumped to 25%. As a result, Chen observes that Americans don’t go to work to sell their souls but to find their souls.
People cannot bear living in a spiritual vacuum, so if they abandon their traditional religion, they will feel compelled to replace it with a new spirituality, even if it means finding “religion” in the workplace.
As a result, there is no work-life balance. Now a 65-hour work week is “typical.”
Work becomes the god. This false god is just a smokescreen for blind ambition.
In Before Times, Work Was Soul-Crushing
In contrast, white-collar work in the 50s was soul-crushing and Americans found peace and connection in their religious community.
There was a strong demarcation line: work in one part of your life and the spiritual existence of the church, community, and family life on the other.
Community Erodes
Now that the religious community is eroding, work is taking the place of such a community.
Those in the upper-income brackets are more likely to like their jobs and see their workplace as a spiritual haven.
Branding Yourself and Giving Yourself an Origin Story
The job sites have a mission, a higher purpose, and even like Marvel superheroes, an “origin story.” In the new global economy, if you don’t have an origin story to strengthen your brand, you are irrelevant.
These origin stories are based on mythologies.
You hit rock bottom, you lose everything, you fall into a pit of despair, you’ve gone down some rabbit hole of confusion; and just then when all seems lost, you see in some crag or nook or cranny this beam of the True Light that leads you to the True Path. Once embarked upon the True Path, you can save the world, find personal redemption, and adopt a three-legged rescue dog named Patsy.
The Holmes persona checked off boxes that Silicon Valley’s startup world loves to fawn over. Dropout from a prestigious school? Check. Obsessed with work, to the point of having no personal life? Check. Under the age of 32? Check. (Paul Graham in 2013, describing what Silicon Valley VCs look for: “The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32.” Also: “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg.”) Only hobby is exercise? Check. Steve Jobs worship? Check. Unnecessary secrecy around your innovation? In tech, secrecy around new inventions is the norm.
What’s interesting about the Elizabeth Holmes character is how she fit in with this founder myth, since she was, you know, female. But a specific kind of woman: low voice, only wears pants, high-neck shirt, clumsy makeup. Not like those other girls. She began to grace magazine covers during a period shortly after Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In, a misguided book about how the solution to misogyny is simply working harder, and around the time Sophia Amoruso published Girlboss, a 2014 book about founding an online discount clothing store.
The Lean In / girlboss period was a kind of response to tech’s image as a bunch of smelly bros in hoodies. Conditions on the ground for lower-level engineers were often full of sexual harassment. What’s more, women rarely got money: in 2019, 2.8 percent of VC funds went to female founders, an all-time high. These are large, systemic issues! And rather than talk about them, the corporate world elected to bring us inspiration, as though the only thing stopping women from building their own CEO destinies was a lack of role models.
And then there was Holmes. She was, conveniently, a woman succeeding in Silicon Valley, a place some people had suggested was possibly sexist due to things such as Paul Graham’s aforementioned Zuckerberg comment, Ellen Pao’s lawsuit against VC firm Kleiner Perkins, and Travis Kalanick’s “boober” incident.
Holmes’ fall from grace was the first crack in the founder myth. It was followed by Travis Kalanick being booted from Uber over the culture of sexual harassment, bullying, and general lawlessness he’d built. More flamboyantly, Adam Neumann of WeWork was forced out after the company filed frankly deranged paperwork for its IPO, which was then called off. Those three founders had borrowed the notes of tech hype for products that were, well, not tech: Theranos was (at least in theory) medicine, Uber is a car service with a nice app, and WeWork is a real estate company. During this heady period, though, investors tended to overlook tech-hyped things that weren’t actually tech.
Even College Students Need Origin Stories to Create a Brand
Even college students writing personal statements to get into high-tier universities fabricate an elaborate origin story to strengthen their brand.
We live in a world where we are on social media and creating a brand for ourselves. This brand may be BS, but over time we will come to believe in it.
Work As Friendship and Emotional Support System
Chen quotes sociologist Arlie Hochschild who reports that today more Americans are meeting their social needs more at work than they are in their families.
If this is true, then what is the motivation to stay in a family, if not literally then at least in terms of time given to that family? Would not someone who finds love and friendship at work be prone to spend as little time with family as possible?
Chen is making the case that the rise of business as a place to meet love, spiritual, friendship, and emotional needs is taking the place of religion and even the family.
Who’s the Team Player in This Scenario?
Do I look to my job for emotional fulfillment?
I love my job and the people I work with and my students, but the fact that I’d rather be home with my family is such that some co-workers might grumble, “He’s not a team player. For McMahon, the apotheosis of love and meaning must come from work. Family is second.”
This sounds insane.
The More Educated and High-Income You Are, The More You Embrace the Workplace as Your Spiritual Haven
Chen traces a direct line between high income and the job site as a place of spiritual meaning, identity, and connection.
Richard Florida calls these job sites “human capital clusters.” They are mostly in big cities like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. The workplace has gourmet buffet, yoga centers, wellness centers, gyms, tracks, meditation retreats, self-esteem therapists, sleeping quarters, busses that come to your house, barista cafes, organic gardens, vegan and homemade pasta cooking lessons, media entertainment centers, deep-tissue massage, hand-crafted IPA and wine bars, and spiritual counseling repurposed to make you more productive. These are One-Size-Fits-All Nanny Centers. They suffocate you, yet you love it.
Chen observes that the higher up the ladder the employee climbs the more likely they are to abandon religion, but their religious needs have not disappeared; “they have been displaced.”
Techtopia
Chen coins the term Techtopia: an engineered society that gives people the highest fulfillment at work by colonizing the functions of other social institutions.
In other words, the spiritual nourishment of the holy temples and family has been spiritually appropriated by work.
Tech Migrants Are Not Just Paying the Bills
Most of the workers Chen interviewed are tech migrants, those who traveled great distances to work in the tech industry. They left friends and family behind. Therefore, they are hungry for connection, and they find it at work.
In the tech industry, a job is more than paying your bills: It’s your identity and your brand. You can never work hard enough to cultivate your identity and your brand. The employer has you right where they want you.
Why You Need Faith
You have to believe in yourself in the tech industry. Either you will become a billionaire and win a big IPO or get bought by Facebook or Microsoft or something equally big, but all the while you know that over 90% of start-ups fail. Therefore, you need lots of faith. You have to believe in the Purpose and the Mission. You have to drink your own Kool-Aid.
All the missions are the same: “My product will bring people together and change the world.”
Any worker who doesn’t drink the Kool-Aid of the above mantra is a nonbeliever, a malcontent who must be expelled from the premises.
Corporate Maternalism
The corporation suffocates you with “love” and all-day care and expects a return on their investment. “The personal is the profession” is the mantra.
The goals of corporate maternalism are threefold: strengthen emotional bonds to the company, help employees avoid job burnout, and obscure the line between the boss and the underlying in order to create a family atmosphere.
Corporate maternalism become a form of authoritarianism and in its extreme, it is the influence of the hit Apple TV show Severance.
In Carolyn Chen’s readable book Work Pray Code, she chronicles the workplace as a “Techtopia” where all of one’s emotional, spiritual, and physical needs are met by “corporate maternalism.” One of the key features of corporate maternalism is feeding your employees. As an employee at a hot tech company, you can eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks from a celebrity gourmet chef and be so satisfied that you don’t even have to waste time and money on grocery shopping. You don’t even have to go home to face meal preparation or kitchen cleanup. The perk attracts talent and keeps it there.
If that’s not a perk to stay on the job, I don’t know what is.
However, Chen observes that corporate maternalism is often phony. She asks the question: What use is a yoga studio when your boss wants you to work 16 hours a day?
Toxic Positivity
Another symptom of corporate maternalism is toxic positivity in which the employees are pressured, often through implicit means, to force a smile and curate a persona of glee and happiness in order to persuade everyone that the company is legit.
Be Your Best Self equals Work Your Butt Off Without Complaining.
“We want you to be your best self, go deep into your soul, and find out who you are.” What this really means is we want you to give us your blood, sweat, and tears, and smile while you’re doing it.
Paragraph 1: Summarize Derek Thompson’s essay about Workism.
Paragraph 2: Your thesis: Develop a claim that the causes of Workism are the following:
The rise of the fraudster who relies on a mythical origin story about creating disruptive change that makes for a better world.
The prevalence of Groupthink in the workplace makes workers malleable.
The prevalence of toxic positivity in the workplace is used to manipulate workers.
The prevalence of pseudo-spirituality in the workplace tethers employees to work while they disconnect from family and community and this creates a vicious cycle.
The prevalence of the Ubermensch ethic as described by Anne Helen Petersen chains employees to a burnout work cycle.
Paragraphs 3-7 address the above bullet points.
Paragraphs 8 and 9: Counterargument and Rebuttal
Some will argue that economic necessity in a hyper-competitive field that makes success a zero-sum game to be the real reason of Workism, not the above. Do you concede that point? Do you reject it? Why? Why not?
Paragraph 10: Conclusion, a reiteration of your thesis.
Works Cited with 4 sources in MLA format.
If you disagree with what’s written below, then it will be a counterargument in your essay.
However, if you agree with the following points, then your thesis will very similar to them.
Sample Thesis Statements, Part 2
Some arguments that serve to disagree with the causes of Workism that we have studied in this class:
Sample #1:
While it’s true that there is toxic positivity, pseudo-spirituality, and fraudsters at many worksites, these sideshows distract us from the real cause of job burnout, which is the zero-sum game of hyper-competitive capitalism.
Sample #2
I will concede with Derek Thompson, Carolyn Chen, and others that the workplace has become a false path for finding meaning, but most hard-working Americans are not getting suckered by CEO fraudsters and their ilk; rather, we are working our butts off because of economic necessity.
Sample #3
Finding your niche at work and getting meaning from that is not some kind of bad thing as McMahon has framed it in this class. Come on, McMahon, stop discouraging us from finding a meaningful, fulfilling job, and instead help us use our critical thinking skills for something valuable. I’m dropping your class.
Sample #4
McMahon has done us a service by making us question putting too much emotional investment at work as a place for meaning. He’s really got me thinking about the life-work balance, and how I don’t want to lose that balance by becoming some sort of slavish devotee to my job. However, as much as I love McMahon’s amazing teaching skills and his captivating and engrossing class discussions, I take issue with his notion that Workism is some sort of phony Meaning Quest. Workism is a symptom of America’s economic failures, which pressure most Americans like myself to run on the work treadmill just so we don’t get behind.
Then compare the idea of Workism, especially how employers rely on manipulation and Groupthink to exploit their employees, in relation to one or more of the following documentaries and TV shows: WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, and Severance. For your comparison of Thompson’s essay and the documentaries or TV shows, develop a thesis that addresses the claim that fraudsters rely on Workism and Groupthink to create a colossal breakdown of critical thinking that causes employees, investors, and customers to become dangerously gullible to the false promises of these mad grifters. As a result, the employees are exploited. Is the following claim legitimate? Why or why not? Explain. Be sure to have a counterargument-rebuttal section in your essay before you reach your conclusion.
What is Workism?
Workism is the religion of work so that you find meaning in throwing your entire being into your job in an attempt to find meaning, belonging, and transcendence.
What is the fraudster?
The fraudster capitalizes on knowing that there is a large workforce hungry for Workism. While trying to slake his greed, he portrays his company as being “on a mission to change the world,” and in the process, he exploits his employees. His goal is to be compensated more and more while having less and less accountability.
What is Groupthink?
Groupthink in the workforce occurs when individuals desire to belong to the group to the point that they compromise their critical thinking skills and “go along with the program” to in effect be like sheep or “sheeple.”
Workism, fraudsters, and Groupthink Equal What?
When you combine Workism, fraudsters, and Groupthink, you get a colossal scam in the making in which many people are exploited, people lose their life savings, people are hurt, and in many cases, people’s lives are irreversibly ruined.
We see massive fraud and exploitation in the documentary WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, about the rising and falling star Adam Neumann who managed to walk away with over a billion dollars after ruining thousands of people’s lives. He still does his grift today. His predatory existence is well chronicled in the 8-episode Apple TV show WeCrashed starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway.
We see criminal negligence, flagrant lies, and exploitation in The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, about the grifter Elizabeth Holmes who endangered people’s lives with a fake health invention. Holmes’ life of fraud and perfidy was also made into an excellent TV 8-episode miniseries The Dropout with Holmes masterfully played by Amanda Seyfried.
We see fraud, exploitation, lies, and sociopathy in Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened in which Billy McFarland becomes a convicted felon.
We see a science fiction version of Workism and Groupthink rendered in the excellent Apple TV show Severance in which workers go through a brain procedure so that their work life is severed from their personal life.
We see a science fiction version of Workism and Groupthink in the 8-episode TV show Devs in which Nick Offerman plays a Silicon Valley cult leader with a diabolical purpose.
The Method (Essay Outline)
Paragraph 1: using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase Derek Thompson’s essay “The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable.”
Paragraph 2, your thesis: Develop a claim that explains how one or more of the above shows or documentaries supports Thompson’s major points about Workism.
Paragraphs 3-7 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 8, your conclusion, is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Your last page, Works Cited, is in MLA format and has a minimum of 4 sources.
Causes of Workism
FOMO
Reptilian competition (lizard brain wants to dominate)
Groupthink or peer pressure
Lack of rewards in home and community life and the seeking compensation for that disconnection at work
Needing to justify the cost of education with "The Job"
Fraudsters manipulate us by making us believe we are part of something bigger than ourselves
The narrative the "finding our life work gives us meaning"
Working long hours is a status symbol
The job is part of a self-actualization myth and an origin story similar to character arcs in Hollywood film scripts
Our "intrinsic value" is measured by our job
Social media conditions us to curate our idealized selves to the public
Our identity is synonymous with our job
Ubermensch ideal (today's influencers create a sense of Self Dysmorphia)
We become "meaning junkies" at work as a counterpoint to the slacker stereotype or the "smartphone zombie"
In this extreme environment of extreme workers, we have the opposite, the Smartphone Zombie:
What is the Smartphone Zombie:
Addicted to smartphone
Depressed from being mired in social media addiction
Narcissistic
Snowflake
Coddled by parents
Lacks independence
Stunted emotional growth
Self-image dysmorphia (low self-esteem)
Overly sensitive to social media ranking and status
Doesn’t drive
Doesn’t date
Doesn’t work
Doesn’t want to grow up
Easily offended and triggered
Do Not Confuse Job Burnout with Workism
Whereas Workism is self-induced burnout, job burnout is different. Job burnout is due to external forces that the worker cannot control.
As Annie Lowrey writes in her essay "Teachers, Nurses and Child-Care Workers Have Had Enough":
The country is in the midst of a burnout crisis. In a recent American Psychological Association Work and Well-Being Survey, large proportions of American workers said that they felt stressed on the job (79 percent), plagued by physical fatigue (44 percent), cognitive weariness (36 percent), emotional exhaustion (32 percent), and a lack of interest, motivation, or energy (26 percent). Such measures are up significantly since the pandemic hit.
Nowhere is this burnout crisis worse than in the caring professions. An untold number of nurses, teachers, and child-care workers are asking themselves Is this worth it? and deciding that it is not. Nurses are walking off their jobs and quitting in droves, while those still at the bedside are experiencing high rates of depression. Shortages of teachers are prompting some school districts to institute four-day weeks and hire educators without a college degree, and more than half of educators report wanting to quit. The child-care workforce is shrinking, spurring parents to camp out overnight to win coveted day-care spots and pushing mothers out of the workforce.
Two mutually reinforcing trends are at play. Occupations that were always difficult have gotten only more so because of coronavirus-related safety concerns and disruptions, as well as pay that is not keeping up with the rising cost of living. And the tight labor market has provided an opportunity for workers to switch to better, less fraught jobs—straining their colleagues who remain and spurring still more workers to consider leaving.
Given that care workers are the people making sure that babies thrive, sick people heal, and children learn, as well as allowing parents to remain in the workforce, the burnout crisis among them is a crisis for society writ large. For decades, these positions have often required some degree of self-sacrifice, asking workers to accept modest pay and tolerate emotionally grueling duties for the greater good. The pandemic and the strong economy have made the sacrifice too much for too many, and that is ultimately putting all of us at risk. In particular women: When shortages occur in these female-dominated “pink-collar” industries, other women typically are the ones to quit their jobs, reduce their hours, or reshuffle their priorities in response.
Unfortunately, day-care centers, hospitals, long-term-care facilities, and schools are bleeding workers and having trouble filling open positions. Although the economy has recovered nearly every job that it lost earlier in the pandemic, the U.S. has nearly 100,000 fewer child-care workers, a loss of 12 percent. About 300,000 fewer nurses are on the job, down roughly 10 percent. And 570,000 fewer educators are working in public schools, a decline of 7 percent; schools across the country are reporting a record 40,000 vacancies. Workers remaining on the job feel miserable. More than half of teachers say they are contemplating quitting, as are nine in 10—nine in 10!—nurses.
No wonder, given the pressures such workers are under. The past two and a half years have been hard for everyone, but particularly brutal for people in these professions. As many as 40 percent of day-care centers shut down during the pandemic, and one in 10 closed permanently. Teachers have had to contend with lockdowns, Zoom school, and controversial reopenings. Nurses have struggled with the trauma of seeing so many COVID patients and being exposed to the virus themselves.
Now care workers are contending with new stressors. Teachers report dealing with a surge in violent and antisocial behaviors among parents and students; one in three says they have experienced at least one threat or incident of harassment of late, according to an APA survey. They also say that the political climate has made teaching harder: One in three teachers reports being harassed because of their school’s COVID-19 safety measures or its curriculum, including on matters of race and racism. The share of hospital nurses who have encountered violence on the job has doubled during the pandemic, too.
Rising wages and ample job openings have given such workers the opportunity to switch gigs—especially child-care workers. Indeed, the typical nanny or day-care teacher makes just $13.22 an hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only one in five has employer-sponsored health coverage. Why make poverty wages changing diapers, soothing tantrums, and wiping noses—while tending to the issues of stressed-out, helicoptering parents—when you could make $5 more an hour as a cashier or a barista, with the added benefit of health insurance and a retirement plan? Some schoolteachers are asking themselves the same question, given that one in six has a second job and that teacher pay has declined in real terms in more than half of states in the past 20 years.
As workers across the caring professions have left, conditions for those remaining on the job have gotten worse—a kind of flywheel immiserating many of our economy’s most essential workers. In recent surveys, two in three nurses reported that their patient counts had recently increased, making attentive care more difficult. And teachers report getting stretched thinner by bigger classes and bloating to-do lists.
In each case, those shortages are affecting the delivery of vital social services, with indirect effects on the whole economy. Many schools are struggling to keep their special-education programs staffed, putting kids with autism-spectrum disorder and other conditions at risk of falling behind. Hospitals and clinics are concerned about rising patient-to-staff ratios, which increase the risk of medical errors. And the impossibility of finding reasonably priced child care has contributed to some 330,000 mothers dropping out of the workforce—a trend particularly affecting Black mothers and the mothers of small children. All of this adds up to lower-performing schools, worse health care, greater risks for children, and fewer parents in the workforce. These costs are borne by everyone.
***
How does the above affect our assessment of Thompson's essay? Does it seem weaker?
If a small number of upper-class workers are ditching leisure time for the status symbol of Workism, why should we care when the majority of workers are suffering overwhelming forces that lead to real job burnout? Would not Derek Thompson achieve more ethos (credibility) and pathos (sympathy) if he framed Workism in the context of real job burnout?
Objections or counterarguments to Thompson's essay:
Scale or Proportion Fallacy:
How widespread is Workism compared to real job burnout? If Workism is small compared to real job burnout, why should we care? Should not Thompson put Workism in the context of real job burnout to gain more credibility and sympathy for his argument?
Monolith Fallacy:
Is it lame to lump all Workism in the same category? Is not Thompson's argument weakened by his failure to discern between healthy, mindful Workism (which he himself does) and mindless, reckless, self-destructive Workism? Is not treating all Workism as one type, a monolith, a convenient way to support his argument when this monolith contradicts reality?
Extreme Fallacy
It is self-evident that if you give extreme cases of anything, the thing is unhealthy. Workism in the extreme is unhealthy, but so is eating.
We need food and we need meaningful work, but extreme approaches to eating and working are not healthy.
Is this not so obvious and self-evident as to not even require our attention?
Mountain of a Molehill Fallacy
Is not Thompson creating a false issue, making a mountain out of a molehill, to write a clickbait essay for The Atlantic? How much should I care about professionals choosing to work themselves to death when there are greater numbers of workers with less privilege suffering job burnout for reasons they cannot control?
Groupthink is pressuring a certain segment of the economy to engage in Workism.
What Is Groupthink?
Groupthink can be defined as a consensus that is reached without performing due diligence or critical reasoning and evaluation.
Often Groupthink deteriorates into irrational, self-destructive behavior as a result of everyone being too cowardly and too desperate to conform so there is a fear of dissent.
Groupthink is born from the tribal instinct for belonging and the desire for group unity and cohesiveness.
What class or category should we place our single-sentence definition of Groupthink?
There is no single correct answer, but here are some suggestions:
Groupthink is a form of mindless consensus.
Groupthink is a tribalistic instinct.
Groupthink is the please-the-others impulse.
Groupthink is a conformity reflex.
What are the distinguishing characteristics of Groupthink?
Irving Janis broke down Groupthink into 8 symptoms, which appropriately are the distinguishing characteristics.
Eight symptoms of Groupthink include the following:
Overestimating the group’s power, infallibility, and morality to the point that the group is perceived as being invincible and invulnerable to the possibility of being wrong.
The narcissistic belief that one’s group is superior to other groups without any objective evaluation. This arrogance causes people to ignore warnings and negative feedback so that they rationalize their stupid behavior.
Close-mindedness and a reliance on tradition rather than critical analysis so that they ignore moral and ethical concerns and can enjoy their continued “in-group” status.
The pressure for everyone in the group to conform, “to be polite,” and “get with the program” so that there is uniformity at the expense of critical analysis.
Self-censorship results from the fear of being expelled by the tribe.
Mindguards who repel any challenge to the status quo.
The ability to rationalize negative outcomes.
The ability to change the goalposts so that the group can redefine success.
Review Definition ofGroupthink:
To conform to groups, we often compromise our critical thinking skills and integrity. This compromise and will to belong and get along with the group is Groupthink.
Peer Pressure
All of us are pressured to conform to group norms. If a joke is embraced as funny by the group and we don’t like it, people will say, “What’s wrong with that guy? He doesn’t even laugh. He must be sick in the head. Stay away from that guy.”
Our rejection from the group snowballs when it is perceived that we are “bad news” because we are weird or problematic.
As born tribalists, we all want approval from the tribe. Since the beginning of history, our survival has depended on it. Therefore, we are hard-wired to conform to the tribe’s norms and ways.
Informative Influence: We assume the group knows best.
Sometimes we adopt a group practice because we are ignorant about something, and we assume the group’s practice is based on knowledge even though it may or may not be. It is just simpler and safer, we assume, to go along with the group. In the video, the instructor gives the example of a dog’s shock collar, which is supposed to be the best way to train a dog. Such a method may in fact be cruel and there may be better methods, but if we act under Informative Influence, we don’t explore those other options.
Normative Influence: We fear expulsion from the group
Sometimes we adopt group behavior because we fear social rejection. How many times, for example, have you liked a post on Twitter or some other social media platform less because you understood the post and more because the person who posted it was popular and you “wanted to ride the gravy train” with everyone else?
Sadly, there is a large degree of moral cowardice that informs Normative Influence. People with privilege should speak out against social injustice, but too often they do not because they don’t want to “rock the boat” and create animosity between family and community members. As a result, a myriad of social injustices persist.
Private Vs. Public Conformity
When we are persuaded by the group privately, we are internalizing their ways and customs in what is often a permanent manner. Let’s say I’m adopted by a vegan family who persuades me that the vegan diet is the only morally acceptable way to eat. I embrace their eating practice for the long haul.
However, if I eat a vegan diet just to be respectful but in truth, I crave rib-eye steak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, then most likely when I move out of the family’s house, I will be frequenting Ruth’s Chris Steak House.
Group Polarization & Confirmation Bias
Majority opinions gain strength as more and more people seek safety and refuge in the acceptance of the majority opinion. As these opinions “amplify” over time, they create group polarization. Wanting acceptance, we rationalize the majority opinions by cherry-picking evidence that confirms their truth. This cherry-picking of evidence is called confirmation bias.
Groupthink
Confirmation bias is done in the service of achieving harmony in the group rather than breaking ranks through dissenting opinion, and in a nutshell, this is the very essence of Groupthink.
Review of the 8 Groupthink Symptoms:
One. Overestimating the group’s power, infallibility, and morality to the point that the group is perceived as being invincible and invulnerable to the possibility of being wrong.
Two. The narcissistic belief that one’s group is superior to other groups without any objective evaluation. This arrogance causes people to ignore warnings and negative feedback so that they rationalize their stupid behavior.
Three. Close-mindedness and a reliance on tradition rather than critical analysis so that they ignore moral and ethical concerns and can enjoy their continued “in-group” status.
Four. The pressure for everyone in the group to conform, “to be polite,” and “get with the program” so that there is uniformity at the expense of critical analysis. This desire for harmony over critical thinking results in Groupthink.
Five. Self-censorship results from the fear of being expelled by the tribe.
Six. Mindguards who repel any challenge to the status quo.
Seven. The ability to rationalize negative outcomes.
Eight. The ability to change the goalposts so that the group can redefine success.
Building Block #1 Assignment for Workism Essay
The Assignment: Summarize the Major Points in "Workism Is Making Americans Miserable" due on October 8
Using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase the major points of Derek Thompson's "Workism Is Making Americans Miserable," which will be your essay's introductory paragraph.
Study Guide for Derek Thompson’s “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” Part 1
Leisure Time Has Become an Obsolescent Idea
Derek Thompson begins his essay by observing that leisure time was supposed to be a significant benefit of success, that the college-educated worker could enjoy a 15-hour work week.
With the 15-hour work week, we could unchain our identities from our jobs and create a parallel world in the arts, hobbies, or other passions, which would become the new reservoir of our new identity.
The Higher the Income Tier, the More Hours You Work
While for many Americans, the work week has indeed shortened, there is one group for which the work week has actually lengthened to at least 65 hours: highly-skilled, college-educated workers who earn the top tier of income in America.
For middle-tier wage earners, the job is a necessary tool to get money to pay for basic expenses: food, gas, shelter, and medical bills.
However, the upper-tier earners work more and have embraced the cult of Workism, meaning that work is not just a source of income, but a major source of self-worth and identity. As Thompson observes:
The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism.
Work Fills the Spiritual or Existential Vacuum
Thompson posits that we all worship something: our god, our family, ambition, money, self-aggrandizement, love, social media status, fast cars, and even donuts. We may say we’ve “lost our religion,” but in reality, some kind of religion always replaces another, including “The Gospel of Work.” In the words of Thompson:
The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion ofnew atheisms. Some people worshipbeauty, some worshippolitical identities, and others worship their children. Buteverybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.
What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.
Without Work, We Languish in Emptiness and Despair and Feel Like Pariahs
Thompson is arguing that for the college-educated Workism is essential to their self-worth, sense of belonging, identity, and anchoring: not family, not religion, not friendship, but Workism.
The frenzied charge to enhance our self-worth through our work is uniquely American and reflects longer work hours than in other countries. As Thompson writes:
No large country in the world as productive as the United States averages more hours of work a year. And the gap between the U.S. and other countries is growing. Between 1950 and 2012, annual hours worked per employee fell by about 40 percent in Germany and the Netherlands—but by only 10 percent in the United States. Americans “work longer hours, have shorter vacations, get less in unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits, and retire later, than people in comparably rich societies,” wrote Samuel P. Huntington in his 2005 bookWho Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity.
One group has led the widening of the workist gap: rich men.
In 1980, the highest-earning men actually worked fewer hours per week than middle-class and low-income men, according to a survey by theMinneapolis Fed. But that’s changed. By 2005, the richest 10 percent of married men had the longest average workweek. In that same time, college-educated men reduced their leisure timemore than any other group. Today, it is fair to say that elite American men have transformed themselves intothe world’s premier workaholics, toiling longer hours than both poorer men in the U.S. and rich men in similarly rich countries.
More Work Hours Is a Pathological Power Grab
It seems that America’s high earners have punked themselves: They compete to be the hardest worker and put in the longest hours because to be a workaholic is to be superior to other workers. As we read in Thompson’s essay:
This shift defies economic logic—and economic history. The rich have always worked less than the poor, because they could afford to.The landed gentry of preindustrial Europe dined, danced, and gossiped, while serfs toiled without end. In the early 20th century, rich Americans used their ample downtime to buy weekly movie tickets anddabble in sports. Today’s rich American men can afford vastly more downtime. But they have used their wealth to buy the strangest of prizes: more work!
Perhaps long hours are part of an arms race for status and income among the moneyed elite. Or maybe the logic here isn’t economic at all. It’s emotional—even spiritual. The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves. “For many of today’s rich there is no such thing as ‘leisure’; in the classic sense—work is their play,” the economist Robert Frankwrote in TheWall Street Journal. “Building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”
Workism Is Part of America’s Dystopian Public Policy
Americans fetishize long work hours so much that we have no political will to give workers time off, lengthy vacations, and paternity leave. We offer the most abysmal time-off in the industrial world. We also punish Americans for being unemployed by cutting them off of medical benefits. We seem to have created this dystopian hell for the working poor but rationalize that if only “they would get with the program” and join the Workism Cult they could reap the awards of the American Dream. In the words of Derek Thompson:
Even as Americans worship workism, its leaders consecrate it from the marble daises of Congress and enshrine it in law.Most advanced countries give new parents paid leave; but the United States guarantees no such thing. Many advanced countries ease the burden of parenthood with national policies; but U.S.public spending on child care and early education is near the bottom of international rankings. In most advanced countries, citizens are guaranteed access to health care by their government; but themajority of insured Americans get health care through—where else?—their workplace. Automation and AI may soon threaten the labor force, but America’s welfare system has become more work-based in the past 20 years. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which replaced much of the existing welfare system with programs that made benefits contingent on the recipient’s employment.
Study Guide for Derek Thompson’s “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” Part 2
Work Is Essential to the Soul But Is There a Point of Diminishing Returns
Thompson is not arguing against work per se; he actually argues that long-term unemployment may be more egregious to the spirit than the loss of a loved one. A certain amount of work is important for structure, focus, self-worth, belonging, and pride.
But what Thompson is questioning is the elevation of a job to something more than a way to make money to pay the bills. It may not be, as Work Cultists would have us believe, be a calling or a platform for self-actualization. In the words of Thompson:
There is nothing wrong with work, when work must be done. And there is no question that an elite obsession with meaningful work will produce a handful of winners who hit the workist lottery: busy, rich, and deeply fulfilled. But a culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualization into salaried jobs is setting itself up for collective anxiety, mass disappointment, andinevitable burnout.
In the past century, the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings—from necessity to status to meaning. In an agrarian or early-manufacturing economy, where tens of millions of people perform similar routinized tasks, there are no delusions about the higher purpose of, say, planting corn or screwing bolts: It’s just a job.
McMahon’s Take: College Applications and Origin Stories
It seems that applying to colleges is rooted in the Job-As-Self-Actualization Myth. When you apply to a college, you have to write a Personal Statement letter, which is nothing less than a Superhero Origin Story about how you found your Life Calling. If you don’t have such a dramatic story that brands you as a Special Person with a Calling, you will find your application gets thrown away and you will be replaced by a student who plays the game and writes a phony origin story.
In other words, colleges are contributing to Workism. Thompson omits this important fact. Colleges are invested in selling meaning and transcendence to prospective students just like the purveyors of business.
What Thompson analyzes in the workplace could be equally applied to the university:
“We’ve created this idea that the meaning of life should be found in work,” says Oren Cass, the author of the book The Once and Future Worker. “We tell young people that their work should be their passion. ‘Don’t give up until you find a job that you love!’ we say. ‘You should be changing the world!’ we tell them. That is the message in commencement addresses, in pop culture, and frankly, in media, including The Atlantic.”
But our desks were never meant to be our altars. The modern labor force evolved to serve the needs of consumers and capitalists, not to satisfy tens of millions of people seeking transcendence at the office. It’s hard to self-actualize on the job if you’re a cashier—one of the most common occupations in the U.S.—and even the best white-collar roles have long periods of stasis, boredom, or busywork. This mismatch between expectations and reality is a recipe for severe disappointment, if not outright misery, and it might explain why rates of depression and anxiety in the U.S. are “substantially higher” than they were in the 1980s, according toa 2014 study.
The Two Traumus of Millennials and Subsequent Generations
Thompson writes that Millennials have amassed huge student debt to make sure they are armed with sufficient degrees and credentials in the competitive workforce. When you are in debt for over two decades, if not a lifetime, for your student loans, you want your job to be larger than life, to possess secret sauce, and unlock the secrets of the universe. Your job has to be far more than money to be to afford food and shelter.
Additionally, Millennials and subsequent generations have social media, which puts pressure on us to curate a successful life, one rich with fulfillment, meaning, and self-actualization. In the words of Thompson:
While it’s inadvisable to paint 85 million people with the same brush, it’s fair to say that American Millennials have been collectively defined by two external traumas. The first is student debt. Millennials are the most educated generation ever, a distinction that should have made them rich and secure. But rising educational attainment has come at a steep price. Since 2007, outstanding student debt has grown by almost $1 trillion, roughly tripling in just 12 years. And since the economy cratered in 2008, average wages for young graduates have stagnated—making it even harder to pay off loans.
The second external trauma of the Millennial generation has been the disturbance of social media, which has amplified the pressure to craft an image of success—for oneself, for one’s friends and colleagues, and even for one’s parents. But literally visualizing career success can be difficult in a services and information economy. Blue-collar jobs produce tangible products, like coal, steel rods, and houses. The output of white-collar work—algorithms, consulting projects, programmatic advertising campaigns—is more shapeless and often quite invisible. It’s not glib to say that the whiter the collar, the more invisible the product.
Since the physical world leaves few traces of achievement, today’s workers turn to social media to make manifest their accomplishments. Many of them spend hours crafting a separate reality of stress-free smiles, postcard vistas, and Edison-lightbulbed working spaces. “The social media feed [is] evidence of the fruits of hard, rewarding labor and the labor itself,” Petersen writes.
“Do What You Love” Is a Lie That Targets the “Meaning Junkies”
Thompson refers to Erin Griffith’s New York Times essay “Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?” in which she shows a generation of young people working at WeWork with “Do What You Love” pillows and they’re all miserable and burned out.
Millennials are “meaning junkies” who need to find a higher purpose at work, a job that justifies all the student debt they’ve accrued. And this meaning must be curated on social media so the whole world can see how fulfilled and spiritually together they are. This makes them ripe for exploitation. We see this exploitation at WeWork, Theranos, and the Fyre Festival fiasco.
This exploitation is justified by Workism, which lines the pockets of the elite rich. As we read:
The problem with this gospel—Your dream job is out there, so never stop hustling—is that it’s a blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion. Long hours don’t make anybody more productive or creative; they make peoplestressed, tired and bitter. But the overwork myths survive “because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies,” Griffithwrites.
Derek Thompson and Ethos
To give himself some humility and credibility in his essay, Thompson makes a confession: He himself is a practitioner of the Cult of Workism. He writes:
This is the right time for a confession. I am the very thing that I am criticizing.
I am devoted to my job. I feel most myself when I am fulfilled by my work—including the work of writing an essay about work. My sense of identity is so bound up in my job, my sense of accomplishment, and my feeling of productivity that bouts of writer’s block can send me into an existential funk that can spill over into every part of my life. And I know enough writers, tech workers, marketers, artists, and entrepreneurs to know that my affliction is common, especially within a certain tranche of the white-collar workforce.
The Reality of Workism
Thompson concedes it’s true that a culture that produces Workism produces some of the best innovations in the world, but it’s also true that 87% of American workers are not engaged at work. Think about that: Eighty-seven % of the workers are disaffected, afflicted with job boredom, burnout, and ennui.
Conclusion: America Needs More Paid Leave and More Work Balance
Thompson argues in his conclusion that as a country America must change its public policy: More paid leave, more paternity leave, better medical coverage for the employed and unemployed alike, and better work balance, which means you work to “buy free time.”
In the end, while some of us are work superstars like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and others, about 90% of us will work to pay the bills, not as a higher calling. We need to live in reality, not fantasy.
Anne Helen Petersen, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”
Study Guide for Anne Helen Petersen’s “How the Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” Part 1
The Contradiction: Lazy and Maladapted Or Overworked?
There is much talk about the newer generations, Millennials and subsequent ones of being spoiled, coddled snowflakes who lack basic development.
According to the stereotype, they have been suffocated by their helicopter parents and they lack the work ethic to succeed in adult life.
Two notable works are the best-selling book The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff and the viral Atlantic essay “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” by Jean M. Twenge.
In these works, young people are emotionally fragile, lazy, narcissistic, inward, and incapable of acting like adults.
The spoiled snowflake started to become prominent in 2012, according to Jean Twenge’s essay. This is when the Apple iPhone began to scale and nearly everyone “needed” a smartphone of some type.
Generation Z (born 1997-2012 after which we have Generation Alpha) spent most of their time on tablets or screens of some kind, not living in the real or analog world.
According to Jean Twenge, Generation Z lives in a world where social media dominates their social ranking and sense of self-worth. They do little homework and are suffocated by their helicopter parents.
As a result, Generation Z has trouble transitioning into dating, driving cars, going to college, and entering the work world.
As Jean Twenge would want you to believe, Generation Z is content living in their parents’ homes for perpetuity while reclined in bed scrolling a screen and checking their social media status.
Twenge’s term for this group of sedated screen-addicted children is iGen.
According to Twenge’s research, when iGen spends time on their screens, they are less happy; when they spend time off their screens, they are happier. However, they are addicted to their screens, so in a way, they are addicted to misery.
Nothing in Twenge’s portrayal of iGen suggests a generation beholden to Workism.
Indeed, Anne Helen Petersen addresses this stereotype of Lazy iGen in her essay. As she writes, basic tasks cannot be completed by today’s generation like mailing a letter.
Adulting and Errand Paralysis
Petersen argues that many young people are the opposite of spoiled. They live in fear and enormous stress due to the failure of the American Dream. Their college costs are up 2,000 percent from thirty years ago and the cost of housing makes home ownership nearly impossible.
To get a headstart in life, young kids are adulting. Petersen defines adulting as doing tedious tasks that are required to live in the adult world such as basic chores: grocery shopping, house cleaning, etc.
Errand paralysis is when the To-Do list is so long people just go to bed and say “Screw it.”
Petersen includes herself in the narrative. As she writes:
None of these tasks were that hard: getting knives sharpened, taking boots to the cobbler, registering my dog for a new license, sending someone a signed copy of my book, scheduling an appointment with the dermatologist, donating books to the library, vacuuming my car. A handful of emails — one from a dear friend, one from a former student asking how my life was going — festered in my personal inbox, which I use as a sort of alternative to-do list, to the point that I started calling it the “inbox of shame.”
It’s not as if I were slacking in the rest of my life. I was publishing stories, writing two books, making meals, executing a move across the country, planning trips, paying my student loans, exercising on a regular basis. But when it came to the mundane, the medium priority, the stuff that wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better, I avoided it.
Adulting, To-Do Lists, and the Meaning of Life
When young people are overwhelmed by all these things they have to do to become an adult, to become successful, and to achieve charisma in the dating world, they see life as following a script that leads to emptiness and vanity.
Some will seek YouTube motivational bros who will teach you how to be good-looking, fit, smart, and intellectual.
Others will see this whole makeover quest as a joke.
So what we have are two contradictory images of iGen:
We have the Smartphone Zombie:
Addicted to smartphone
Depressed from being mired in social media addiction
Narcissistic
Snowflake
Coddled by parents
Lacks independence
Stunted emotional growth
Self-image dysmorphia (low self-esteem)
Overly sensitive to social media ranking and status
Doesn’t drive
Doesn’t date
Doesn’t work
Doesn’t want to grow up
Easily offended and triggered
But we also have the tireless Social Influencer or Ubermensch (Superman or Superwoman)
You’ve excelled in STEM and have been adept at computer coding since the first grade
Since the age of ten, you have been an expert at writing college personal statements in which you’ve created a powerful personal narrative that captures your Brand.
By high school, you are well-versed in The Classics and at the drop of a hat you can quote lengthy passages from Nietzsche, Aristotle, Plato, Spinoza, Hobbes, Aristophanes, Darwin, Freud, Jung, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Lao Tzu, Aldous Huxley, Bushido Samarai, Karl Marx, Shakespeare, Dante, Frederick Douglass, Virginia Wolf, Joan Didion, Doestoveski, and Theodor Adorno.
You have a strong social media presence like a YouTube channel with hundreds of thousands of followers and you give advice on business, diet, exercise, philosophy, future trends, and cryptocurrency.
You give Ted Talks about how even though you have never gone to college, you are an autodidactic and have taught yourself to have the equivalent of ten PhDs, and you teach young people how to become successful without a college degree by starting their own tech start-up, investing in Bitcoin, and finding their niche in day trading.
You drive an electric car that looks and moves like a flying saucer.
You have almost no body fat, wear dark jeans, black T-shirts, and Vibram Five-Finger Toe Shoes, and replace all your meals with tall glasses of water mixed with whey-isolate protein powder, spirulina, and wheat grass.
You are a philanthropist and you visit third-world countries where you establish schools named after you. These schools are state-of-the-art with lightning-fast computers, organic vegetable gardens, and a spectacular Planetarium where kids can watch the cosmos while listening to the music of Lana Del Ray and Pink Floyd.
You have mastered several languages including Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese, German, French, Spanish, Farsi, Urdu, and Ki-Swahili.
You are well-versed in the breathing techniques of Breathing Master Wim Hof. As a result, you are an evangelist for correct breathing, and you will chastise people for breathing through their mouths, telling them that nose-breathing is the only True Path.
Three times a day you spend an hour inside your ten-thousand-dollar Ice Chamber to enjoy the health benefits of cryotherapy and engage in “mindful meditation” while listening to the haunting Icelandic band Sigur Ros, Eluvium, or Radiohead.
Anne Helen Petersen, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”
Petersen is arguing that the newer generations, post-Millennial, are not lazy; they are burned out. It’s not so much a flaw of individual character but something systemic to culture at large, a society that promotes a dystopia where people are underpaid and overworked. Society has acclimated itself to this burnout but it can be felt in the background. As Petersen writes:
But the more I tried to figure out my errand paralysis, the more the actual parameters of burnout began to reveal themselves. Burnout and the behaviors and weight that accompany it aren’t, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It’s not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments. And it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives.
That realization recast my recent struggles: Why can’t I get this mundane stuff done? Because I’m burned out. Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should beworking all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it —explicitly andimplicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.
***
Economic Disadvantage
Petersen argues that it is grotesque for Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers to paint younger generations as spoiled when the younger gens have several economic disadvantages: cost of education, cost of housing, and crappy or at best mediocre job prospects, which often require a side hustle.
Competing for good jobs has become a scene out of the Netflix show Squid Game, about a world that is essentially a tooth-and-claw zero-sum game with only winners and losers, no in-between.
Contrary to being lazy, many of the new generations are full-time careerists who fearfully worship at the altar of Workism, putting all their energies on career success. As Petersen writes:
It wasn’t until after college that I began to see the results of those attitudes in action. Four years postgraduation, alumni would complain that the school had filled with nerds: No one even parties on a Tuesday! I laughed at the eternal refrain — These younger kids, what dorks, we were way cooler — but not until I returned to campus years later as a professor did I realize just how fundamentally different those students’ orientation to school was. There were still obnoxious frat boys and fancy sorority girls, but they were far more studious than my peers had been. They skipped fewer classes. They religiously attended office hours. They emailed at all hours. But they were also anxious grade grubbers, paralyzed at the thought of graduating, and regularly stymied by assignments that called for creativity. They’d been guided closely all their lives, and they wanted me to guide them as well. They were, in a word, scared.
Every graduating senior is scared, to some degree, of the future, but this was on a different level. When my class left our liberal arts experience, we scattered to temporary gigs: I worked at a dude ranch; another friend nannied for the summer; one got a job on a farm in New Zealand; others became raft guides and transitioned to ski instructors. We didn’t think our first job was important; it was just a job and would eventually, meanderingly lead to The Job.
***
Not Workism: Fear
A certain amount of fear is normal in life. I’m a Baby Boomer, and fear helped me succeed in college.
When I was seventeen during the summer before I went to college, I did construction work, and I was so sweat-soaked and tired when I got home that all I could do is shower, eat a bowl of cereal, go to bed, and wake up the next morning and start my Hell Day all over again.
It became apparent to me as a teenage kid that if I didn’t go to college, my life would be miserable and I would be so tired I wouldn’t even have time for thoughts; in other words, I would have been a Work Bot who Never Becomes Someone.
I went to college because I wanted to Become Someone.
I nearly failed my first year of college. I received a letter of probationary warning: Either stop dropping classes and improve your grades or you’re expelled.
The warning letter put a fire torch on my rear and motivated me to change my ways, stop hanging out with my high school buddies, and start being consistent with my studies.
I dumped my old friends and quickly spiked my GPA so that I was on the Dean’s List, but let there be no mistake, fear was a huge motivational factor.
Easier for Me
But let’s be clear. My college life as a Baby Boomer was easier than today’s generation. I paid $75 a quarter to go to Cal State and I could major in anything I wanted and be confident I’d find a high-paying job with good medical benefits and afford a house. That scenario doesn’t exist for my students today.
For example, I had no student debt to worry about. But today the average student loan debt is $36K overall and $55K for private colleges.
Today’s Fear of Failure and Disappointing One’s Parents
Petersen observes that today’s generation in college feels the stakes are so high that they immediately must get a high-status job to define their success and “intrinsic value”; otherwise, they will disappoint themselves and their parents. As we read:
But these students were convinced that their first job out of college would not only determine their career trajectory, but also their intrinsic value for the rest of their lives. I told one student, whose dozens of internship and fellowship applications yielded no results, that she should move somewhere fun, get any job, and figure out what interests her and what kind of work she doesn’t want to do — a suggestion that prompted wailing. “But what’ll I tell my parents?” she said. “I want a cool job I’m passionate about!”
Those expectations encapsulate the millennial rearing project, in which students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about. Whether that job is as a professional sports player, a Patagonia social media manager, a programmer at a startup, or a partner at a law firm seems to matter less than checking all of those boxes.
Or at least that’s the theory. So what happens when millennials start the actual search for that holy grail career — and start “adulting” — but it doesn’t feel at all like the dream that had been promised?
***
Study Guide for Anne Helen Petersen’s “How the Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” Part 2
Curating Our Life to be Self-Actualized and Successful
Social media has become the prominent mode for curating our lives as being successful and self-actualized.
We have become inculcated with the idea that we must curate a narrative on social media: We are on a self-actualization journey; we have a hard-work ethic, and we enjoy the fruits of our hard work.
We like to show the world our expensive vacations, our pet dogs, our euphoric romances, our mouth-water meals. We fail to realize that this facade is pure BS, the effluvium of the insecure, the impoverished, and the psychologically damaged.
No matter how much attention and validation is lavished upon us for our social media curations, we feel constantly impoverished, hungry, and “thirsty” for more attention. We can never get enough. We remain sad, anxious, and depressed.
To make our connection to social media even worse, not only are we emotionally addicted to self-curation, we are told that having a “social media presence” is essential to promoting our career and establishing “our brand.” As Petersen writes:
The social media feed — and Instagram in particular — is thus evidence of the fruits of hard, rewarding labor and the labor itself. The photos and videos that induce the most jealousy are those that suggest a perfect equilibrium (work hard, play hard!) has been reached. But of course, for most of us, it hasn’t. Posting on social media, after all, is a means of narrativizing our own lives: What we’re telling ourselves our lives are like. And when we don’t feel the satisfaction that we’ve been told we should receive from a good job that’s “fulfilling,” balanced with a personal life that’s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you’re feeling it is to illustrate it for others.
For many millennials, a social media presence — on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter — has also become an integral part of obtaining and maintaining a job. The “purest” example is thesocial media influencer, whose entire income source is performing andmediating the self online. But social media is also the means through which many “knowledge workers” — that is, workers who handle, process, or make meaning of information — market and brand themselves. Journalists use Twitter to learn about other stories, but they also use it to develop a personal brand and following that can be leveraged; people use LinkedIn not just for résumés and networking, but to post articles that attest to their personality (their brand!) as a manager or entrepreneur. Millennials aren’t the only ones who do this, but we’re the ones who perfected and thus set the standards for those who do.
“Branding” is a fitting word for this work, as it underlines what the millennial self becomes: a product. And as in childhood, the work of optimizing that brand blurs whatever boundaries remained between work and play. There is no “off the clock” when at all hours you could be documenting your on-brand experiences or tweeting your on-brand observations. The rise of smartphones makes these behaviors frictionless and thus more pervasive, more standardized. In the early days of Facebook, you had to take pictures with your digital camera, upload them to your computer, and post them in albums. Now, your phone is a sophisticated camera, always ready to document every component of your life — in easily manipulated photos, in short video bursts, in constant updates to Instagram Stories — and to facilitate the labor of performing the self for public consumption.
***
Turning ourselves into “a brand” is a form of self-commodification that contributes to Workism. As we drink our own Kool-Aid and believe the BS narrative we spin on social media, we become lost narcissists worshipping at the altar of Workism and not realizing that eventually we will crash and burn.
Business is both complicit and happy with our demise. They are looking at us as wet rags and every last drop will be squeezed from us.
The Phone Tethers Us to Work 24/7 While We Suffer Wage Stagnation
In the Smartphone Age, the idea of a 40-hour work week is a joke. The smartphone makes us beholden to our job responsibilities 24/7, either by explicit decree by our boss or our own internalized pressures to keep up and remain competitive.
We would like to believe our increased hours and productivity would result in commensurate pay, but on the contrary, we get paid less, suffer less job security, and endure fewer benefits. As Petersen writes:
But as sociologist Arne L. Kallebergpoints out, that efficiency was supposed to give us more job security, more pay, perhaps even more leisure. In short, better jobs.
Yet the more work we do, the more efficient we’ve proven ourselves to be, the worse our jobs become: lower pay, worse benefits, less job security. Our efficiency hasn’t bucked wage stagnation; our steadfastness hasn’t made us more valuable. If anything, our commitment to work, no matter how exploitative, has simply encouraged and facilitated our exploitation. We put up with companies treating us poorly because we don’t see another option. We don’t quit. We internalize that we’re not striving hard enough. And we get a second gig.
***
Optimization Is a Pretty Word for Burnout
As we optimize and maximize our efficiency to champion our success, we actually fall precipitously into a rabbit hole of mental and physical weariness and collapse.
Worse than exhaustion which has an endpoint, burnout is a form of an ongoing collapse in which we are in a state of depression and sadness yet keep pushing ourselves to maintain our agenda. Somehow with no rewards, we keep telling ourselves to exploit ourselves more and more as if there is a rainbow waiting for us when in fact no such rainbow exists.
Exhaustion has an endgame. You collapse, hit rock bottom, and abandon the thing that caused the exhaustion.
In contrast, burnout has no endgame. You slog forward in a state of frayed and tattered emotions with no will to stop yourself.
Our intellect tells us to stop and get off the Workism Treadmill, but we have internalized a compulsive addiction to self-punishment that defines what our powers of reason tell us.
As a result, this pathological condition called Burnout becomes the new normal for newer generations. As Petersen writes:
All of this optimization — as children, in college, online — culminates in the dominant millennial condition, regardless of class or race or location: burnout. “Burnout” was first recognized as a psychological diagnosis in 1974, applied by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger to cases of “physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.” Burnout is of a substantively different category than “exhaustion,” although it’s related. Exhaustion means going to the point where you can’t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.
What’s worse, the feeling of accomplishment that follows an exhausting task — passing the final! Finishing the massive work project! — never comes. “The exhaustion experienced in burnout combines an intense yearning for this state of completion with the tormenting sense that it cannot be attained, that there is always some demand or anxiety or distraction which can’t be silenced,” Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout,writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”
In his writing about burnout, Cohen is careful to note that it has antecedents; “melancholic world-weariness,” as he puts it, is noted in the book of Ecclesiastes, diagnosed by Hippocrates, and endemic to the Renaissance, a symptom of bewilderment with the feeling of “relentless change.” In the late 1800s, “neurasthenia,” or nervous exhaustion, afflicted patients run down by the “pace and strain of modern industrial life.” Burnout differs in its intensity and its prevalence: It isn’t an affliction experienced by relatively few that evidences the darker qualities of change but, increasingly, and particularly among millennials, the contemporary condition.
People patching together a retail job with unpredictable scheduling while driving Uber and arranging child care have burnout. Startup workers with fancy catered lunches, free laundry service, and 70-minute commutes have burnout. Academics teaching four adjunct classes and surviving on food stamps while trying to publish research in one last attempt at snagging a tenure-track job have burnout. Freelance graphic artists operating on their own schedule without health care or paid time off have burnout.
***
Propaganda Against Millennials Reframes Necessity as “Killing” and “Laziness.”
What critics call “killing” high-quality cultural artifacts like nice furniture, diamond wedding rings, and sit-down restaurants as a sign of bad taste and laziness is actually the necessity of optimization. As Petersen writes:
One of the ways to think through the mechanics of millennial burnout is by looking closely at the various objects and industriesour generation has supposedly “killed.” We’ve “killed” diamonds because we’re getting married later (or not at all), and if or when we do, it’s rare for one partner to have the financial stability to set aside the traditional two months’ salary for a diamond engagement ring. We’re killing antiques, opting instead for “fast furniture” — not because we hate our grandparents’ old items, but because we’re chasing stable employment across the country, and lugging old furniture and fragile china costs money that we don’t have. We’ve exchanged sit-down casual dining (Applebee’s, TGI Fridays) for fast casual (Chipotle et al.) because if we’re gonna pay for something, it should either be an experience worth waiting in line for (Cronuts! World-famous BBQ! Momofuku!) or efficient as hell.
Even the trends millennials have popularized — like athleisure — speak to our self-optimization. Yoga pants might look sloppy to your mom, but they’re efficient: You can transition seamlessly from an exercise class to a Skype meeting to child pickup. We use Fresh Direct and Amazon because the time they save allows us to do more work.
This is why the fundamental criticism of millennials — that we’re lazy and entitled — is so frustrating: We hustle so hard that we’ve figured out how to avoid wasting time eating meals and are called entitled for asking for fair compensation and benefits like working remotely (so we can live in affordable cities), adequate health care, or 401(k)s (so we can theoretically stop working at some point before the day we die). We’re called whiny for talking frankly about just how much we do work, or how exhausted we are by it. But because overworking for less money isn’t always visible — because job hunting now means trawling LinkedIn, because “overtime” now means replying to emails in bed — the extent of our labor is often ignored, or degraded.
Raising a Family Is the Second Shift
Peterson observes another factor to burnout: Having a family. Raising a family is hard by itself but coming home from a job to cook and clean for a family is the Second Shift. This life has become the new normal and burnout is inevitable. More and more of the young generation are opting out of marriage and having kids altogether to be spared the Second Shift and the financial burdens of raising a family.
Add to the Second Shift the “massive cognitive load” from worrying about money all the time and you’ve got Burnout.
Post-Petersen Essay, American Burnout Has Gotten Worse
America has gotten worse since Petersen’s essay came out in 2019. When we look at the economy, climate change, global conflicts, the Covid Pandemic and all its variants, America’s political polarization, the erosion of American democracy, and masses of Americans with no decent and critical thinking skills living in a conspiracy-addled Fever Swamp of weaponized misinformation, we find ourselves living in a constant state of Hair on Fire.
When our Hair is on Fire 24/7, the burnout Petersen describes is multiplied by a thousand.
***
Workism Sample Thesis Statements
Strong Thesis Should be Demonstrable, Defensible, and Debatable
Demonstrable: The information in the thesis generates body paragraphs or “reasons” for supporting your thesis, which will be the bulk of your essay.
Defensible: You can defend your thesis with logic, reasoning, evidence, facts, statistics, and credible sources, and as a result, achieve logos, pathos, and ethos.
Debatable: Your argument has two sides; therefore, you are not presenting a claim that is so obvious and self-evident as to be fatuous.
Sample #1
Derek Thompson in his essay “The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable” makes the persuasive case that the current work environment pushes young employees down a rabbit hole of being overworked in the name of “Workism,” an oppressive phenomenon characterized by Groupthink, fraudsters who effectively manipulate their workers, social media popularity contests, and college debt.
Sample #2
“The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable” is Derek Thompson’s compelling clarion call that urges us to pull out of Workism, a false religion that will lead to our ruin evidenced by ______________, ___________________, ______________, and _______________________.
Sample #3
As Derek Thompson and expertly and deftly illustrates, in our current zeitgeist we are being tempted by the deleterious allure of Workism, a phony religion defined by __________________, ____________________, ___________________, and _______________________.
Sample #4
While Derek Thompson makes several helpful insights about what he sees as the false religion of Workism, his essay is severely flawed in several respects.
Sample #5
While Derek Thompson makes several helpful insights about what he sees as the false religion of Workism, his essay is severely flawed in several respects, including the fact that he treats Workism as an oversimplistic monolith when in fact there are several Workism iterations in gradations of good and bad; he doesn’t acknowledge that certain types of Workism are necessary for innovation and success, and he fails to acknowledge that Workism is less a false religion than a necessity in today’s brutal “Squid Game” competition.
Sample #5
Derek Thompson has falsely framed Workism as a fake religion when in fact the drive to make work a place of meaning and societal change is a noble and worthy endeavor that defies Thompson’s attempts to demonize it.
Sample #6
Derek Thompson’s 2019 thesis that Workism is a disease that is stealing the lives of American workers collapses under the weight of the post-pandemic work trends, which point to The Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting, societal waves that render Thompson’s thesis both irrelevant and obsolescent.
Sample #7
I find it rich that privileged, highly educated, and highly successful public intellectual Derek Thompson, a man whose life has borne fruit from Workism, is eager to find clickbait for an online article that bemoans the very type of all-consuming work that he himself is beholden to. “Don’t do as I do; do as I say” is the lame and fitting epitaph to his grotesque and obsolescent essay.
Sample #8
While I will acknowledge that Derek Thompson’s essay has many flaws, including the hypocrisy that he himself is a disciple of Workism, his essay is a helpful and insightful anodyne to the wave of fraudsters who are hellbent on using the trappings of Workism to oppress their employees.
Sample #9
Derek Thompson’s notion of Workism as this “superman” approach to work is presented as a novelty, some kind of new and remarkable phenomenon that signifies the ascent of the tech industry, and yet it is precisely the way Thompson frames Workism as all-consuming work that shows his grotesque failure to acknowledge that tireless work is nothing new at all, but rather a key feature of immigrants coming to America. Therefore, Thompson’s thesis smacks of ignorance and a tendency to dismiss immigrant work, which as a whole diminishes the ethos of his claim and makes his essay contemptuous and unpersuasive.
Sample #10
While I acknowledge the Thompson critic in Thesis Sample #9 who is chafed and irate that Thompson failed to acknowledge the herculean hard work of immigrants who come to America and while I acknowledge that this immigrant contribution to the American workforce would have provided valuable contextualization of Thompson’s essay, I must defend Thompson’s thesis because there is nothing about the undeniable hard work of immigrants that contradicts Thompson’s claim, Thompson’s essay has a very specific focus on rich tech entrepreneurs and to cover the hard work of immigrants would have caused him to stray and meander off topic; finally, the oppression that results from Workism is a warning that helps immigrants and non-immigrants alike. Therefore, the Thompson critic who wrote Thesis Sample #9 needs to “cool it,” put an end to his self-righteous rhetorical excesses, and assess Thompson’s essay on its own terms.
1C Essay #2 Due October 22
Workism and Groupthink Compromise Critical Thinking and Exploits Employees
Then compare the idea of Workism, especially how employers rely on manipulation and Groupthink to exploit their employees, in relation to one or more of the following documentaries and TV shows: WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, and Severance. For your comparison of Thompson’s essay and the documentaries or TV shows, develop a thesis that addresses the claim that fraudsters rely on Workism and Groupthink to create a colossal breakdown of critical thinking that causes employees, investors, and customers to become dangerously gullible to the false promises of these mad grifters. As a result, the employees are exploited. Is the following claim legitimate? Why or why not? Explain. Be sure to have a counterargument-rebuttal section in your essay before you reach your conclusion.
What is Workism?
Workism is the religion of work so that you find meaning in throwing your entire being into your job in an attempt to find meaning, belonging, and transcendence.
What is the fraudster?
The fraudster capitalizes on knowing that there is a large workforce hungry for Workism. While trying to slake his greed, he portrays his company as being “on a mission to change the world,” and in the process, he exploits his employees.
What is Groupthink?
Groupthink in the workforce occurs when individuals desire to belong to the group to the point that they compromise their critical thinking skills and “go along with the program” to in effect be like sheep or “sheeple.”
Workism, fraudsters, and Groupthink Equal What?
When you combine Workism, fraudsters, and Groupthink, you get a colossal scam in the making in which many people are exploited, people lose their life savings, people are hurt, and in many cases, people’s lives are irreversibly ruined.
We see massive fraud and exploitation in the documentary WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, about the rising and falling star Adam Neumann who managed to walk away with over a billion dollars after ruining thousands of people’s lives. He still does his grift today. His predatory existence is well chronicled in the 8-episode Apple TV show WeCrashed starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway.
We see criminal negligence, flagrant lies, and exploitation in The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, about the grifter Elizabeth Holmes who endangered people’s lives with a fake health invention. Holmes’ life of fraud and perfidy was also made into an excellent TV 8-episode miniseries The Dropout with Holmes masterfully played by Amanda Seyfried.
We see fraud, exploitation, lies, and sociopathy in Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened in which Billy McFarland becomes a convicted felon.
We see a science fiction version of Workism and Groupthink rendered in the excellent Apple TV show Severance in which workers go through a brain procedure so that their work life is severed from their personal life.
We see a science fiction version of Workism and Groupthink in the 8-episode TV show Devs in which Nick Offerman plays a Silicon Valley cult leader with a diabolical purpose.
The Method (Essay Outline)
Paragraph 1: using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase Derek Thompson’s essay “The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable.”
Paragraph 2, your thesis: Develop a claim that explains how one or more of the above shows or documentaries supports Thompson’s major points about Workism.
Paragraphs 3-7 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 8, your conclusion, is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Your last page, Works Cited, is in MLA format and has a minimum of 4 sources.
Then compare the idea of Workism, especially how employers rely on manipulation and Groupthink to exploit their employees, in relation to one or more of the following documentaries and TV shows: WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, and Severance. For your comparison of Thompson’s essay and the documentaries or TV shows, develop a thesis that addresses the claim that fraudsters rely on Workism and Groupthink to create a colossal breakdown of critical thinking that causes employees, investors, and customers to become dangerously gullible to the false promises of these mad grifters. As a result, the employees are exploited. Is the following claim legitimate? Why or why not? Explain. Be sure to have a counterargument-rebuttal section in your essay before you reach your conclusion.
What is Workism?
Workism is the religion of work so that you find meaning in throwing your entire being into your job in an attempt to find meaning, belonging, and transcendence.
What is the fraudster?
The fraudster capitalizes on knowing that there is a large workforce hungry for Workism. While trying to slake his greed, he portrays his company as being “on a mission to change the world,” and in the process, he exploits his employees. His goal is to be compensated more and more while having less and less accountability.
What is Groupthink?
Groupthink in the workforce occurs when individuals desire to belong to the group to the point that they compromise their critical thinking skills and “go along with the program” to in effect be like sheep or “sheeple.”
Workism, fraudsters, and Groupthink Equal What?
When you combine Workism, fraudsters, and Groupthink, you get a colossal scam in the making in which many people are exploited, people lose their life savings, people are hurt, and in many cases, people’s lives are irreversibly ruined.
We see massive fraud and exploitation in the documentary WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, about the rising and falling star Adam Neumann who managed to walk away with over a billion dollars after ruining thousands of people’s lives. He still does his grift today. His predatory existence is well chronicled in the 8-episode Apple TV show WeCrashed starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway.
We see criminal negligence, flagrant lies, and exploitation in The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, about the grifter Elizabeth Holmes who endangered people’s lives with a fake health invention. Holmes’ life of fraud and perfidy was also made into an excellent TV 8-episode miniseries The Dropout with Holmes masterfully played by Amanda Seyfried.
We see fraud, exploitation, lies, and sociopathy in Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened in which Billy McFarland becomes a convicted felon.
We see a science fiction version of Workism and Groupthink rendered in the excellent Apple TV show Severance in which workers go through a brain procedure so that their work life is severed from their personal life.
We see a science fiction version of Workism and Groupthink in the 8-episode TV show Devs in which Nick Offerman plays a Silicon Valley cult leader with a diabolical purpose.
The Method (Essay Outline)
Paragraph 1: using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase Derek Thompson’s essay “The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable.”
Paragraph 2, your thesis: Develop a claim that explains how one or more of the above shows or documentaries supports Thompson’s major points about Workism.
Paragraphs 3-7 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 8, your conclusion, is a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Your last page, Works Cited, is in MLA format and has a minimum of 4 sources.
The Purpose:
All of us are susceptible to the trappings of Groupthink. Why? Because our Hunter and Forager ancestors survived in tribes, so we have an innate hunger for group approval hard-wired into our brains.
We are programmed to conform to the tribe’s desires even if these desires sometimes conflict with our individual conscience.
Writing an essay in which we examine the ways Groupthink diminishes our critical thinking and individual conscience helps strengthen our individual resolve, sharpens our critical thinking, and hopefully repels the pitfalls of Groupthink in our lives.
What Is Groupthink?
Groupthink can be defined as a consensus that is reached without performing due diligence or critical reasoning and evaluation.
Often Groupthink deteriorates into irrational, self-destructive behavior as a result of everyone being too cowardly and too desperate to conform so there is a fear of dissent.
Groupthink is born from the tribal instinct for belonging and the desire for group unity and cohesiveness.
What class or category should we place our single-sentence definition of Groupthink?
There is no single correct answer, but here are some suggestions:
Groupthink is a form of mindless consensus.
Groupthink is a tribalistic instinct.
Groupthink is the please-the-others impulse.
Groupthink is a conformity reflex.
What are the distinguishing characteristics of Groupthink?
Irving Janis broke down Groupthink into 8 symptoms, which appropriately are the distinguishing characteristics.
Eight symptoms of Groupthink include the following:
Overestimating the group’s power, infallibility, and morality to the point that the group is perceived as being invincible and invulnerable to the possibility of being wrong.
The narcissistic belief that one’s group is superior to other groups without any objective evaluation. This arrogance causes people to ignore warnings and negative feedback so that they rationalize their stupid behavior.
Close-mindedness and a reliance on tradition rather than critical analysis so that they ignore moral and ethical concerns and can enjoy their continued “in-group” status.
The pressure for everyone in the group to conform, “to be polite,” and “get with the program” so that there is uniformity at the expense of critical analysis.
Self-censorship results from the fear of being expelled by the tribe.
Mindguards who repel any challenge to the status quo.
The ability to rationalize negative outcomes.
The ability to change the goalposts so that the group can redefine success.
Review Definition ofGroupthink:
To conform to groups, we often compromise our critical thinking skills and integrity. This compromise and will to belong and get along with the group is Groupthink.
Peer Pressure
All of us are pressured to conform to group norms. If a joke is embraced as funny by the group and we don’t like it, people will say, “What’s wrong with that guy? He doesn’t even laugh. He must be sick in the head. Stay away from that guy.”
Our rejection from the group snowballs when it is perceived that we are “bad news” because we are weird or problematic.
As born tribalists, we all want approval from the tribe. Since the beginning of history, our survival has depended on it. Therefore, we are hard-wired to conform to the tribe’s norms and ways.
Informative Influence: We assume the group knows best.
Sometimes we adopt a group practice because we are ignorant about something, and we assume the group’s practice is based on knowledge even though it may or may not be. It is just simpler and safer, we assume, to go along with the group. In the video, the instructor gives the example of a dog’s shock collar, which is supposed to be the best way to train a dog. Such a method may in fact be cruel and there may be better methods, but if we act under Informative Influence, we don’t explore those other options.
Normative Influence: We fear expulsion from the group
Sometimes we adopt group behavior because we fear social rejection. How many times, for example, have you liked a post on Twitter or some other social media platform less because you understood the post and more because the person who posted it was popular and you “wanted to ride the gravy train” with everyone else?
Sadly, there is a large degree of moral cowardice that informs Normative Influence. People with privilege should speak out against social injustice, but too often they do not because they don’t want to “rock the boat” and create animosity between family and community members. As a result, a myriad of social injustices persist.
Private Vs. Public Conformity
When we are persuaded by the group privately, we are internalizing their ways and customs in what is often a permanent manner. Let’s say I’m adopted by a vegan family who persuades me that the vegan diet is the only morally acceptable way to eat. I embrace their eating practice for the long haul.
However, if I eat a vegan diet just to be respectful but in truth, I crave rib-eye steak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, then most likely when I move out of the family’s house, I will be frequenting Ruth’s Chris Steak House.
Group Polarization & Confirmation Bias
Majority opinions gain strength as more and more people seek safety and refuge in the acceptance of the majority opinion. As these opinions “amplify” over time, they create group polarization. Wanting acceptance, we rationalize the majority opinions by cherry-picking evidence that confirms their truth. This cherry-picking of evidence is called confirmation bias.
Groupthink
Confirmation bias is done in the service of achieving harmony in the group rather than breaking ranks through dissenting opinion, and in a nutshell, this is the very essence of Groupthink.
Review of the 8 Groupthink Symptoms:
One. Overestimating the group’s power, infallibility, and morality to the point that the group is perceived as being invincible and invulnerable to the possibility of being wrong.
Two. The narcissistic belief that one’s group is superior to other groups without any objective evaluation. This arrogance causes people to ignore warnings and negative feedback so that they rationalize their stupid behavior.
Three. Close-mindedness and a reliance on tradition rather than critical analysis so that they ignore moral and ethical concerns and can enjoy their continued “in-group” status.
Four. The pressure for everyone in the group to conform, “to be polite,” and “get with the program” so that there is uniformity at the expense of critical analysis. This desire for harmony over critical thinking results in Groupthink.
Five. Self-censorship results from the fear of being expelled by the tribe.
Six. Mindguards who repel any challenge to the status quo.
Seven. The ability to rationalize negative outcomes.
Eight. The ability to change the goalposts so that the group can redefine success.
Building Block #1 Assignment for Workism Essay
The Assignment: Summarize the Major Points in "Workism Is Making Americans Miserable" due on October 8
Using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase the major points of Derek Thompson's "Workism Is Making Americans Miserable," which will be your essay's introductory paragraph.
Study Guide for Derek Thompson’s “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” Part 1
Leisure Time Has Become an Obsolescent Idea
Derek Thompson begins his essay by observing that leisure time was supposed to be a significant benefit of success, that the college-educated worker could enjoy a 15-hour work week.
With the 15-hour work week, we could unchain our identities from our jobs and create a parallel world in the arts, hobbies, or other passions, which would become the new reservoir of our new identity.
The Higher the Income Tier, the More Hours You Work
While for many Americans, the work week has indeed shortened, there is one group for which the work week has actually lengthened to at least 65 hours: highly-skilled, college-educated workers who earn the top tier of income in America.
For middle-tier wage earners, the job is a necessary tool to get money to pay for basic expenses: food, gas, shelter, and medical bills.
However, the upper-tier earners work more and have embraced the cult of Workism, meaning that work is not just a source of income, but a major source of self-worth and identity. As Thompson observes:
The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism.
Work Fills the Spiritual or Existential Vacuum
Thompson posits that we all worship something: our god, our family, ambition, money, self-aggrandizement, love, social media status, fast cars, and even donuts. We may say we’ve “lost our religion,” but in reality, some kind of religion always replaces another, including “The Gospel of Work.” In the words of Thompson:
The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion ofnew atheisms. Some people worshipbeauty, some worshippolitical identities, and others worship their children. Buteverybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.
What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.
Without Work, We Languish in Emptiness and Despair and Feel Like Pariahs
Thompson is arguing that for the college-educated Workism is essential to their self-worth, sense of belonging, identity, and anchoring: not family, not religion, not friendship, but Workism.
The frenzied charge to enhance our self-worth through our work is uniquely American and reflects longer work hours than in other countries. As Thompson writes:
No large country in the world as productive as the United States averages more hours of work a year. And the gap between the U.S. and other countries is growing. Between 1950 and 2012, annual hours worked per employee fell by about 40 percent in Germany and the Netherlands—but by only 10 percent in the United States. Americans “work longer hours, have shorter vacations, get less in unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits, and retire later, than people in comparably rich societies,” wrote Samuel P. Huntington in his 2005 bookWho Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity.
One group has led the widening of the workist gap: rich men.
In 1980, the highest-earning men actually worked fewer hours per week than middle-class and low-income men, according to a survey by theMinneapolis Fed. But that’s changed. By 2005, the richest 10 percent of married men had the longest average workweek. In that same time, college-educated men reduced their leisure timemore than any other group. Today, it is fair to say that elite American men have transformed themselves intothe world’s premier workaholics, toiling longer hours than both poorer men in the U.S. and rich men in similarly rich countries.
More Work Hours Is a Pathological Power Grab
It seems that America’s high earners have punked themselves: They compete to be the hardest worker and put in the longest hours because to be a workaholic is to be superior to other workers. As we read in Thompson’s essay:
This shift defies economic logic—and economic history. The rich have always worked less than the poor, because they could afford to.The landed gentry of preindustrial Europe dined, danced, and gossiped, while serfs toiled without end. In the early 20th century, rich Americans used their ample downtime to buy weekly movie tickets anddabble in sports. Today’s rich American men can afford vastly more downtime. But they have used their wealth to buy the strangest of prizes: more work!
Perhaps long hours are part of an arms race for status and income among the moneyed elite. Or maybe the logic here isn’t economic at all. It’s emotional—even spiritual. The best-educated and highest-earning Americans, who can have whatever they want, have chosen the office for the same reason that devout Christians attend church on Sundays: It’s where they feel most themselves. “For many of today’s rich there is no such thing as ‘leisure’; in the classic sense—work is their play,” the economist Robert Frankwrote in TheWall Street Journal. “Building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”
Workism Is Part of America’s Dystopian Public Policy
Americans fetishize long work hours so much that we have no political will to give workers time off, lengthy vacations, and paternity leave. We offer the most abysmal time-off in the industrial world. We also punish Americans for being unemployed by cutting them off of medical benefits. We seem to have created this dystopian hell for the working poor but rationalize that if only “they would get with the program” and join the Workism Cult they could reap the awards of the American Dream. In the words of Derek Thompson:
Even as Americans worship workism, its leaders consecrate it from the marble daises of Congress and enshrine it in law.Most advanced countries give new parents paid leave; but the United States guarantees no such thing. Many advanced countries ease the burden of parenthood with national policies; but U.S.public spending on child care and early education is near the bottom of international rankings. In most advanced countries, citizens are guaranteed access to health care by their government; but themajority of insured Americans get health care through—where else?—their workplace. Automation and AI may soon threaten the labor force, but America’s welfare system has become more work-based in the past 20 years. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which replaced much of the existing welfare system with programs that made benefits contingent on the recipient’s employment.
Study Guide for Derek Thompson’s “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable,” Part 2
Work Is Essential to the Soul But Is There a Point of Diminishing Returns
Thompson is not arguing against work per se; he actually argues that long-term unemployment may be more egregious to the spirit than the loss of a loved one. A certain amount of work is important for structure, focus, self-worth, belonging, and pride.
But what Thompson is questioning is the elevation of a job to something more than a way to make money to pay the bills. It may not be, as Work Cultists would have us believe, be a calling or a platform for self-actualization. In the words of Thompson:
There is nothing wrong with work, when work must be done. And there is no question that an elite obsession with meaningful work will produce a handful of winners who hit the workist lottery: busy, rich, and deeply fulfilled. But a culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualization into salaried jobs is setting itself up for collective anxiety, mass disappointment, andinevitable burnout.
In the past century, the American conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers to callings—from necessity to status to meaning. In an agrarian or early-manufacturing economy, where tens of millions of people perform similar routinized tasks, there are no delusions about the higher purpose of, say, planting corn or screwing bolts: It’s just a job.
McMahon’s Take: College Applications and Origin Stories
It seems that applying to colleges is rooted in the Job-As-Self-Actualization Myth. When you apply to a college, you have to write a Personal Statement letter, which is nothing less than a Superhero Origin Story about how you found your Life Calling. If you don’t have such a dramatic story that brands you as a Special Person with a Calling, you will find your application gets thrown away and you will be replaced by a student who plays the game and writes a phony origin story.
In other words, colleges are contributing to Workism. Thompson omits this important fact. Colleges are invested in selling meaning and transcendence to prospective students just like the purveyors of business.
What Thompson analyzes in the workplace could be equally applied to the university:
“We’ve created this idea that the meaning of life should be found in work,” says Oren Cass, the author of the book The Once and Future Worker. “We tell young people that their work should be their passion. ‘Don’t give up until you find a job that you love!’ we say. ‘You should be changing the world!’ we tell them. That is the message in commencement addresses, in pop culture, and frankly, in media, including The Atlantic.”
But our desks were never meant to be our altars. The modern labor force evolved to serve the needs of consumers and capitalists, not to satisfy tens of millions of people seeking transcendence at the office. It’s hard to self-actualize on the job if you’re a cashier—one of the most common occupations in the U.S.—and even the best white-collar roles have long periods of stasis, boredom, or busywork. This mismatch between expectations and reality is a recipe for severe disappointment, if not outright misery, and it might explain why rates of depression and anxiety in the U.S. are “substantially higher” than they were in the 1980s, according toa 2014 study.
The Two Traumus of Millennials and Subsequent Generations
Thompson writes that Millennials have amassed huge student debt to make sure they are armed with sufficient degrees and credentials in the competitive workforce. When you are in debt for over two decades, if not a lifetime, for your student loans, you want your job to be larger than life, to possess secret sauce, and unlock the secrets of the universe. Your job has to be far more than money to be to afford food and shelter.
Additionally, Millennials and subsequent generations have social media, which puts pressure on us to curate a successful life, one rich with fulfillment, meaning, and self-actualization. In the words of Thompson:
While it’s inadvisable to paint 85 million people with the same brush, it’s fair to say that American Millennials have been collectively defined by two external traumas. The first is student debt. Millennials are the most educated generation ever, a distinction that should have made them rich and secure. But rising educational attainment has come at a steep price. Since 2007, outstanding student debt has grown by almost $1 trillion, roughly tripling in just 12 years. And since the economy cratered in 2008, average wages for young graduates have stagnated—making it even harder to pay off loans.
The second external trauma of the Millennial generation has been the disturbance of social media, which has amplified the pressure to craft an image of success—for oneself, for one’s friends and colleagues, and even for one’s parents. But literally visualizing career success can be difficult in a services and information economy. Blue-collar jobs produce tangible products, like coal, steel rods, and houses. The output of white-collar work—algorithms, consulting projects, programmatic advertising campaigns—is more shapeless and often quite invisible. It’s not glib to say that the whiter the collar, the more invisible the product.
Since the physical world leaves few traces of achievement, today’s workers turn to social media to make manifest their accomplishments. Many of them spend hours crafting a separate reality of stress-free smiles, postcard vistas, and Edison-lightbulbed working spaces. “The social media feed [is] evidence of the fruits of hard, rewarding labor and the labor itself,” Petersen writes.
“Do What You Love” Is a Lie That Targets the “Meaning Junkies”
Thompson refers to Erin Griffith’s New York Times essay “Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?” in which she shows a generation of young people working at WeWork with “Do What You Love” pillows and they’re all miserable and burned out.
Millennials are “meaning junkies” who need to find a higher purpose at work, a job that justifies all the student debt they’ve accrued. And this meaning must be curated on social media so the whole world can see how fulfilled and spiritually together they are. This makes them ripe for exploitation. We see this exploitation at WeWork, Theranos, and the Fyre Festival fiasco.
This exploitation is justified by Workism, which lines the pockets of the elite rich. As we read:
The problem with this gospel—Your dream job is out there, so never stop hustling—is that it’s a blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion. Long hours don’t make anybody more productive or creative; they make peoplestressed, tired and bitter. But the overwork myths survive “because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies,” Griffithwrites.
Derek Thompson and Ethos
To give himself some humility and credibility in his essay, Thompson makes a confession: He himself is a practitioner of the Cult of Workism. He writes:
This is the right time for a confession. I am the very thing that I am criticizing.
I am devoted to my job. I feel most myself when I am fulfilled by my work—including the work of writing an essay about work. My sense of identity is so bound up in my job, my sense of accomplishment, and my feeling of productivity that bouts of writer’s block can send me into an existential funk that can spill over into every part of my life. And I know enough writers, tech workers, marketers, artists, and entrepreneurs to know that my affliction is common, especially within a certain tranche of the white-collar workforce.
The Reality of Workism
Thompson concedes it’s true that a culture that produces Workism produces some of the best innovations in the world, but it’s also true that 87% of American workers are not engaged at work. Think about that: Eighty-seven % of the workers are disaffected, afflicted with job boredom, burnout, and ennui.
Conclusion: America Needs More Paid Leave and More Work Balance
Thompson argues in his conclusion that as a country America must change its public policy: More paid leave, more paternity leave, better medical coverage for the employed and unemployed alike, and better work balance, which means you work to “buy free time.”
In the end, while some of us are work superstars like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and others, about 90% of us will work to pay the bills, not as a higher calling. We need to live in reality, not fantasy.
2 Forces of Groupthink: Public School and Social Media (Rankings)
Groupthink starts in childhood when we attend public school.
It was from James Bryant Conant - president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century - that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
Review Flaws and Strengths of Harriet Brown’s Essay
Let us review the flaws.
Flaw #1 Oversimplifying Our Concern with Weight
Brown’s first flaw is that she oversimplifies our weight-consciousness as cosmetic-driven beginning in the 1910s when in fact, post World War II, an abundance of calorie-dense foods did indeed cause a spike in weight:
As Brown writes:
Weight inched its way into the American consciousness around the turn of the 20th century. “I would sooner die than be fat,” declared Amelia Summerville, author of the 1916 volume Why Be Fat? Rules for Weight-Reduction and the Preservation of Youth and Health. (She also wrote, with a giddy glee that likely derived from malnutrition, “I possibly eat more lettuce and pineapple than any other woman on earth!”) As scales became more accurate and affordable, doctors began routinely recording patients’ height and weight at every visit. Weight-loss drugs hit the mainstream in the 1920s, when doctors started prescribing thyroid medications to healthy people to make them slimmer. In the 1930s, 2,4-dinitrophenol came along, sold as DNP, followed by amphetamines, diuretics, laxatives, and diet pills like fen-phen, all of which caused side effects ranging from the annoying to the fatal.
The national obsession with weight got a boost in 1942, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company crunched age, weight, and mortality numbers from policy holders to create “desirable” height and weight charts. For the first time, people (and their doctors) could compare themselves to a standardized notion of what they “should” weigh. And compare they did, in language that shifted from words like chubby and plump to the more clinical-sounding adipose, overweight, and obese. The word overweight, for example, suggests you’re over the “right” weight. The word obese, from the Latin obesus, or “having eaten until fat,” conveys both a clinical and a moral judgment.
***
Flaw #2: Oversimplifying and Downplaying the Health Effects of Being Overweight
Brown’s second flaw is oversimplifying the effects of being overweight. To a degree, being “overweight” is not a risk factor, but Brown doesn’t address morbid levels of obesity that make people at risk. She cherry-picks some evidence but ignores a whole body of other evidence.
Brown writes:
Higher BMIs have been linked to a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers, especially esophageal, pancreatic, and breast cancers. But weight loss is not necessarily linked to lower levels of disease. The only study to follow subjects for more than five years, the 2013 Look AHEAD study, found that people with type 2 diabetes who lost weight had just as many heart attacks, strokes, and deaths as those who didn’t.
Not only that, since 2002, study after study has turned up what researchers call the “obesity paradox”: Obese patients with heart disease, heart failure, diabetes, kidney disease, pneumonia, and many other chronic diseases fare better and live longer than those of normal weight.
***
Brown conveniently ignores the billions of health care costs that obesity places on Americans. Granted, she wrote her essay pre-Pandemic, but overweight people are at the highest risk for fatality from Covid-19.
Flaw #3: Unlike Aamodt, Brown fails to look at the real factors of high-risk lifestyles.
Unlike Harriet Brown, Sandra Aamodt gives us a clear picture of someone who is at high risk. This person has the following characteristics:
Lives in a food desert
Has low income
Lives in a high-stress environment
Suffers from loneliness
Doesn’t eat whole foods and several servings of fruits and vegetables a day
Doesn’t exercise every day
Because Brown fails to see the whole picture, she offers no Exit Strategy.
Flaw #4: Brown’s essay as a whole is bitter, hopeless, and needlessly fails to provide an Exit Strategy or a viable solution.
Whereas Sandra Aamodt encourages us to eat wholesome foods, listen to our hunger cues, exercise regularly, and take on a reasonable attitude in life, Brown’s essay suffers from despair and nutritional nihilism, the idea that we should just give up.
Can we provide an honest and persuasive defense of Harriet Brown?
Let us now look at some defenses of Harriet Brown in the form of a counterargument and rebuttal.
My opponents and supporters of Harriet Brown’s essay will make the claim that Brown does a powerful, cogent, and persuasive job of showing that dieting is a fool’s errand because dieting is both harmful and futile. Brown provides specific evidence to show that beauty standards are contrived by the media, advertising, and health insurance companies; she shows that the diet industry stands to make billions by believing the chicanery or BS that diets work effectively, and she does an outstanding job showing that drugs and surgeries to address obesity have large failure rates and present high risk to the patients. I will concede with defenders of Harriet Brown that Brown’s points are irrefutable, demonstrable, and persuasive. However, her essay is a failure when we consider she conveniently doesn’t address the need to make healthy lifestyle changes, she doesn’t address, as Sandra Aamodt does, the real high-risk conditions that people confuse with the generic term “obesity,” and her failure to give us an Exit Strategy from the Diet Hell that society imposes on us.
Sample Thesis:
While Harriet Brown’s essay is larded with too many flaws to be considered a successful essay, I agree with those who make the claim that both Harriet Brown and Sandra Aamodt in her essay “Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet” champion the idea that trying to lose weight is a fool’s errand. Dieting is doomed to fail, it is doomed to inflict chaos on our metabolism, it is bound to inflict us with stress, anxiety, and shame, and it is bound to force us to spend an enormous amount of time, money, and energy on a futile quest for weight loss. The Wise Errand is seeking to eat whole, healthy foods, exercise, make a decent living, and establish healthy social connections.
Review Essay Outline for Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand Essay
Paragraph 1: Either outline Brown’s essay or write a personal anecdote about you or someone you know who went on a weight-loss quest.
Paragraph 2: Write a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the claim (made by both Harriet Brown and Sandra Aamodt) that dieting is a fool’s errand. Make sure your thesis can be supported by 3 or 4 reasons because these reasons will be in your body paragraphs.
Paragraphs 3-6 will be your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraphs 7 and 8 will be your counterargument and rebuttal paragraphs. It’s important to let your reader know you battle-tested your claim by considering your opponents’ strongest counterarguments.
Paragraph 9 is your conclusion, a powerful restatement of your thesis.
Your final page is an MLA-formated Works Cited with a minimum of 4 sources, which would include the essays of Harriet Brown, Sandra Aamodt, and at least 2 others.
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.
***
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.”
***
No Bitterness, Just Science
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.
Despair Vs. Hope
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).
Exit Strategy
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
“Just eat everything in moderation.”
Anyone who’s trying to lose weight hears it all the time, along with its cousins: Eat less, move more; eat fewer calories than you expend.
Sure, fine, good, yes. All that is true. But if I could do that, do you seriously think I’d be overweight in the first place?
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.
Recognizing Logical Fallacies
Begging the Question
Begging the question assumes that a statement is self-evident when it actually requires proof.
Major Premise Based on a False Assumption: Fulfilling all my major desires is the only way I can be happy (false assumption).
Minor Premise: I can’t afford when of my greatest desires in life, a Rolex Deepsea Dweller wristwatch.
Conclusion: Therefore, I can never be happy.
Major Premise Based on a False Assumption: I need to go on a diet because staying on a diet will exercise my willpower, increase my self-esteem, and make me healthier.
Minor Premise: Every time I go on a diet, I fail after a few months.
Conclusion: I must have lousy willpower, lousy self-esteem, and lousy health.
Circular Reasoning
Circular reasoning occurs when we support a statement by restating it in different terms.
Going on a diet is good for you because diets make you lose weight, and losing weight is a good thing.
Stealing is wrong because it is illegal.
Admitting women into the men’s club is wrong because it’s an invalid policy.
Your essay is woeful because of its egregious construction.
Your boyfriend is hideous because of his heinous characteristics.
I have to sell my car because I’m ready to sell it.
I can’t spend time with my kids because it’s too time-consuming.
I need to spend more money on my presents than my family’s presents because I need bigger and better presents.
I’m a great father because I’m the best father my children have ever had.
Weak Analogy or Faulty Comparison
Analogies are never perfect but they can be powerful. The question is do they have a degree of validity to make them worth the effort.
Finding the right diet is like finding your perfect soul mate.
A toxic relationship is like cancer that gets worse and worse (fine).
Sugar is high-octane fuel to use before your workout (weak because there is nothing high-octane about a substance that causes you to crash and converts into fat and creates other problems)
Free education is a great flame and the masses are moths flying into the flames of destruction. (horribly false analogy)
Ad Hominem Fallacy (Personal Attack)
You attack the person but not the argument.
Harriet Brown looks like a bitter person so we shouldn’t believe what she writes about dieting.
“Who are you to be a marriage counselor? You’ve been divorced six times?”
A lot of people give great advice and present sound arguments even if they don’t apply their principles to their lives, so we should focus on the argument, not a personal attack.
“So you believe in universal health care, do you? I suppose you’re a communist and you hate America as well.”
Making someone you disagree with an American-hating communist is invalid and doesn’t address the actual argument.
“What do you mean you don’t believe in marriage? What are you, a crazed nihilist, an unrepentant anarchist, an immoral misanthrope, a craven miscreant?”
Straw Man Fallacy
You twist, distort, and misconstrue your opponent’s argument to make it look weaker than it is when you refute it. Instead of attacking the real issue, you aim for a weaker issue based on your deliberate misinterpretation of your opponent’s argument.
“Those who are against universal health care are heartless. They obviously don’t care if innocent children die.”
“I told you to go off Twitter because it’s toxic and feeds your addiction, not because I’m jealous of your popularity on Twitter. Don’t twist my words.”
“Don’t accuse me of hating my country when I criticize it. I criticize my country because I have high expectations for it. The day I stop criticizing my country is the day I’ve given up on it.”
Hasty Generalization (Jumping to a Conclusion)
You base a generality on an insufficient sample.
“I’ve had three English instructors who are middle-aged bald men. Therefore, all English instructors are middle-aged bald men.”
“I’ve met three American celebrities with fake British accents and they were all annoying. Therefore, all American celebrities, such as Madonna, have fake British accents.”
“Every vegan I’ve ever met is preachy, judgmental, and looks anemic and undernourished.”
“Every guy I’ve met who is obsessed with the band Rush is middle-aged, chain smokes, underemployed, and still lives with his parents.”
Either/Or Fallacy
There are only two choices to an issue makes an oversimplification and an either/or fallacy.
“Either you be my girlfriend or you don’t like real men.”
“Either you be my boyfriend or you’re not a real American.”
“Either you play football for me or you’re not a real man.”
“Either you’re for us or against us.” (The enemy of our enemy is our friend is everyday foreign policy.)
“Either you agree with me about increasing the minimum wage, or you’re okay with letting children starve to death.”
“Either you get a 4.0 and get admitted into USC, or you’re only half a man.”
Equivocation
Equivocation occurs when you deliberately twist the meaning of something in order to justify your position.
“You told me the used car you just sold me was in ‘good working condition.’”
“I said ‘good,’ not perfect.”
The seller is equivocating.
“I told you to be in bed by ten.”
“I thought you meant to be home by ten.”
“You told me you were going to pay me the money you owe me on Friday.”
“I didn’t know you meant the whole sum.”
“You told me you were going to take me out on my birthday.”
“Technically speaking, the picnic I made for us in the backyard was a form of ‘going out.’”
Red Herring Fallacy
This fallacy is to throw a distraction in your opponent’s face because you know a distraction may help you win the argument.
“Barack Obama wants us to support him but his father was a Muslim. How can we trust the President on the war against terrorism when he has terrorist ties?”
“You said you were going to pay me my thousand dollars today. Where is it?”
“Dear friend, I’ve been diagnosed with a very serious medical condition. Can we talk about our money issue some other time?”
Slippery Slope Fallacy
We go down a rabbit hole of exaggerated consequences to make our point sound convincing.
“If we allow gay marriage, then what’s next? We’ll have to allow people to marry turtles.”
“If we allow gay marriage, my marriage to my wife will be disrespected and dishonored. I will not allow you to disrespect my marriage.”
Appeal to Authority
Using a celebrity to promote an energy drink doesn’t make this drink effective in increasing performance.
Listening to an actor play a doctor on TV doesn’t make the pharmaceutical he’s promoting safe or effective.
Tradition Fallacy
“We’ve never allowed women into our country club. Why should we start now?”
“Women have always served men. That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it always should be. That is the basis of a successful marriage. Look at divorce today. It’s because we’ve forgotten our traditional roles.”
Misuse of Statistics
Using stats to show causality when it’s a condition of correlation or omitting other facts.
“Ninety-nine percent of people who take this remedy see their cold go away in ten days.” (Colds go away on their own).
“Violent crime from home intruders goes down twenty percent in a home equipped with guns.” (more people in those homes die of accidental shootings or suicides)
Post Hoc, Confusing Causality with Correlation
Taking cold medicine makes your cold go away. Really?
The rooster crows and makes the sun go up. Really?
You drink on a Thursday night and on Friday morning you get an A on your calculus exam. Really?
You stop drinking milk and you feel stronger. Really? (or is it a placebo effect?)
Non Sequitur (It Does Not Follow)
The conclusion in an argument is not relevant to the premises.
Megan drives a BMW, so she must be rich.
McMahon understands the difference between a phrase and a dependent clause; therefore, he must be a genius.
Whenever I eat chocolate cake, I feel good. Therefore, chocolate cake must be good for me.
Bandwagon Fallacy
Because everyone believes something, it must be right.
“You can steal a little at work. Everyone else does.”
“In Paris, ninety-nine percent of all husbands have a secret mistress. Therefore adultery is not immoral.”
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.
***
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
“Just eat everything in moderation.”
Anyone who’s trying to lose weight hears it all the time, along with its cousins: Eat less, move more; eat fewer calories than you expend.
Sure, fine, good, yes. All that is true. But if I could do that, do you seriously think I’d be overweight in the first place?
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.
Using Sturgeon’s Law to Disagree with Harriet Brown:
Sample Essay That Responds to Option A
The High Failure Rate of Dieting Is No Excuse
Stuck at 220 pounds for nearly four weeks, my Inner Fat Man was whispering in my ear, “Give up, dude. Game over. Your metabolism is adapting to your sugar- and gluten-deprived diet. Your metabolism is essentially shutting down. It’s a protest, dude. Don’t you see? Your body is telling you and your diet to go to hell. But no need to feel ashamed. Over ninety-five percent of dieters regain all their weight and get even fatter. Just surrender and admit you’re in the Fat Man Club.”
My Inner Fat Man had a point. The odds were against me. All the research showed that my body would eventually rebel and make my Fat Man triumph over my attempt at gaining control of my tendency toward fatness with all of its related health catastrophes.
Writing for Time, Alexandra Sifferlin in her article “The Weight Loss Trap: Why Your Diet Isn’t Working” describes the findings of scientist Kevin Hall, who doing research for the National Institute of Health, studied the reality-show The Biggest Loser to see if the contestants’ successful weight loss could be studied to help the population at large. Their weight loss was dramatic. Hall observed that on average they lost 127 pounds each, about 64% of their body weight. But Hall soon discovered that transferring the rigid training and dieting to the real world was not a realistic proposition. Sifferlin writes:
What he didn’t expect to learn was that even when the conditions for weight loss are TV-perfect–with a tough but motivating trainer, telegenic doctors, strict meal plans and killer workouts–the body will, in the long run, fight like hell to get that fat back. Over time, 13 of the 14 contestants Hall studied gained, on average, 66% of the weight they’d lost on the show, and four were heavier than they were before the competition.
Like other studies I’ve read, people who go on weight-loss programs do indeed lose the weight, but they always gain it back and even get heavier. But worse, after they soar to an even fatter version of themselves before they went on a diet, their metabolism is set at a lower speed, so they’re worse off than before. As Sifferlin explains Kevin Hall’s research,
As demoralizing as his initial findings were, they weren’t altogether surprising: more than 80% of people with obesity who lose weight gain it back. That’s because when you lose weight, your resting metabolism (how much energy your body uses when at rest) slows down–possibly an evolutionary holdover from the days when food scarcity was common.
With research like this, we can see why any reasonable person would conclude that dieting is not only futile but self-destructive. Driving this point home, Syracuse University journalism professor Harriet Brown in her Slate article “The Weight of the Evidence,” beseeches the 45 million Americans who go on a diet every year to not do so. She warns: “You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chance of keeping if off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.”
In partial agreement with Harriet Brown is Sandra Aamodt, author of Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession with Weight Loss. Aamodt cites studies that show the overwhelming majority of dieters get fatter and mess up their metabolism, making them even more vulnerable to obesity. All one can do is let go of society’s unrealistic body images, eat sensibly, exercise, stop weighing oneself, and let the chips fall where they may.
I will concede that these intelligent writers make a strong case for not dieting and for not embarking on a fool’s errand to aspire to society’s unrealistic slender body images.
However, I find their arguments that we are doomed to fail to lose and keep our weight off ultimately unconvincing. High failure rates of anything don’t impress me because I am a disciple of Sturgeon’s Law, the belief that over 90% of everything is crap.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of aspiring novelists write crappy novels. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to discourage one of my brilliant students from becoming a novelist.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that 90% of books that are published today aren’t even real books. They’re just gussied-up, padded short stories and essays masquerading as books. But that doesn’t mean I don’t search for literary gems.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that if you’re part of the dating scene, over 90% of the people you’re dating are emotional dumpster fires, unctuous charlatans, and incorrigible sociopaths. But that doesn’t you can’t eventually find through dating a legit human being for whom you find true love.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of marriages are cesspools of misery, toxicity, and dysfunction. But that doesn’t mean that I would discourage two people who are both well-grounded with strong moral convictions, sincere motivations, and a realistic grasp of what is in store for them to not marry each other.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that most home-improvement contractors are hacks, fugitives, pathological liars, and snake-tongued mountebanks. But that doesn’t mean you don’t bust your butt looking for a solid referral to find a credible contractor who will redo your kitchen.
I could go on. The point is that if you are looking to do something that is exceptional and long-lasting, you are going to have to commit yourself to hard study and hard work. You’re also going to have to endure a lot of trial and error. Since Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of people don’t do the necessary groundwork for embarking on any project in a worthwhile manner, then you’re not surprisingly going to have a high failure rate in the realm of dieting.
What we must do to be successful is not point to the high failure rate as an excuse for our own failures, as our Inner Fat Person is want to do. What we must do is study the small number of successful people and analyze their methods of excellence. There are powerful, life-changing books on this subject. One helpful example is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers: The Story of Success, which propounds the 10,000-Hour Rule, the principle that you need a minimum of 10,000 hours of concentrated work to achieve a base level of competence in your craft. Other books that help us study the methods of success come from Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport. He has written Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. In both both books, Newport advocates a “craftsman mindset,” in which you achieve mastery in a craft through “deep work.” This mastery is rare and therefore highly marketable and valuable. But only people who have the fortitude, commitment, and proper habits of “deep work,” performing long chunks of focused work on their craft, rise to the top. Newport argues that this kind of achievement is exceptional and therefore highly prized.
Of course it is. Sturgeon’s Law dictates that this be so.
When we look at everything through the prism of Sturgeon’s Law, we see we have no excuses for our failures, including our diet failures.
Studying failures is not an excuse for failure. Studying failures is a warning for us not to follow the footsteps of those who fail. Once we’ve examined the don’ts of the failures, then we must study the dos of the successes.
To find how to be successful at killing our Inner Fat Person, we can return to Alexandra Sifferlin’s essay “The Weight Loss Trap.” Sifferlin points out that there are some people, over 10,000 in fact, who successfully lose their weight. Their success is recorded in The National Weight Control Registry, headed by Brown University professor Rena Wing and obesity researcher James O. Hill from the University of Colorado. To be a member of the registry, one has to have lost 30 pounds and have kept it off for at least a year. Registry members don’t all stick to one diet. They have different diets, but the one common denominator is that whatever diet they’re on, the new diet is making them mindful of what they’re putting in their mouth. They also exercise regularly. So against the odds, thousands of people are losing and keeping their weight off.
What separates the successful dieters from the failures is consistency, mindfulness of what they’re eating, and a realistic approach so that they don’t get discouraged and burned out over the long haul.
Another success factor is to find a reliable mentor, either a person you know or an author whose realistic dieting goals can stick with you for a lifetime.
I have an exceptional mentor, Max Penfold, who embodies the “craftsman mindset” described by Cal Newport.
Max Penfold is a United States powerlifting champion, former Navy Seal, and executive chef for arguably the most disruptive tech company in the world.
Also, Max Penfold has lost 70 pounds, and he has kept if off for seven years. That qualifies him for membership in The National Weight Control Registry.
If I lose just five more pounds and keep it off for a year, I too can enter the realm of success.
I say the hell with failure.
The hell with the doomsday prophets who say failure is inevitable.
And the hell with my Inner Fat Man.
Good Rhetoric but Poor Research
The above writing makes some good points and is written with a strong authorial presence that makes the points sound bold and convincing.
However, the writing is poor in the context of research. While the writer bloviates with rhetorical strength and splendor, he has no studies to back up his claim that rising above Sturgeon's Law does anything to make long-term dieting successful. Without research to back up his claim that he can overcome Sturgeon's Law in the realm of weight loss, he is on a fool's errand just like everyone else.
Nor does he bring any expertise to his rhetoric. He has no background in science. In contrast, Sandra Aamodt is a neuroscientist.
He also conflates Harriet Brown's points with Sandra Aamodt's when there are significant differences in content and tone.
You should use high rhetoric but be prepared to back it up with evidence. Otherwise, you're just full of chicanery.
The Above Is a Lesson in the Liabilities of BS
When you’re a smart person, you have a natural instinct for using impressive rhetoric in both writing and speech. As an intelligent person, you are really good at sounding like you know what you are talking about. You can deliver arguments that sound powerful and persuasive.
What happens is that even without performing a deep dive on this or that subject, you can sound impressive in your speech and writing, and you see how your intelligence affects others. They are impressed even when you exert little effort in your arguments.
This is dangerous because you begin to believe in the power of your own BS.
Once you believe you can get by on your BS, and use your BS to impress others, you are at risk of compromising your station in life because you become blind to the liabilities of BS. What are these liabilities?
Your BS will impress 90 percent of the human race, and this 90 percent will give you a false sense of mastery and competence when in fact you can be very ignorant and incompetent.
Over time, you will disdain the 90 percent who drink your Kool-Aid, and you will want to win the hearts and minds of the smarter 10 percent who will be skeptical and critical of your BS. The smarter 10 percent may even expose you as a fraud. Over time, you won’t have credentials to be admired and loved by the group of the population you admire the most, and you will have to settle for the mediocre admiration of the 90 percent. As a smart person, you crave the admiration of the 10 percent, but you won’t receive it, so you will be lonely and miserable.
As an expert BSer, you will get high on your own supply. As a result, you will become blind to your weaknesses.
Blind to your weaknesses, you will not grow or evolve, and therefore you will remain stagnant.
Relying on BS comes easy to you, so being in the habit of using BS, you will over time become lazy. Your default setting will be to rely on BS to get out of situations, do college work, get by at the workplace. In sum, relying on BS will result in laziness and self-complacent mediocrity.
Ethos, Logos, Pathos: The 3 Pillars of Argument
Adapted from Diana Hacker's Rules for Writers, Eighth Edition (99)
Ethos
Ethos is an ethical appeal based on the writer's character, knowledge, authority, savvy, book smarts, and street smarts. The latter is evidenced by the author's savvy in using appropriate, not pretentious language to appeal to her readers.
Ethos is further achieved through confidence, humility, and command of language and subject.
Confidence without humility is not confidence; it is bluster, bombast, and braggadocio, elements that diminish logos.
Real confidence is mastery, detailed, granular, in-depth knowledge of the topic at hand and acknowledgment of possible limitations and errors in one's conclusions.
Ethos is further established by using credible sources that are peer-reviewed.
Logos
Logos is establishing a reasonable, logical argument, appealing to the reader's sense of logic, relying on credible evidence, using inductive and deductive reasoning, and exposing logical fallacies.
Logos is further achieved by using sources that are timely, up-to-date, current, and relevant.
To strengthen logos, the writer considers opposing views, concedes where those opposing views might diminish the claim, and make appropriate rebuttals to counterarguments.
Pathos
Pathos is achieved by appealing to the reader's emotions, moral sense, and moral beliefs.
Pathos gets away from the brain and toward the gut. It makes a visceral appeal.
Appropriate pathos uses emotion in a way that supports and reinforces the evidence. It does not manipulate and use smokescreens that depart from the evidence.
Sample Counterarguments and Rebuttals for Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand Essay
Typically, when we write argumentation essays, we devote a section of our essay, usually before our conclusion, that addresses our opponents’ disagreement with our central argument or the way we anticipate how our opponents will object to our essay’s claim.
We want to make a clear presentation of how and why our imagined opponents might disagree with us. This is called the counterargument.
We then examine the counterargument and offer a rebuttal or refutation of that counterargument.
Here are some examples for the essay that addresses the claim that losing weight is such a futile endeavor that dieting surely is a fool’s errand.
Example of a Counterargument and Rebuttal for Essay That Supports Idea That Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand
I can imagine my opponents taking my claim that dieting is a fool’s errand as bait for accusing me of “dietary nihilism,” the notion that we should throw care to the wind and engage in reckless disregard when it comes to our bodies, indulging in gluttony, and being both beholden and addicted to the food industry’s myriad of fat-, salt-, and sugar-laden foods. On the contrary, I am no dietary nihilist. I am a dietary realist or pragmatist. My approach is not to focus on weight loss but on health by cultivating a love for cooking whole foods, avoiding processed foods, and having the food literacy to know the difference.
Example of a Counterargument and Rebuttal for Essay That Refutes Idea That Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand
I am a staunch defender of the idea that we should not let the majority of dieters, doomed to fail for a myriad of reasons too many to list here, be an excuse for our own individual aspirations to manage our weight and live a healthy lifestyle. My opponents will point out, correctly, that many lack the time and resources to buy and prepare healthy foods. I concede their point. For many hard-working Americans, time and budget constraints impede them from devoting the kind of time and resources necessary for a permanent weight-loss plan. But my fellow Americans’ dietary failures, however legitimate, do not excuse me for taking personal responsibility for my own dietary success. The truth of the matter is I have the familial, financial, and environmental support to succeed at my dietary goals, and my particular situation is such that dieting is not a fool’s errand. Rather, dieting and keeping excess weight off is a moral imperative.
Example of Counterargument and Rebuttal for Essay That Supports Idea That Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand
Since the overwhelming majority of Americans lack the time and resources to devote to full-time dieting, I stand by my argument that dieting for the most part is a fool’s errand. My opponents will point out that there are some Americans who enjoy enough financial comfort and discretionary time to devote to their weight-loss plan. But this amount of Americans is too minuscule to make a drop in the bucket, so to speak, when it comes to successful dieting because we cannot really talk about dieting as a fool’s errand, or not unless we talk about viability and sustainability for most people. If we can’t scale successful dieting for the masses, then dieting indeed is a fool’s errand with the exception of a very elite and specialized class of people who can meet all the caveats and conditions for succeeding at permanent weight loss. And I would remind that elite class that even they have a strong probability of failing, so my contention that dieting is a fool’s errand stands.
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 about 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.
What Students Have Taught Me
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.
***
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
“Just eat everything in moderation.”
Anyone who’s trying to lose weight hears it all the time, along with its cousins: Eat less, move more; eat fewer calories than you expend.
Sure, fine, good, yes. All that is true. But if I could do that, do you seriously think I’d be overweight in the first place?
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.
95-97% Failure Rate (but is all failure the same?)
Brown begins with the claim that diets are futile and that your chances of successfully losing weight and maintaining that weight loss is 5%.
Brown writes:
If you’re one of the 45 million Americans who plan to go on a diet this year, I’ve got one word of advice for you: Don’t.
You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chance of keeping if off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.
The reality is worse because obesity research doesn’t do long-term follow-ups. As Brown observes. “In reality, 97 percent of dieters regain everything they lost and then some within three years. Obesity research fails to reflect this truth because it rarely follows people for more than 18 months. This makes most weight-loss studies disingenuous at best and downright deceptive at worst.”
Harriet Brown and Her Unclear Obesity Definition
In the next section of her essay, Brown argues that the weight-loss industry profits from us aspiring to have glamorous, unrealistic bodies based on unreliable definitions of obesity. She writes:
One of the principles driving the $61 billion weight-loss industries is the notion that fat is inherently unhealthy and that it’s better, health-wise, to be thin, no matter what you have to do to get there. But a growing body of research is beginning to question this paradigm. Does obesity cause ill health, result from it, both, or neither? Does weight loss lead to a longer, healthier life for most people?
Studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly find the lowest mortality rates among people whose body mass index puts them in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories. And recent research suggests that losing weight doesn’t actually improve health biomarkers such as blood pressure, fasting glucose, or triglyceride levels for most people.
***
Brown fails to mention that many dieters seek to lose weight not for glamour but for better health.
Brown also only cites studies that refute the notion that being heavy results in health risks.
Brown is eager to show that BMI measures are not a reliable measure of good health but less eager to show that being overweight makes people at high risk for diabetes and other morbidity factors.
A Potential Flaw in Brown’s Essay: Do Unreliable BMI Measures Mean Obesity Is Okay?
Brown may be correct that BMI is not a reliable measure of obesity. However, just because people with high BMIs may not be obese and therefore not suffer ill health effects doesn’t mean there is no causal link between real obesity and serious health concerns and morbidity. In other words, Brown’s claim that BMI is not an accurate measure of obesity is legitimate, but her attempt to conflate BMI with real obesity and then downplay the ill health effects of real obesity could be seen as a weakness in her argumentation and credibility.
So, yes, let’s agree with Harriet Brown that BMI is unrealistic and probably not an accurate measure of obesity, but let us be skeptical about her attempt to conclude that therefore obesity rates are exaggerated. With or without BMI definitions, obesity and its ill health effects are a huge problem in our society, and Brown loses credibility in trying to deny that fact.
The Glamour Ideal Behind the Dieting Industry
Brown makes a fair contention that a lot of dieting is profit-driven and that the diet industry relies on fear, anxiety, and vanity by making us want to be glamorous. She writes:
So why, then, are we so deeply invested in treatments that not only fail to do what they’re supposed to—make people thinner and healthier—but often actively makes people fatter, sicker, and more miserable?
Weight inched its way into the American consciousness around the turn of the 20th century. “I would sooner die than be fat,” declared Amelia Summerville, author of the 1916 volumeWhy Be Fat? Rules for Weight-Reduction and the Preservation of Youth and Health. (She also wrote, with a giddy glee that likely derived from malnutrition, “I possibly eat more lettuce and pineapple than any other woman on earth!”) As scales became more accurate and affordable, doctors beganroutinely recording patients’ height and weight at every visit. Weight-loss drugs hit the mainstream in the 1920s, when doctors startedprescribing thyroid medications to healthy people to make them slimmer. In the 1930s, 2,4-dinitrophenol came along, sold as DNP, followed by amphetamines, diuretics, laxatives, and diet pills like fen-phen, all of which caused side effects ranging from the annoying to the fatal.
The national obsession with weight got a boost in 1942, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company crunched age, weight, and mortality numbers from policy holders to create “desirable” height and weight charts. For the first time, people (and their doctors) could compare themselves to a standardized notion of what they “should” weigh. And compare they did, inlanguage that shifted from words like chubby and plump to the more clinical-sounding adipose, overweight, and obese. The word overweight, for example, suggests you’re over the “right” weight. The word obese, from the Latin obesus, or “having eaten until fat,” conveys both a clinical and a moral judgment.
In 1949, a small group of doctors created the National Obesity Society, the first of many professional associations meant to take obesity treatment from the margins to the mainstream. They believed that “any level of thinness was healthier than being fat, and the thinner a person was, the healthier she or he was,”writes Nita Mary McKinley, a psychologist at the University of Washington-Tacoma. This attitude inspired a number of new and terrible treatments for obesity, including jaw wiring andstereotactic brain surgery that burned lesions into the hypothalamus.
Either/Or Fallacy in Harriet Brown's Essay?
In critical thinking, we study logical fallacies. A very common fallacy is what is called the Either/Or Fallacy. In this case, the writer presents us with a false proposition of only two choices when there may be more. In Brown’s case, she is arguing this:
Either embrace the diet industry’s phony glamour ideal and live a life of neurotic anxiety and yo-yo dieting or embrace your natural self and stop dieting because most likely you’ll be fine.
But Brown conveniently ignores another scenario: Millions of Americans suffer from malnutrition as a result of overeating processed foods and are at high risk for diabetes, cancer, lost work hours, and premature death. This scenario doesn’t fit with her argument, so she decides to pay it short attention if any at all.
Summary of This Critique
Brown does a good job of showing how using BMI to measure obesity is unreliable.
She does a good job of showing how futile dieting is.
She does a good job of showing how the dieting industry is profit-driven more than health-driven and shows how this industry dates back to a hundred years.
She fails, though, in addressing the real health concerns of obesity, which is a growing problem in America.
She also fails in using a large brush to paint dieters as unrealistically aspiring to some glamour image when many of us have real health concerns. Using such a large brush is in critical thinking language called using an oversimplification.
Critique of “The Weight of the Evidence,” Part 2
Maintaining a skinny body is more difficult than losing weight:
Brown makes a fair point that even if we lose our desired weight, maintaining our weight loss is an even more excruciating task. She writes:
For instance, much of the research assumes that when fat people lose weight, they become “healthy” in the same ways as a thinner person is healthy. The evidence says otherwise. “Even if someone loses weight, they will always need fewer calories and need to exercise more,” says Skinner. “So we’re putting people through something we know will probably not be successful anyway. Who knows what we’re doing to their metabolisms.”
Cherry-Picked Evidence: Brown Portrays the Exercise Habit as Health on Earth
In her essay, Brown shows people who have lost weight and then embark upon a maintenance program that looks like hell. Is she cherry-picking evidence? There are some people who exercise regularly and love it, thrive on it, and are even addicted to it. But Brown conveniently ignores such cases. Rather, she cherry-picks her evidence, as with this example:
Debra Sapp-Yarwood, a fiftysomething from Kansas City, Missouri, who’s studying to be a hospital chaplain, is one of the three percenters, the select few who have lost a chunk of weight and kept it off. She dropped 55 pounds 11 years ago, and maintains her new weight with a diet and exercise routine most people would find unsustainable: She eats 1,800 calories a day—no more than 200 in carbs—and has learned to put up with what she describes as “intrusive thoughts and food preoccupations.” She used to run for an hour a day, but after foot surgery she switched to her current routine: a 50-minute exercise video performed at twice the speed of the instructor, while wearing ankle weights and a weighted vest that add between 25 or 30 pounds to her small frame.
“Maintaining weight loss is not a lifestyle,” she says. “It’s a job.” It’s a job that requires not just time, self-discipline, and energy—it also takes up a lot of mental real estate. People who maintain weight loss over the long term typically make it their top priority in life. Which is not always possible. Or desirable.
Brown Addresses Link Between Disease and Obesity, Or Does She?
Brown has a section in her essay where she addresses health concerns that are linked to obesity. But she is skeptical about that link. She writes:
While concerns over appearance motivate a lot of would-be dieters, concerns about health fuel the national conversation about the “obesity epidemic.” So how bad is it, health-wise, to be overweight or obese? The answer depends in part on what you mean by “health.” Right now, we know obesity is linked with certain diseases, most strongly type 2 diabetes, but as scientists are fond of saying, correlation does not equal causation. Maybe weight gain is an early symptom of type 2 diabetes. Maybe some underlying mechanism causes both weight gain and diabetes. Maybe weight gain causes diabetes in some people but not others. People who lose weight often see their blood sugar improve, but that’s likely an effect of calorie reduction rather than weight loss. Type 2 diabetics who have bariatric surgery go into complete remission after only seven days, long before they lose much weight, because they’re eating only a few hundred calories a day.
Disease is also attributed to what we eat (or don’t), and here, too, the connections are often assumed to relate to weight. For instance, eating fast food once a week has been linked to high blood pressure, especially for teens. And eating fruits and vegetables every day is associated with lower risk of heart disease. But it’s a mistake to simply assume weight is the mechanism linking food and disease. We have yet to fully untangle the relationship.
Straw Man Argument?
A Straw Man Argument is when you twist your opponent’s words or twist his or her argument so that your attack will be more convincing. In the following passage, Harriet Brown is attacking the notion that losing weight is no guarantee of not having disease. But who made that claim in the first place? No one claimed that being skinny guarantees lower rates of disease. Being skinny, you can have some genetic markers for some diseases regardless of your weight. But being overweight can at a certain point make you at a higher risk for some morbidity factors. Brown seems to be making a Straw Man argument. As she writes:
Higher BMIs have been linked to a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers, especially esophageal, pancreatic, and breast cancers. But weight loss is not necessarily linked to lower levels of disease. The only study to follow subjects for more than five years, the 2013 Look AHEAD study, found that people with type 2 diabetes who lost weighthad just as many heart attacks, strokes, and deaths as those who didn’t.
Not only that, since 2002, study after study has turned up what researchers call the “obesity paradox”: Obese patients with heart disease, heart failure, diabetes, kidney disease, pneumonia, and many other chronic diseases fare better and live longer than those of normal weight.
Throwing Doubt on Obesity as Precondition for Morbidity
Harriet Brown expresses confusion over studies that obesity is linked to morbidity and a precondition that puts us at high risk for things like influenza.
In the pandemic as we see that obesity is a risk factor for dying at the hands of Covid-19, Brown’s claimed skepticism doesn’t look very convincing. She writes:
Likewise, we don’t fully understand the relationship between weight and overall mortality. Many of us assume it’s a linear relationship, meaning the higher your BMI, the higher your risk of early death. But Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist with the CDC, has consistently found a J-shaped curve, with the highest death rates among those at either end of the BMI spectrum and the lowest rates in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories.
One epidemiologist's finding doesn’t contradict the huge body of evidence that obesity is linked to diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cancer, fatty liver, and premature death. To act “confused” by the proposed link between obesity and death could strike some as disingenuous.
One. Our body has a skinny rebel, the hormone leptin.
Two. Snack industry brainwashed us into snacking so that we constantly have elevated insulin, resulting in obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, etc.
Three. Food industry has us addicted to processed foods, which are higher profit than whole foods.
Four. After World War II, calories became "low-hanging fruit," easy pickings.
Five. "Normal" is eating in excess of 3,000 calories a day when, from an evolutionary level, we're more suited to under 2,000.
Six. Diets may or may not work. It doesn't matter because most of us don't stick to them in the long-term.
Seven. Related to Six, most people don't stick to diets because weight-loss management is a full-time job not suited to people who have to work, go to school, parent, etc. If you're rich and have the whole day to focus on your navel and hire a personal trainer and have an Instagram account showing off your Hot Bod, then perhaps you will be a string bean. But that's not most of us.
Eight. The only people who tend to manage their weight find a way to enjoy eating whole foods for their lifetime.
Summary of Harriet Brown's Essay
Reasons for Making Claim That Diets Don't Work
One. 80-97% of dieters gain all their weight back and more.
Two. We have an unrealistic notion of a good skinny body.
Three. Skinny=healthy=good person
Four. Maintaining weight loss is a full-time job; it's just too hard to maintain this over the long run.
Five. Curing obesity is a money-driven industry, so a lot of claims about who's obese are inflated.
Six. Obesity=lazy=bad person.
Seven. Biggest Loser Failure Argument
Eight. No one diet works for everyone
Nine. Eating Western Diet (sugar and processed foods) is cheaper than eating a healthy diet.
Ten. We have a Set Point.
Eleven. There is no Magic Bullet. We don't want to know the boring truth: Cut down on sugar and exercise more.
Success Factors for Weight Loss
One. You have a health need. You might die if you don't find religion and find a way to lose weight. There is a gun to your head. Now you're moving in the right direction.
Two. You did research or due diligence.
Three. You desire to change.
Four. You like your new diet enough.
Five. You have healthy outlets so you don't rely on junk food as your exclusive drug.
Risk Factors that Make Weight Loss Unlikely
One. You have stress.
Two. You live in poverty.
Three. You suffer from depression.
Four. You suffer from learned depression.
Five. Your diet was triggered by an act of caprice, whim, or compulsion and therefore lacked due diligence.
Six. You lack basic food education so you don't know the difference between whole food and processed food.
Seven. Peer pressure doesn't give you the support you need to eat well.
Strengths and Weaknesses in Harriet Brown’s Essay
Strengths:
Brown does a good job of showing that diets are futile, that the glamour industry dictates unrealistic standards of beauty, that there is fat stigma, and that the diet industry is focused more on making money than being effective.
Weaknesses:
Brown doesn’t address people who have urgent health needs that require drastic weight loss, she doesn’t address any kind of middle ground of healthy eating, she doesn’t persuade me that adiposity (being fat) is not a health risk since I can show her statistics that contradict the studies she provides us.
Using Sturgeon’s Law to Disagree with Harriet Brown:
Sample Essay That Responds to Option A
The High Failure Rate of Dieting Is No Excuse
Stuck at 220 pounds for nearly four weeks, my Inner Fat Man was whispering in my ear, “Give up, dude. Game over. Your metabolism is adapting to your sugar- and gluten-deprived diet. Your metabolism is essentially shutting down. It’s a protest, dude. Don’t you see? Your body is telling you and your diet to go to hell. But no need to feel ashamed. Over ninety-five percent of dieters regain all their weight and get even fatter. Just surrender and admit you’re in the Fat Man Club.”
My Inner Fat Man had a point. The odds were against me. All the research showed that my body would eventually rebel and make my Fat Man triumph over my attempt at gaining control of my tendency toward fatness with all of its related health catastrophes.
Writing for Time, Alexandra Sifferlin in her article “The Weight Loss Trap: Why Your Diet Isn’t Working” describes the findings of scientist Kevin Hall, who doing research for the National Institute of Health, studied the reality-show The Biggest Loser to see if the contestants’ successful weight loss could be studied to help the population at large. Their weight loss was dramatic. Hall observed that on average they lost 127 pounds each, about 64% of their body weight. But Hall soon discovered that transferring the rigid training and dieting to the real world was not a realistic proposition. Sifferlin writes:
What he didn’t expect to learn was that even when the conditions for weight loss are TV-perfect–with a tough but motivating trainer, telegenic doctors, strict meal plans and killer workouts–the body will, in the long run, fight like hell to get that fat back. Over time, 13 of the 14 contestants Hall studied gained, on average, 66% of the weight they’d lost on the show, and four were heavier than they were before the competition.
Like other studies I’ve read, people who go on weight-loss programs do indeed lose the weight, but they always gain it back and even get heavier. But worse, after they soar to an even fatter version of themselves before they went on a diet, their metabolism is set at a lower speed, so they’re worse off than before. As Sifferlin explains Kevin Hall’s research,
As demoralizing as his initial findings were, they weren’t altogether surprising: more than 80% of people with obesity who lose weight gain it back. That’s because when you lose weight, your resting metabolism (how much energy your body uses when at rest) slows down–possibly an evolutionary holdover from the days when food scarcity was common.
With research like this, we can see why any reasonable person would conclude that dieting is not only futile but self-destructive. Driving this point home, Syracuse University journalism professor Harriet Brown in her Slate article “The Weight of the Evidence,” beseeches the 45 million Americans who go on a diet every year to not do so. She warns: “You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chance of keeping if off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.”
In partial agreement with Harriet Brown is Sandra Aamodt, author of Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession with Weight Loss. Aamodt cites studies that show the overwhelming majority of dieters get fatter and mess up their metabolism, making them even more vulnerable to obesity. All one can do is let go of society’s unrealistic body images, eat sensibly, exercise, stop weighing oneself, and let the chips fall where they may.
I will concede that these intelligent writers make a strong case for not dieting and for not embarking on a fool’s errand to aspire to society’s unrealistic slender body images.
However, I find their arguments that we are doomed to fail to lose and keep our weight off ultimately unconvincing. High failure rates of anything don’t impress me because I am a disciple of Sturgeon’s Law, the belief that over 90% of everything is crap.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of aspiring novelists write crappy novels. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to discourage one of my brilliant students from becoming a novelist.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that 90% of books that are published today aren’t even real books. They’re just gussied-up, padded short stories and essays masquerading as books. But that doesn’t mean I don’t search for literary gems.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that if you’re part of the dating scene, over 90% of the people you’re dating are emotional dumpster fires, unctuous charlatans, and incorrigible sociopaths. But that doesn’t you can’t eventually find through dating a legit human being for whom you find true love.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of marriages are cesspools of misery, toxicity, and dysfunction. But that doesn’t mean that I would discourage two people who are both well-grounded with strong moral convictions, sincere motivations, and a realistic grasp of what is in store for them to not marry each other.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that most home-improvement contractors are hacks, fugitives, pathological liars, and snake-tongued mountebanks. But that doesn’t mean you don’t bust your butt looking for a solid referral to find a credible contractor who will redo your kitchen.
I could go on. The point is that if you are looking to do something that is exceptional and long-lasting, you are going to have to commit yourself to hard study and hard work. You’re also going to have to endure a lot of trial and error. Since Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of people don’t do the necessary groundwork for embarking on any project in a worthwhile manner, then you’re not surprisingly going to have a high failure rate in the realm of dieting.
What we must do to be successful is not point to the high failure rate as an excuse for our own failures, as our Inner Fat Person is want to do. What we must do is study the small number of successful people and analyze their methods of excellence. There are powerful, life-changing books on this subject. One helpful example is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers: The Story of Success, which propounds the 10,000-Hour Rule, the principle that you need a minimum of 10,000 hours of concentrated work to achieve a base level of competence in your craft. Other books that help us study the methods of success come from Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport. He has written Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. In both both books, Newport advocates a “craftsman mindset,” in which you achieve mastery in a craft through “deep work.” This mastery is rare and therefore highly marketable and valuable. But only people who have the fortitude, commitment, and proper habits of “deep work,” performing long chunks of focused work on their craft, rise to the top. Newport argues that this kind of achievement is exceptional and therefore highly prized.
Of course it is. Sturgeon’s Law dictates that this be so.
When we look at everything through the prism of Sturgeon’s Law, we see we have no excuses for our failures, including our diet failures.
Studying failures is not an excuse for failure. Studying failures is a warning for us not to follow the footsteps of those who fail. Once we’ve examined the don’ts of the failures, then we must study the dos of the successes.
To find how to be successful at killing our Inner Fat Person, we can return to Alexandra Sifferlin’s essay “The Weight Loss Trap.” Sifferlin points out that there are some people, over 10,000 in fact, who successfully lose their weight. Their success is recorded in The National Weight Control Registry, headed by Brown University professor Rena Wing and obesity researcher James O. Hill from the University of Colorado. To be a member of the registry, one has to have lost 30 pounds and have kept it off for at least a year. Registry members don’t all stick to one diet. They have different diets, but the one common denominator is that whatever diet they’re on, the new diet is making them mindful of what they’re putting in their mouth. They also exercise regularly. So against the odds, thousands of people are losing and keeping their weight off.
What separates the successful dieters from the failures is consistency, mindfulness of what they’re eating, and a realistic approach so that they don’t get discouraged and burned out over the long haul.
Another success factor is to find a reliable mentor, either a person you know or an author whose realistic dieting goals can stick with you for a lifetime.
I have an exceptional mentor, Max Penfold, who embodies the “craftsman mindset” described by Cal Newport.
Max Penfold is a United States powerlifting champion, former Navy Seal, and executive chef for arguably the most disruptive tech company in the world.
Also, Max Penfold has lost 70 pounds, and he has kept if off for seven years. That qualifies him for membership in The National Weight Control Registry.
If I lose just five more pounds and keep it off for a year, I too can enter the realm of success.
I say the hell with failure.
The hell with the doomsday prophets who say failure is inevitable.
And the hell with my Inner Fat Man.
Good Rhetoric but Poor Research
The above writing makes some good points and is written with a strong authorial presence that makes the points sound bold and convincing.
However, the writing is poor in the context of research. While the writer bloviates with rhetorical strength and splendor, he has no studies to back up his claim that rising above Sturgeon's Law does anything to make long-term dieting successful. Without research to back up his claim that he can overcome Sturgeon's Law in the realm of weight loss, he is on a fool's errand just like everyone else.
You should use high rhetoric but be prepared to back it up with evidence. Otherwise, you're just full of chicanery.
Ethos, Logos, Pathos: The 3 Pillars of Argument
Adapted from Diana Hacker's Rules for Writers, Eighth Edition (99)
Ethos
Ethos is an ethical appeal based on the writer's character, knowledge, authority, savvy, book smarts, and street smarts. The latter is evidenced by the author's savvy in using appropriate, not pretentious language to appeal to her readers.
Ethos is further achieved through confidence, humility, and command of language and subject.
Confidence without humility is not confidence; it is bluster, bombast, and braggadocio, elements that diminish logos.
Real confidence is mastery, detailed, granular, in-depth knowledge of the topic at hand and acknowledgment of possible limitations and errors in one's conclusions.
Ethos is further established by using credible sources that are peer-reviewed.
Logos
Logos is establishing a reasonable, logical argument, appealing to the reader's sense of logic, relying on credible evidence, using inductive and deductive reasoning, and exposing logical fallacies.
Logos is further achieved by using sources that are timely, up-to-date, current, and relevant.
To strengthen logos, the writer considers opposing views, concedes where those opposing views might diminish the claim, and make appropriate rebuttals to counterarguments.
Pathos
Pathos is achieved by appealing to the reader's emotions, moral sense, and moral beliefs.
Pathos gets away from the brain and toward the gut. It makes a visceral appeal.
Appropriate pathos uses emotion in a way that supports and reinforces the evidence. It does not manipulate and use smokescreens that depart from the evidence.
Sample Counterarguments and Rebuttals for Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand Essay
Typically, when we write argumentation essays, we devote a section of our essay, usually before our conclusion, that addresses our opponents’ disagreement with our central argument or the way we anticipate how our opponents will object to our essay’s claim.
We want to make a clear presentation of how and why our imagined opponents might disagree with us. This is called the counterargument.
We then examine the counterargument and offer a rebuttal or refutation of that counterargument.
Here are some examples for the essay that addresses the claim that losing weight is such a futile endeavor that dieting surely is a fool’s errand.
Example of a Counterargument and Rebuttal for Essay That Supports Idea That Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand
I can imagine my opponents taking my claim that dieting is a fool’s errand as bait for accusing me of “dietary nihilism,” the notion that we should throw care to the wind and engage in reckless disregard when it comes to our bodies, indulging in gluttony, and being both beholden and addicted to the food industry’s myriad of fat-, salt-, and sugar-laden foods. On the contrary, I am no dietary nihilist. I am a dietary realist or pragmatist. My approach is not to focus on weight loss but on health by cultivating a love for cooking whole foods, avoiding processed foods, and having the food literacy to know the difference.
Example of a Counterargument and Rebuttal for Essay That Refutes Idea That Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand
I am a staunch defender of the idea that we should not let the majority of dieters, doomed to fail for a myriad of reasons too many to list here, be an excuse for our own individual aspirations to manage our weight and live a healthy lifestyle. My opponents will point out, correctly, that many lack the time and resources to buy and prepare healthy foods. I concede their point. For many hard-working Americans, time and budget constraints impede them from devoting the kind of time and resources necessary for a permanent weight-loss plan. But my fellow Americans’ dietary failures, however legitimate, do not excuse me for taking personal responsibility for my own dietary success. The truth of the matter is I have the familial, financial, and environmental support to succeed at my dietary goals, and my particular situation is such that dieting is not a fool’s errand. Rather, dieting and keeping excess weight off is a moral imperative.
Example of Counterargument and Rebuttal for Essay That Supports Idea That Dieting Is a Fool’s Errand
Since the overwhelming majority of Americans lack the time and resources to devote to full-time dieting, I stand by my argument that dieting for the most part is a fool’s errand. My opponents will point out that there are some Americans who enjoy enough financial comfort and discretionary time to devote to their weight-loss plan. But this amount of Americans is too minuscule to make a drop in the bucket, so to speak, when it comes to successful dieting because we cannot really talk about dieting as a fool’s errand, or not unless we talk about viability and sustainability for most people. If we can’t scale successful dieting for the masses, then dieting indeed is a fool’s errand with the exception of a very elite and specialized class of people who can meet all the caveats and conditions for succeeding at permanent weight loss. And I would remind that elite class that even they have a strong probability of failing, so my contention that dieting is a fool’s errand stands.
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 about 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.
What Students Have Taught Me
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.
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.
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.”
Analyze “The Weight of the Evidence,” Essay Outline, Thesis, Counterarguments
Essay #1 (Essay worth 200 points):
Due as an upload on September 24
Is Losing Weight a Fool’s Errand?
Essay #1 (Essay is worth 200 points):
Due as an upload on September 24
Is Losing Weight a Fool’s Errand?
The Assignment:
In a 1,200-word essay with a minimum of 4 sources, address Harriet Brown’s “The Weight of the Evidence” by supporting, refuting, or complicating the claim that Brown’s essay is too mired in structuralism and learned helplessness to be a persuasive essay.
What is structuralism?
Structuralism argues that society, not the individual, determines a positive outcome. Therefore, when we talk about losing weight and weight management, if we are structuralists, we look at economic injustice, genetics, childbirth, hormones, the availability of cheap calories, and the social ostracism one suffers when rejecting the Western Diet as the main factors that determine how successful we will be with keeping trim and well-conditioned.
On the other hand, the individualist argues that we can engage with the challenge of body weight management by using critical thinking to dissect the logical fallacies that misinform those who would give up on health and a safer society.
What camp do you belong to? Write an argument that defends your position as a structuralist or an individualist in the context of body weight management. Be sure to have a counterargument-rebuttal section.
You Might be a Sweet-Spot-Ologist
You might look for the sweet spot in which you balance the compelling points of individualism with structuralism. You don’t have to side 100% with one over the other.
The Method (Essay Outline):
In paragraph 1, analyze in terms of pathos, logos, and ethos, the points made by Harriet Brown in her essay “The Weight of the Evidence.”
As an alternative for paragraph 1, you can write a 200-word paragraph about a personal struggle you had with dieting before you transition to your thesis.
In paragraph 2, your thesis or claim: Based on your knowledge of the challenges of permanent weight loss, should we structuralists or individualists who embrace self-agency, self-responsibility, and finding ways to overcome the challenges of being healthy in the Western Diet, AKA the Standard American Diet (SAD).
In paragraphs 3-6, support your claim using evidence rooted in ethos, logos, and pathos.
In paragraphs 7 and 8, summarize two compelling objections your opponents might have against your argument and counter with two rebuttals.
In paragraph 9, write a dramatic restatement of your thesis to achieve pathos.
Your last page, Works Cited, is in MLA format and has a minimum of 4 credible sources.
How I Grade Your 200-Point Essay
One. The salience and effectiveness of your argument writing with a strong authorial presence and using logos, ethos, and pathos: 100
Two. The integration of signal phrases for quotations, summaries, and paraphrases and correct MLA in-text citations to introduce sources to support your claims: 35
Three. Writing clear, well-structured sentences with correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling: 35
Four. Presenting your manuscript with correct MLA pagination, headers, indent, double-spacing, and MLA Works Cited page with a minimum of 4 credible sources: 30
You can consult the following articles:
Harriet Brown’s “The Weight of the Evidence”
James Hamblin’s “Body Weight, Clash of Ideologies”
Harriet Brown’s “How Weight Loss Became a Disease”
Derek Thompson’s “Where Does Obesity Come From?”
Olga Khazan’s “Why Scientists Can’t Agree On Whether It’s Unhealthy to be Overweight”
Rivka Galchen’s “Bariatric Surgery: The Solution to Obesity?”
Sandra Aamodt’s “Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet”
Tommy Tomlinson’s “The Weight I Carry” and Julie Beck’s “You Can’t Willpower Your Way to Lasting Weight Loss”
Tamar Haspel’s “Why ‘Moderation’ Is the Worst Weight-Loss Advice Ever”
Amanda Mull’s “The Latest Diet Trend Is Not Dieting”
Netflix: "Why Diets Fail," Explained
The Purpose of This Essay Assignment:
Most of us have considered losing weight to increase our health, our body image, and our self-confidence. Most of us have been cautioned not to go on this or that diet but rather to make a healthy “lifestyle change.” Most of us who have gone on diets did lose the desired weight, but we gained it back again, and then some more, just to pour salt into our wounds.
Losing weight over a course of six months can be fun, attention-getting, and even addictive. But once the party is over, so to speak, and we have the body we want, we have to maintain it. Long-term adherence is where people fail. As a result, people gain their weight back and more.
When we consider that most people gain all their weight back, healthy eating can be expensive for those of us on a tight budget, and with all the other disgusting problems in the world, shouldn’t we just shrug our shoulders, throw caution to the wind, sing “Que sera sera, whatever will be will be,” and eat what we please?
But wait. There’s more. What about those of us who suffer from diabetes, metabolic syndrome, neuropathy, and other ailments associated with our being overweight? What about those of us who can’t fit in our pants? Should we give up on the pride, discipline, and self-confidence of controlling our eating and simply surrender to our health problems since our quest is mired in futility? Some of us don’t have the luxury of giving up on our health.
Some of us have urgent health concerns that make permanent weight loss mandatory.
Building Block Assignment #1 is worth 25 points and is due as an upload on September 10.
The Assignment: Write the first two paragraphs of your essay
Paragraph 1: Using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase the major points in Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence." Or you can write a personal narrative that depicts the struggle to go on a diet to lose weight.
Paragraph 2: Support, refute, or complicate Harriet's Brown claim.
Suggested Outline for Essay 1
Paragraph 1: Using appropriate signal phrases, summarize and paraphrase the major points in Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence."
Paragraph 2: Support, refute, or complicate Harriet's Brown claim. This is your thesis statement with mapping components. The mapping components are the reasons you use to support your argument. Your reasons map your body paragraphs.
Example of a thesis statement with mapping components:
While Harriet Brown’s thoughtful and insightful essay “The Weight of the Evidence” makes some irrefutable points about the profiteering of the weight-loss industry and society’s body shaming, her doomsday analysis of weight loss has some glaring weaknesses, including her failure to address the health dangers of being overweight, her inclination to cherry-pick evidence to support her claim that weight loss doesn’t improve vital health specs like cholesterol, insulin, and triglyceride levels, and her failure to seriously look at any useful tools to combat excessive weight gain.
Notice the above has 3 mapping components:
One: her failure to address the health dangers of being overweight
Two: her inclination to cherry-pick evidence to support her claim that weight loss doesn’t improve vital health specs like cholesterol, insulin, and triglyceride levels
Three: her failure to seriously look at any useful tools to combat excessive weight gain.
Body Paragraphs
You might devote one or two body paragraphs to each of the above mapping components.
Supporting Paragraphs Are Not Enough: You Need a Counterargument-Rebuttal Section
After Your Body Paragraphs and Before Your Conclusion, Write Your Counterargument-Rebuttal Section:
For an argumentative essay, providing compelling support paragraphs to make your claim or thesis persuasive is not enough. You also need acounterargument-rebuttal section.
To earn credibility in an argument, good writers anticipate how opponents will disagree with their claim, so they actually provide an anticipated disagreement with their own thesis. Often they will write this counterargument-rebuttal section after their supporting paragraphs (and before their conclusion).
Some people may object to my point X, but they fail to see Y.
Some people will take issue with my argument X, and I will concede their point to some degree. However, on balance, my argument X still stands because______________________________.
It is true as my opponents say that my argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that Y, but I would counterargue by observing that ___________________.
I would be the first to agree with my opponents that my argument can lead to some dangerous conclusions such as X. But we can neutralize these misgivings when we consider __________________________.
Study the Templates for Counterargument-Rebuttal Section of Essay
While the author’s arguments for meaning are convincing, she fails to consider . . .
While the authors make convincing arguments, they must also consider . . .
These arguments, rather than being convincing, instead prove . . .
While these authors agree with Writer A on point X, in my opinion . . .
Although it is often true that . . .
While I concede that my opponents make a compelling case for point X, their main argument collapses underneath a barrage of . . .
While I see many good points in my opponent’s essay, I am underwhelmed by his . . .
While my opponent makes some cogent points regarding A, B, and C, his overall argument fails to convince us when we consider X, Y, and Z.
My opponent makes many provocative and intriguing points. However, his arguments must be dismissed as fallacious when we take into account W, X, Y, and Z.
While the author’s points first appear glib and fatuous, a closer look at his polemic reveals a convincing argument that . . .
Writing Your Conclusion
Yourconclusion is about creating emotional power and finding a way to reiterate your essay’s purpose in order to maximize the strength of your persuasion.
Since you want emotional power in your conclusion, you want to avoid cliches or overused (hackneyed) conclusion structures.
Sorry for this lousy essay, but just in case you didn’t understand what I was saying,
Effective Conclusion Strategies:
Use the “full circle” technique. If you begin with a story or image in your introduction, return to that story or image in your conclusion.
End on a rhetorical question.
End with a gut-punching quotation.
End with an indelible image.
End with a dire warning.
End with a universal truth that applies to your specific argument.
End with an emotionally-powerful restatement of your thesis.
Works Cited
After your conclusion, you will cite a minimum of 4 sources on a separate page for Works Cited using the current MLA format as explained in these videos:
Make sure your essay has a strong title. Avoid a generic title like “Losing Weight” or “Essay 1.” Try to have a catchy title that is relevant to your focus.
Brown begins with the claim that diets are futile and that your chances of successfully losing weight and maintaining that weight loss is 5%.
Brown writes:
If you’re one of the 45 million Americans who plan to go on a diet this year, I’ve got one word of advice for you: Don’t.
You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chance of keeping if off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.
The reality is worse because obesity research doesn’t do long-term follow-ups. As Brown observes. “In reality, 97 percent of dieters regain everything they lost and then some within three years. Obesity research fails to reflect this truth because it rarely follows people for more than 18 months. This makes most weight-loss studies disingenuous at best and downright deceptive at worst.”
Harriet Brown and Her Unclear Obesity Definition
In the next section of her essay, Brown argues that the weight-loss industry profits from us aspiring to have glamorous, unrealistic bodies based on unreliable definitions of obesity. She writes:
One of the principles driving the $61 billion weight-loss industries is the notion that fat is inherently unhealthy and that it’s better, health-wise, to be thin, no matter what you have to do to get there. But a growing body of research is beginning to question this paradigm. Does obesity cause ill health, result from it, both, or neither? Does weight loss lead to a longer, healthier life for most people?
Studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly find the lowest mortality rates among people whose body mass index puts them in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories. And recent research suggests that losing weight doesn’t actually improve health biomarkers such as blood pressure, fasting glucose, or triglyceride levels for most people.
***
Brown fails to mention that many dieters seek to lose weight not for glamour but for better health.
Brown also only cites studies that refute the notion that being heavy results in health risks.
Brown is eager to show that BMI measures are not a reliable measure of good health but less eager to show that being overweight makes people at high risk for diabetes and other morbidity factors.
A Potential Flaw in Brown’s Essay: Do Unreliable BMI Measures Mean Obesity Is Okay?
Brown may be correct that BMI is not a reliable measure of obesity. However, just because people with high BMIs may not be obese and therefore not suffer ill health effects doesn’t mean there is no causal link between real obesity and serious health concerns and morbidity. In other words, Brown’s claim that BMI is not an accurate measure of obesity is legitimate, but her attempt to conflate BMI with real obesity and then downplay the ill health effects of real obesity could be seen as a weakness in her argumentation and credibility.
So, yes, let’s agree with Harriet Brown that BMI is unrealistic and probably not an accurate measure of obesity, but let us be skeptical about her attempt to conclude that therefore obesity rates are exaggerated. With or without BMI definitions, obesity and its ill health effects are a huge problem in our society, and Brown loses credibility in trying to deny that fact.
The Glamour Ideal Behind the Dieting Industry
Brown makes a fair contention that a lot of dieting is profit-driven and that the diet industry relies on fear, anxiety, and vanity by making us want to be glamorous. She writes:
So why, then, are we so deeply invested in treatments that not only fail to do what they’re supposed to—make people thinner and healthier—but often actively makes people fatter, sicker, and more miserable?
Weight inched its way into the American consciousness around the turn of the 20th century. “I would sooner die than be fat,” declared Amelia Summerville, author of the 1916 volumeWhy Be Fat? Rules for Weight-Reduction and the Preservation of Youth and Health. (She also wrote, with a giddy glee that likely derived from malnutrition, “I possibly eat more lettuce and pineapple than any other woman on earth!”) As scales became more accurate and affordable, doctors beganroutinely recording patients’ height and weight at every visit. Weight-loss drugs hit the mainstream in the 1920s, when doctors startedprescribing thyroid medications to healthy people to make them slimmer. In the 1930s, 2,4-dinitrophenol came along, sold as DNP, followed by amphetamines, diuretics, laxatives, and diet pills like fen-phen, all of which caused side effects ranging from the annoying to the fatal.
The national obsession with weight got a boost in 1942, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company crunched age, weight, and mortality numbers from policy holders to create “desirable” height and weight charts. For the first time, people (and their doctors) could compare themselves to a standardized notion of what they “should” weigh. And compare they did, inlanguage that shifted from words like chubby and plump to the more clinical-sounding adipose, overweight, and obese. The word overweight, for example, suggests you’re over the “right” weight. The word obese, from the Latin obesus, or “having eaten until fat,” conveys both a clinical and a moral judgment.
In 1949, a small group of doctors created the National Obesity Society, the first of many professional associations meant to take obesity treatment from the margins to the mainstream. They believed that “any level of thinness was healthier than being fat, and the thinner a person was, the healthier she or he was,”writes Nita Mary McKinley, a psychologist at the University of Washington-Tacoma. This attitude inspired a number of new and terrible treatments for obesity, including jaw wiring andstereotactic brain surgery that burned lesions into the hypothalamus.
Either/Or Fallacy in Harriet Brown's Essay?
In critical thinking, we study logical fallacies. A very common fallacy is what is called the Either/Or Fallacy. In this case, the writer presents us with a false proposition of only two choices when there may be more. In Brown’s case, she is arguing this:
Either embrace the diet industry’s phony glamour ideal and live a life of neurotic anxiety and yo-yo dieting or embrace your natural self and stop dieting because most likely you’ll be fine.
But Brown conveniently ignores another scenario: Millions of Americans suffer from malnutrition as a result of overeating processed foods and are at high risk for diabetes, cancer, lost work hours, and premature death. This scenario doesn’t fit with her argument, so she decides to pay it short attention if any at all.
Summary of This Critique
Brown does a good job of showing how using BMI to measure obesity is unreliable.
She does a good job of showing how futile dieting is.
She does a good job of showing how the dieting industry is profit-driven more than health-driven and shows how this industry dates back to a hundred years.
She fails, though, in addressing the real health concerns of obesity, which is a growing problem in America.
She also fails in using a large brush to pain dieters as unrealistically aspiring to some glamour image when many of us have real health concerns. Using such a large brush is in critical thinking language called using an oversimplification.
Critique of “The Weight of the Evidence,” Part 2
Maintaining a skinny body is more difficult than losing weight:
Brown makes a fair point that even if we lose our desired weight, maintaining our weight loss is an even more excruciating task. She writes:
For instance, much of the research assumes that when fat people lose weight, they become “healthy” in the same ways as a thinner person is healthy. The evidence says otherwise. “Even if someone loses weight, they will always need fewer calories and need to exercise more,” says Skinner. “So we’re putting people through something we know will probably not be successful anyway. Who knows what we’re doing to their metabolisms.”
Cherry-Picked Evidence: Brown Portrays the Exercise Habit as Health on Earth
In her essay, Brown shows people who have lost weight and then embark upon a maintenance program that looks like hell. Is she cherry-picking evidence? There are some people who exercise regularly and love it, thrive on it, and are even addicted to it. But Brown conveniently ignores such cases. Rather, she cherry-picks her evidence, as with this example:
Debra Sapp-Yarwood, a fiftysomething from Kansas City, Missouri, who’s studying to be a hospital chaplain, is one of the three percenters, the select few who have lost a chunk of weight and kept it off. She dropped 55 pounds 11 years ago, and maintains her new weight with a diet and exercise routine most people would find unsustainable: She eats 1,800 calories a day—no more than 200 in carbs—and has learned to put up with what she describes as “intrusive thoughts and food preoccupations.” She used to run for an hour a day, but after foot surgery she switched to her current routine: a 50-minute exercise video performed at twice the speed of the instructor, while wearing ankle weights and a weighted vest that add between 25 or 30 pounds to her small frame.
“Maintaining weight loss is not a lifestyle,” she says. “It’s a job.” It’s a job that requires not just time, self-discipline, and energy—it also takes up a lot of mental real estate. People who maintain weight loss over the long term typically make it their top priority in life. Which is not always possible. Or desirable.
Brown Addresses Link Between Disease and Obesity, Or Does She?
Brown has a section in her essay where she addresses health concerns that are linked to obesity. But she is skeptical about that link. She writes:
While concerns over appearance motivate a lot of would-be dieters, concerns about health fuel the national conversation about the “obesity epidemic.” So how bad is it, health-wise, to be overweight or obese? The answer depends in part on what you mean by “health.” Right now, we know obesity is linked with certain diseases, most strongly type 2 diabetes, but as scientists are fond of saying, correlation does not equal causation. Maybe weight gain is an early symptom of type 2 diabetes. Maybe some underlying mechanism causes both weight gain and diabetes. Maybe weight gain causes diabetes in some people but not others. People who lose weight often see their blood sugar improve, but that’s likely an effect of calorie reduction rather than weight loss. Type 2 diabetics who have bariatric surgery go into complete remission after only seven days, long before they lose much weight, because they’re eating only a few hundred calories a day.
Disease is also attributed to what we eat (or don’t), and here, too, the connections are often assumed to relate to weight. For instance, eating fast food once a week has been linked to high blood pressure, especially for teens. And eating fruits and vegetables every day is associated with lower risk of heart disease. But it’s a mistake to simply assume weight is the mechanism linking food and disease. We have yet to fully untangle the relationship.
Straw Man Argument?
A Straw Man Argument is when you twist your opponent’s words or twist his or her argument so that your attack will be more convincing. In the following passage, Harriet Brown is attacking the notion that losing weight is no guarantee of not having disease. But who made that claim in the first place? No one claimed that being skinny guarantees lower rates of disease. Being skinny, you can have some genetic markers for some diseases regardless of your weight. But being overweight can at a certain point make you at a higher risk for some morbidity factors. Brown seems to be making a Straw Man argument. As she writes:
Higher BMIs have been linked to a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers, especially esophageal, pancreatic, and breast cancers. But weight loss is not necessarily linked to lower levels of disease. The only study to follow subjects for more than five years, the 2013 Look AHEAD study, found that people with type 2 diabetes who lost weighthad just as many heart attacks, strokes, and deaths as those who didn’t.
Not only that, since 2002, study after study has turned up what researchers call the “obesity paradox”: Obese patients with heart disease, heart failure, diabetes, kidney disease, pneumonia, and many other chronic diseases fare better and live longer than those of normal weight.
Throwing Doubt on Obesity as Precondition for Morbidity
Harriet Brown expresses confusion over studies that obesity is linked to morbidity and a precondition that puts us at high risk for things like influenza.
In the pandemic as we see that obesity is a risk factor for dying at the hands of Covid-19, Brown’s claimed skepticism doesn’t look very convincing. She writes:
Likewise, we don’t fully understand the relationship between weight and overall mortality. Many of us assume it’s a linear relationship, meaning the higher your BMI, the higher your risk of early death. But Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist with the CDC, has consistently found a J-shaped curve, with the highest death rates among those at either end of the BMI spectrum and the lowest rates in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories.
One epidemiologist's finding doesn’t contradict the huge body of evidence that obesity is linked to diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cancer, fatty liver, and premature death. To act “confused” by the proposed link between obesity and death could strike some as disingenuous.
Summary of Harriet Brown's Persuasive Lapses and Fallacies
Brown does a good job of showing how using BMI to measure obesity is unreliable.
She does a good job of showing how futile dieting is.
She does a good job of showing how the dieting industry is profit-driven more than health-driven and shows how this industry dates back to a hundred years.
She fails, though, in addressing the real health concerns of obesity, which is a growing problem in America.
She also fails in using a large brush to pain dieters as unrealistically aspiring to some glamour image when many of us have real health concerns. Using such a large brush is in critical thinking language called using an oversimplification.
She cherry-picks evidence to make an exaggerated claim that maintaining a weight-loss exercise program is hell on earth and to cast doubt on link between obesity and disease.
She ignores a huge body of evidence that connects obesity to disease and premature death.
She uses a Straw Man argument to argue that being skinny doesn't guarantee good health.
One. Our body has a skinny rebel, the hormone leptin.
Two. Snack industry brainwashed us into snacking so that we constantly have elevated insulin, resulting in obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, etc.
Three. Food industry has us addicted to processed foods, which are higher profit than whole foods.
Four. After World War II, calories became "low-hanging fruit," easy pickings.
Five. "Normal" is eating in excess of 3,000 calories a day when, from an evolutionary level, we're more suited to under 2,000.
Six. Diets may or may not work. It doesn't matter because most of us don't stick to them in the long-term.
Seven. Related to Six, most people don't stick to diets because weight-loss management is a full-time job not suited to people who have to work, go to school, parent, etc. If you're rich and have the whole day to focus on your navel and hire a personal trainer and have an Instagram account showing off your Hot Bod, then perhaps you will be a string bean. But that's not most of us.
Eight. The only people who tend to manage their weight find a way to enjoy eating whole foods for their lifetime.
Summary of Harriet Brown's Essay
Reasons for Making Claim That Diets Don't Work
One. 80-97% of dieters gain all their weight back and more.
Two. We have an unrealistic notion of a good skinny body.
Three. Skinny=healthy=good person
Four. Maintaining weight loss is a full-time job; it's just too hard to maintain this over the long run.
Five. Curing obesity is a money-driven industry, so a lot of claims about who's obese are inflated.
Six. Obesity=lazy=bad person.
Seven. Biggest Loser Failure Argument
Eight. No one diet works for everyone
Nine. Eating Western Diet (sugar and processed foods) is cheaper than eating a healthy diet.
Ten. We have a Set Point.
Eleven. There is no Magic Bullet. We don't want to know the boring truth: Cut down on sugar and exercise more.
Harriet Brown, "The Weight of the Evidence"
Headings are mine.
(Diets are futile)
If you’re one of the 45 million Americans who plan to go on a diet this year, I’ve got one word of advice for you: Don’t.
You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chance of keeping if off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.
This isn’t breaking news; doctors know the holy trinity of obesity treatments—diet, exercise, and medication—don’t work. They know yo-yo dieting is linked to heart disease, insulin resistance, higher blood pressure, inflammation, and, ironically, long-term weight gain. Still, they push the same ineffective treatments, insisting they’ll make you not just thinner but healthier.
In reality, 97 percent of dieters regain everything they lost and then some within three years. Obesity research fails to reflect this truth because it rarely follows people for more than 18 months. This makes most weight-loss studies disingenuous at best and downright deceptive at worst.
(Author questions if obesity is linked to bad health)
One of the principles driving the $61 billion weight-loss industries is the notion that fat is inherently unhealthy and that it’s better, health-wise, to be thin, no matter what you have to do to get there. But a growing body of research is beginning to question this paradigm. Does obesity cause ill health, result from it, both, or neither? Does weight loss lead to a longer, healthier life for most people?
(BMI is a different issue than true obesity; don't use a bait and switch.)
Studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly find the lowest mortality rates among people whose body mass index puts them in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories. And recent research suggests that losing weight doesn’t actually improve health biomarkers such as blood pressure, fasting glucose, or triglyceride levels for most people.
(What are the causes of our weight obsession? Glamour, privilege, wealth, success, self-esteem, etc.)
So why, then, are we so deeply invested in treatments that not only fail to do what they’re supposed to—make people thinner and healthier—but often actively makes people fatter, sicker, and more miserable?
Weight inched its way into the American consciousness around the turn of the 20th century. “I would sooner die than be fat,” declared Amelia Summerville, author of the 1916 volumeWhy Be Fat? Rules for Weight-Reduction and the Preservation of Youth and Health. (She also wrote, with a giddy glee that likely derived from malnutrition, “I possibly eat more lettuce and pineapple than any other woman on earth!”) As scales became more accurate and affordable, doctors beganroutinely recording patients’ height and weight at every visit. Weight-loss drugs hit the mainstream in the 1920s, when doctors startedprescribing thyroid medications to healthy people to make them slimmer. In the 1930s, 2,4-dinitrophenol came along, sold as DNP, followed by amphetamines, diuretics, laxatives, and diet pills like fen-phen, all of which caused side effects ranging from the annoying to the fatal.
The national obsession with weight got a boost in 1942, when the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company crunched age, weight, and mortality numbers from policy holders to create “desirable” height and weight charts. For the first time, people (and their doctors) could compare themselves to a standardized notion of what they “should” weigh. And compare they did, inlanguage that shifted from words like chubby and plump to the more clinical-sounding adipose, overweight, and obese. The word overweight, for example, suggests you’re over the “right” weight. The word obese, from the Latin obesus, or “having eaten until fat,” conveys both a clinical and a moral judgment.
In 1949, a small group of doctors created the National Obesity Society, the first of many professional associations meant to take obesity treatment from the margins to the mainstream. They believed that “any level of thinness was healthier than being fat, and the thinner a person was, the healthier she or he was,”writes Nita Mary McKinley, a psychologist at the University of Washington-Tacoma. This attitude inspired a number of new and terrible treatments for obesity, including jaw wiring andstereotactic brain surgery that burned lesions into the hypothalamus.
(Desperation results in bariatric surgery)
Bariatric surgery is the latest of these. In 2000, about 37,000 bariatric surgeries were performed in the United States; by 2013, the number had risen to 220,000. Thebest estimates suggest that about half of those who have surgery regain some or all of the weight they lose. While such surgeries are safer now than they were 10 years ago, they still lead to complications for many, including long-term malnutrition, intestinal blockages, disordered eating, and death. “Bariatric surgery is barbaric, but it’s the best we have,” says David B. Allison, a biostatistician at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.
Reading the research on obesity treatments sometimes feels like getting stuck in an M.C. Escher illustration, where walls turn into ceilings and water flows upward. You can find studies that “prove” the merit of high-fat/low-carb diets and low-fat/high-carb diets, and either 30 minutes of daily aerobic exercise or 90 minutes. You’ll read that fen-phen is safe (even though the drug damaged heart valves in a third of those who took it). Studies say that orlistat (which causes liver damage and “uncontrollable” bowel movements) and sibutramine (which ups the risk of heart attacks and strokes) are effective. After reading literally more than a thousand studies, each of them claiming some nucleus of truth, the only thing I know for sure is that we really don’t know weight and health at all.
“We make all these recommendations, with all this apparent scientific precision, but when it comes down to it we don’t know, say, how much fat someone should have in their diet,” says Asheley Skinner, a pediatrician at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill School of Medicine. “We argue like we know what we’re talking about, but we don’t.”
(Maintaining a skinny body is more stressful than healthy)
For instance, much of the research assumes that when fat people lose weight, they become “healthy” in the same ways as a thinner person is healthy. The evidence says otherwise. “Even if someone loses weight, they will always need fewer calories and need to exercise more,” says Skinner. “So we’re putting people through something we know will probably not be successful anyway. Who knows what we’re doing to their metabolisms.”
Debra Sapp-Yarwood, a fiftysomething from Kansas City, Missouri, who’s studying to be a hospital chaplain, is one of the three percenters, the select few who have lost a chunk of weight and kept it off. She dropped 55 pounds 11 years ago, and maintains her new weight with a diet and exercise routine most people would find unsustainable: She eats 1,800 calories a day—no more than 200 in carbs—and has learned to put up with what she describes as “intrusive thoughts and food preoccupations.” She used to run for an hour a day, but after foot surgery she switched to her current routine: a 50-minute exercise video performed at twice the speed of the instructor, while wearing ankle weights and a weighted vest that add between 25 or 30 pounds to her small frame.
“Maintaining weight loss is not a lifestyle,” she says. “It’s a job.” It’s a job that requires not just time, self-discipline, and energy—it also takes upa lot of mental real estate. People who maintain weight loss over the long term typically make it their top priority in life. Which is not always possible. Or desirable.
While concerns over appearance motivate a lot of would-be dieters, concerns about health fuel the national conversation about the “obesity epidemic.” So how bad is it, health-wise, to be overweight or obese? The answer depends in part on what you mean by “health.” Right now, we know obesity is linked with certain diseases, most strongly type 2 diabetes, but as scientists are fond of saying, correlation does not equal causation. Maybe weight gain is an early symptom of type 2 diabetes. Maybe some underlying mechanism causes both weight gain and diabetes. Maybe weight gain causes diabetes in some people but not others. People who lose weight often see their blood sugar improve, but that’s likely an effect of calorie reduction rather than weight loss. Type 2 diabetics who have bariatric surgery go into complete remission after only seven days, long before they lose much weight, because they’reeating only a few hundred calories a day.
Disease is also attributed to what we eat (or don’t), and here, too, the connections are often assumed to relate to weight. For instance, eating fast food once a week has been linked to high blood pressure, especially for teens. And eating fruits and vegetables every day is associated withlower risk of heart disease. But it’s a mistake to simply assume weight is the mechanism linking food and disease. We have yet to fully untangle the relationship.
(But no one said weight loss is a panacea or cure all; is the author using a Straw Man argument?)
Higher BMIs have been linked to a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers, especially esophageal, pancreatic, and breast cancers. But weight loss is not necessarily linked to lower levels of disease. The only study to follow subjects for more than five years, the 2013 Look AHEAD study, found that people with type 2 diabetes who lost weighthad just as many heart attacks, strokes, and deaths as those who didn’t.
Not only that, since 2002, study after study has turned up what researchers call the “obesity paradox”: Obese patients with heart disease, heart failure, diabetes, kidney disease, pneumonia, and many other chronic diseases fare better and live longer than those of normal weight.
Likewise, we don’t fully understand the relationship between weight and overall mortality. Many of us assume it’s a linear relationship, meaning the higher your BMI, the higher your risk of early death. But Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist with the CDC, has consistently found a J-shaped curve, with the highest death rates among those at either end of the BMI spectrum and the lowest rates in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories.
(Treating obesity is a big money industry)
There’s a lot of money at stake in treating obesity. The American Medical Association—against the recommendations of its own Committee on Science and Public Health—recently classified obesity as a disease, and doctors hope insurers will start covering more treatments for obesity. If Medicare goes along with the AMA and designates obesity as a disease, doctors who discuss weight with their patients will be able to add that diagnosis code to their bill, and charge more for the visit.
Obesity researchers and doctors also defend what appear to be financial conflicts of interest. In 2013, the New England Journal of Medicine published “Myths, Presumptions, and Facts About Obesity.” The authors dismissed the often-observed link between weight cycling and mortality, saying it was “probably due to confounding by health status” (code for “We just can’t believe this could be true”) and went on to plug meal replacements like Jenny Craig, medications, and bariatric surgery.
Five of the 20 authors disclosed financial support from sponsors in related industries, including UAB’s David Allison. I asked him how he would respond to allegations of financial self-interest. “It would be no different than anybody saying about any other person who puts forth an idea, ‘I want to comment that you have this background or personality, this sexual orientation, weight, gender, or race,’ ” he argued. “These conflicts were disclosed, we didn’t hide them, we weren’t ashamed of them. And what’s your point?”
(Fat stigma affects doctors' judgments)
Another layer to the onion may lie in our deeply held cultural assumptions around weight. “People, journalists, and researchers live in a world where it’s taken for granted that fat is bad and thin is good,” says Saguy.
Doctors buy into those assumptions and biases even more heavily than the rest of us, which may explain in part why they continue to blame patients who can’t keep weight off. Joseph Majdan, a cardiologist who teaches at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, has lost and regained the same 100 or so pounds more times than he can count. Some of the meanest comments Majdan has heard about his weight have come from other doctors, like the med-school classmate who asked if she could project slides onto a pair of his white intern’s pants for a skit. Or the colleague who asked him, “Aren’t you disgusted with yourself?”
“When a person has recurrent cancer, the physician is so empathetic,” says Majdan. “But when a person regains weight, there’s disgust. And that is morally and professionally abhorrent.”
(Obesity is seen as a moral choice, evidence of poor character.)
The idea that obesity is a choice, that people who are obese lack self-discipline or are gluttonous or lazy, is deeply ingrained in our public psyche. And there are other costs to this kind of judgmentalism. Research done by Lenny Vartanian, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales, suggests that people who believe they’re worthless because they’re not thin, who have tried and failed to maintain weight loss, areless likely to exercise than fat people who haven’t strongly internalized weight stigma.
(In conclusion, author asks us to "let go")
Not that abiding by competent eating, which fits the Health at Every Size paradigm, is easy; Robin Flamm would tell you that. When her clothes started to feel a little tighter, she panicked. Her first impulse was to head back to Weight Watchers. Instead, she says, she asked herself if she was eating mindfully, if she was exercising in a way that gave her pleasure, if she, maybe, needed to buy new clothes. “It’s really hard to let go of results,” she says. “It’s like free falling. And even though there’s no safety net ever, really, this time it’s knowing there’s no safety net.”
One day she was craving a hamburger, a food she wouldn’t typically have eaten. But that day, she ate a hamburger and fries for lunch. “And I was done. End of story,” she says, with a hint of wonder in her voice. No cravings, no obsessing over calories, no weeklong binge-and-restrict, no “feeling fat” and staying away from exercise. She ate a hamburger and fries, and nothing terrible happened. “I just wish more people would get it,” she says.
Success Factors for Weight Loss
One. You have a health need. You might die if you don't find religion and find a way to lose weight. There is a gun to your head. Now you're moving in the right direction.
Two. You did research or due diligence.
Three. You desire to change.
Four. You like your new diet enough.
Five. You have healthy outlets so you don't rely on junk food as your exclusive drug.
Risk Factors that Make Weight Loss Unlikely
One. You have stress.
Two. You live in poverty.
Three. You suffer from depression.
Four. You suffer from learned depression.
Five. Your diet was triggered by an act of caprice, whim, or compulsion and therefore lacked due diligence.
Six. You lack basic food education so that you don't know difference between whole food and processed food.
Seven. Peer pressure doesn't give you support you need to eat well.
Strengths and Weaknesses in Harriet Brown’s Essay
Strengths:
Brown does a good job of showing that diets are futile, that the glamour industry dictates unrealistic standards of beauty, that there is fat stigma, and that the diet industry is focused more on making money than being effective.
Weaknesses:
Brown doesn’t address people who have urgent health needs that require drastic weight loss, she doesn’t address any kind of middle ground of healthy eating, she doesn’t persuade me that adiposity (being fat) is not a health risk since I can show her statistics that contradict the studies she provides us.
Using Sturgeon’s Law to Disagree with Harriet Brown:
Sample Essay That Responds to Option A
The High Failure Rate of Dieting Is No Excuse
Stuck at 220 pounds for nearly four weeks, my Inner Fat Man was whispering in my ear, “Give up, dude. Game over. Your metabolism is adapting to your sugar- and gluten-deprived diet. Your metabolism is essentially shutting down. It’s a protest, dude. Don’t you see? Your body is telling you and your diet to go to hell. But no need to feel ashamed. Over ninety-five percent of dieters regain all their weight and get even fatter. Just surrender and admit you’re in the Fat Man Club.”
My Inner Fat Man had a point. The odds were against me. All the research showed that my body would eventually rebel and make my Fat Man triumph over my attempt at gaining control of my tendency toward fatness with all of its related health catastrophes.
Writing for Time, Alexandra Sifferlin in her article “The Weight Loss Trap: Why Your Diet Isn’t Working” describes the findings of scientist Kevin Hall, who doing research for the National Institute of Health, studied the reality-show The Biggest Loser to see if the contestants’ successful weight loss could be studied to help the population at large. Their weight loss was dramatic. Hall observed that on average they lost 127 pounds each, about 64% of their body weight. But Hall soon discovered that transferring the rigid training and dieting to the real world was not a realistic proposition. Sifferlin writes:
What he didn’t expect to learn was that even when the conditions for weight loss are TV-perfect–with a tough but motivating trainer, telegenic doctors, strict meal plans and killer workouts–the body will, in the long run, fight like hell to get that fat back. Over time, 13 of the 14 contestants Hall studied gained, on average, 66% of the weight they’d lost on the show, and four were heavier than they were before the competition.
Like other studies I’ve read, people who go on weight-loss programs do indeed lose the weight, but they always gain it back and even get heavier. But worse, after they soar to an even fatter version of themselves before they went on a diet, their metabolism is set at a lower speed, so they’re worse off than before. As Sifferlin explains Kevin Hall’s research,
As demoralizing as his initial findings were, they weren’t altogether surprising: more than 80% of people with obesity who lose weight gain it back. That’s because when you lose weight, your resting metabolism (how much energy your body uses when at rest) slows down–possibly an evolutionary holdover from the days when food scarcity was common.
With research like this, we can see why any reasonable person would conclude that dieting is not only futile but self-destructive. Driving this point home, Syracuse University journalism professor Harriet Brown in her Slate article “The Weight of the Evidence,” beseeches the 45 million Americans who go on a diet every year to not do so. She warns: “You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chance of keeping if off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.”
In agreement with Harriet Brown is Sandra Aamodt, author of Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession with Weight Loss. Aamodt cites studies that show the overwhelming majority of dieters get fatter and mess up their metabolism, making them even more vulnerable to obesity. All one can do is let go of society’s unrealistic body images, eat sensibly, exercise, stop weighing oneself, and let the chips fall where they may.
I will concede that these intelligent writers make a strong case for not dieting and for not embarking on a fool’s errand to aspire to society’s unrealistic slender body images.
However, I find their arguments that we are doomed to fail to lose and keep our weight off ultimately unconvincing. High failure rates of anything don’t impress me because I am a disciple of Sturgeon’s Law, the belief that over 90% of everything is crap.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of aspiring novelists write crappy novels. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to discourage one of my brilliant students from becoming a novelist.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that 90% of books that are published today aren’t even real books. They’re just gussied-up, padded short stories and essays masquerading as books. But that doesn’t mean I don’t search for literary gems.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that if you’re part of the dating scene, over 90% of the people you’re dating are emotional dumpster fires, unctuous charlatans, and incorrigible sociopaths. But that doesn’t you can’t eventually find through dating a legit human being for whom you find true love.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of marriages are cesspools of misery, toxicity, and dysfunction. But that doesn’t mean that I would discourage two people who are both well-grounded with strong moral convictions, sincere motivations, and a realistic grasp of what is in store for them to not marry each other.
Sturgeon’s Law dictates that most home-improvement contractors are hacks, fugitives, pathological liars, and snake-tongued mountebanks. But that doesn’t mean you don’t bust your butt looking for a solid referral to find a credible contractor who will redo your kitchen.
I could go on. The point is that if you are looking to do something that is exceptional and long-lasting, you are going to have to commit yourself to hard study and hard work. You’re also going to have to endure a lot of trial and error. Since Sturgeon’s Law dictates that over 90% of people don’t do the necessary groundwork for embarking on any project in a worthwhile manner, then you’re not surprisingly going to have a high failure rate in the realm of dieting.
What we must do to be successful is not point to the high failure rate as an excuse for our own failures, as our Inner Fat Person is want to do. What we must do is study the small amount of successful people and analyze their methods of excellence. There are powerful, life-changing books on this subject. One helpful example is Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers: The Story of Success, which propounds the 10,000 Hour Rule, the principle that you need a minimum of 10,000 hours of concentrated work to achieve a base level of competence in your craft. Other books that help us study the methods of success come from Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport. He has written Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. In both both books, Newport advocates a “craftsman mindset,” in which you achieving mastery in a craft through “deep work.” This mastery is rare and therefore highly marketable and valuable. But only people who have the fortitude, commitment, and proper habits of “deep work,” performing long chunks of focused work on their craft, rise to the top. Newport argues that this kind of achievement is exceptional and therefore highly prized.
Of course it is. Sturgeon’s Law dictates that this be so.
When we look at everything through the prism of Sturgeon’s Law, we see we have no excuses for our failures, including our diet failures.
Studying failures is not an excuse for failure. Studying failures is a warning for us not to follow the footsteps of those who fail. Once we’ve examined the don’ts of the failures, then we must study the dos of the successes.
To find how to be successful at killing our Inner Fat Person, we can return to Alexandra Sifferlin’s essay “The Weight Loss Trap.” Sifferlin points out that there are some people, over 10,000 in fact, who successfully lose their weight. Their success is recorded in The National Weight Control Registry, headed by Brown University professor Rena Wing and obesity researcher James O. Hill from the University of Colorado. To be a member of the registry, one has to have lost 30 pounds and have kept it off for at least a year. Registry members don’t all stick to one diet. They have different diets, but the one common denominator is that whatever diet they’re on, the new diet is making them mindful of what they’re putting in their mouth. They also exercise regularly. So against the odds, thousands of people are losing and keeping their weight off.
What separates the successful dieters from the failures is consistency, mindfulness of what they’re eating, and a realistic approach so that they don’t get discouraged and burned out over the long haul.
Another success factor is to find a reliable mentor, either a person you know or an author whose realistic dieting goals can stick with you for a lifetime.
I have an exceptional mentor, Max Penfold, who embodies the “craftsman mindset” described by Cal Newport.
Max Penfold is a United States powerlifting champion, former Navy Seal, and executive chef for arguably the most disruptive tech company in the world.
Also Max Penfold has lost 70 pounds, and he has kept if off for seven years. That qualifies him for membership in The National Weight Control Registry.
If I lose just five more pounds and keep it off for a year, I too can enter the realm of success.
I say the hell with failure.
The hell with the doomsday prophets who say failure is inevitable.
And the hell with my Inner Fat Man.
Ethos, Logos, Pathos: The 3 Pillars of Argument
Adapted from Diana Hacker's Rules for Writers, Eighth Edition (99)
Ethos
Ethos is an ethical appeal based on writer's character, knowledge, authority, savvy, book smarts, and streets smarts. The latter is evidenced by author's savvy in using appropriate, not pretentious language to appeal to her readers.
Ethos is further achieved through confidence, humility, and command of language and subject.
Confidence without humility is not confidence; it is bluster, bombast, and braggadocio, elements that diminish logos.
Real confidence is mastery, detailed, granular, in-depth knowledge of the topic at hand and acknowledgment of possible limitations and errors in one's conclusions.
Ethos is further established by using credible sources that are peer-reviewed.
Logos
Logos is establishing a reasonable, logical argument, appealing to the reader's sense of logic, relying on credible evidence, using inductive and deductive reasoning, and exposing logical fallacies.
Logos is further achieved by using sources that are timely, up-to-date, current, and relevant.
To strengthen logos, the writer considers opposing views, concedes where those opposing views might diminish the claim, and make appropriate rebuttals to counterarguments.
Pathos
Pathos is achieved by appealing to the reader's emotions, moral sense, and moral beliefs.
Pathos gets away from the brain and toward the gut. It makes a visceral appeal.
Appropriate pathos uses emotion in a way that supports and reinforces the evidence. It does not manipulate and use smokescreens that depart from the evidence.
