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.
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.
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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.
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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 of Harriet Brown Fallacies:
Dietary Nihilism
Brown suggests giving up in paragraph 1 yet offers no alternatives. Giving up with no solutions to weight-related problems is what I call Dietary Nihilism, an unacceptable position for someone who wants to live a long, healthy life.
Telling people to give up dieting while offering no alternatives strikes me as bitter and irresponsible. Such a position compromises the writer’s ethos (credibility) and pathos (my emotional connection to the writing).
Cherry-Picking Based on Cognitive Bias
There is an abundance of credible studies showing how being overweight has deleterious effects on our health, but Brown conveniently ignores those studies and focuses on studies that show that the contrary is true: There is no connection between high BMI and having bad health in terms of heart disease, high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome, diabetes 2, inflammation, higher risk for cancer, stroke, and cardiac arrest; shortened lifespan.
If I want to eat to my heart’s content, then my cognitive bias is going to point me in the direction to “research” that gives me the Green Light to eat pizza, donuts, and ice cream.
Cherry-picking evidence based on cognitive biases does not help Brown in terms of credibility, reasoning, or emotional power: ethos, logos, and pathos.
“It’s All So Confusing!” Fallacy
Brown complains that there are so many kinds of diets making health claims: keto, vegan, raw, organic, high-protein, low-fat, etc. She just doesn’t know what to believe anymore.
When an important topic is confusing or difficult, should we shrug our shoulders and scream, “I just don’t know what to do!”
Of course, weight management is difficult and so is healthy eating, but Brown says nothing about nutritional literacy and how such literacy will make great strides in improving our health.
What is nutritional literacy?
- It’s knowing the difference between whole and processed foods and where to find whole foods in the grocery store and how to avoid processed foods in the grocery store.
- It’s learning how to cook at least half a dozen healthy meals that you enjoy eating so that you are both healthy and self-reliant.
- It’s learning how to avoid sugar and find foods that satisfy you without eating sugar.
- It’s learning how to achieve satiety (fullness) by eating sufficient protein.
- It’s learning how to steam vegetables and season them and make high-protein salads that you enjoy eating.
- It’s learning to replace alcohol, sugar, and processed foods with healthy foods that you actually like.
Brown’s failure to address food literacy and her cry of learned helplessness because “eating is just so confusing” compromises her credibility (ethos).
Failure to Acknowledge That Two Things Can Both be True: Either/Or Fallacy
Brown does a good job of showing that a skinny body aesthetic was artificially imposed upon us starting around the 1920s. For the last 100 years, there has been a money-making conspiracy to make us ashamed of our bodies:
- Advertising
- Consumerism
- Media giving us unrealistic body aesthetic
- Diet pills
- Insurance companies
- Unrealistic BMI levels
- Bariatric surgeries
- Variety of pharmaceuticals
- Ever-changing dietary advice from the medical community and the government
While all of this is true, it can at the same time be true that being overweight is unhealthy.
Either the quest for a healthy body is legit or there is a conspiracy to give us an unrealistic expectation of the ideal body.
Brown commits an either/or fallacy: It’s possible that there is a profit-driven diet industry AND that being overweight is a health risk at the same time.
Her either/or fallacy compromises her credibility and reasoning (ethos and logos).
Failure to Acknowledge Self-Empowerment Through Knowledge and Reasonable Expectations
Life is a cruel place. Once we’re 18, we’re out on our own. We have to fend for ourselves. There are many confusing things we have to deal with: health, diet, relationships, education, career, politics, civil responsibilities, and developing an appropriate philosophy of life.
Telling you that dieting is too confusing, that being skinny is nothing more than a profit-driven conspiracy, and that it’s too much work to eat right is the Gospel of Despair, Helplessness, and Victimization.
Brown’s Gospel of Despair has no business in my class and it has no business infecting my students.
I would rather tell my students that you should fight to find a job that gives you a good living, find people to love in your life so that you have enough self-worth to work on having a long healthy life for your sake and your loved one’s sake, make a good living so you can afford to eat healthy because healthy whole foods are expensive, but that’s the situation. Empower yourself. Develop food literacy. Develop knowledge about health because knowledge is power and you’re responsible for gaining that power.
Harriet Brown’s sob story won’t give it to you.
Learning to eat healthy foods may not give you a hot Instagram bod, but you’ll be vastly healthier than if you give up and go on an Eat- Everything Diet.
See Netflix Explained: Why Diets Fail and linked to Vox.
Review of "Why Diets Fail":
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.
Sample Thesis Statements
Defining a thesis:
A thesis is a meaningful claim or argument that is the central focus of your essay, that you can defend with credible information, that will outline an essay of 1,200 words or more, that is challenging enough to be appropriate for college-level writing, that has high stakes, and that defies simple analysis.
- The thesis or claim is the central focus of your essay. It is the reason you are writing your essay. To stray from your thesis is to betray your original intention.
- The thesis is based on an informed opinion based on credible research. Your research has been peer reviewed and is rooted in reality. To look to “research” based on a fever swamp of unproven conspiracies and misinformation is to present an essay that is disconnected from reality. We live in an age where even facts and reality itself are disputed. This is a very specific crisis called the epistemic crisis. You can read about this crisis in Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Knowledge.
- A strong thesis may have reasons contained in the sentence. These reasons are also called mapping components. They outline your essay’s body paragraphs. Observe the following example: Working from the home is more viable for most companies because working from the home saves your workers from commute time, doesn’t expose workers to illnesses resulting in lost work time, reduces work theft opportunities, reduces company expenses such as heat, AC, lighting, etc., and takes advantage of the technology that’s cheaply available to make your employees’ home office an efficient business office.
- The thesis can generate an essay that is 1,200 words or more means the thesis is demonstrable: You can defend the thesis with reasoning, logic, examples, and research.
- Your thesis has high stakes. You present an argument and the listener or reader doesn’t feel compelled to say “So what?” Rather, you have chosen a topic that is relevant, vital, and urgent to the human condition.
- Your thesis defies simple analysis. You are avoiding the obvious and factual such as “What the world needs now is love.” Rather, you are focusing on debatable topics.
Sample Thesis Statements
Sample #1 offers no mapping components and may or may not be demonstrable:
Suppose your Western Diet, an endless buffet of sugar, processed food, and sodium, is presenting you with various health afflictions that are so extreme that you have a variety of morbidity factors. In that case, you have to push Harriet Brown’s pessimism aside and manipulate your eating environment and recalibrate your eating habits in such a way that your diet is not a fool’s errand but a necessary step in saving your life.
Sample #2 with mapping components
If you’re discouraged by your lackluster build and pudgy contours and aspire to look like a chiseled Instagram model, you will most likely find that your austere dietary program will give you short-term results, but in the long run, your diet will be a fool’s errand because willpower can only last so long, environmental and social pressures to indulge will break you, high-density-calorie foods are in abundance, and sugary, fatty foods are an irresistible drug that provides an escape from the stresses of modern life.
Sample #3 with mapping components
While it’s true that long-term adherence to a proper diet is difficult and that sugary, fatty foods can indeed become an irresistible drug from the stresses of modern life, I propose that a healthy whole food diet over the long haul is more viable than the self-destructive Western Diet because a healthy whole food diet can be adopted through habit, economic wellbeing and prove to be necessary for the fight against depression, diabetes, and other comorbidity factors.
Sample #4 with mapping components
While Harriet Brown in “The Weight of the Evidence” makes many compelling and persuasive points, her essay suffers from a lack of persuasion because of problems in ethos, logos, and pathos.
Sample #5 without mapping components is probably demonstrable.
While Harriet Brown’s “The Weight of the Evidence” suffers problems in ethos, logos, and pathos, her main argument about the futility of dieting remains insightful, compelling, and persuasive.
Sample #6 with mapping components
While Harriet Brown’s tone is a bit glum and some of her studies seem cherry-picked, she nonetheless demonstrates persuasively that dieting is a fool’s errand because of unrealistic societal expectations, money-driven skinny aesthetics of a fraudulent dieting industry, the inevitable failure of willpower, and biological impediments.
Sample #7 with mapping components
While Harriet Brown makes many insightful and irrefutable points, I find her essay offensive and harmful because she cherry-picks studies to support her claim that being fat is not a health risk, she doesn’t leave nuance in the realm of healthy eating as an alternative to throwing care to the wind and eating “whatever,” she doesn’t offer any success stories to provide a counterbalance to her doom and gloom, and she offers no encouragement for at least eating healthy whole foods so that as a whole her essay leaves a sour and putrid taste in my mouth.
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 anticipate 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 the 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 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 an 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 Peacemaker 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 peacemakers 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 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 of 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 by 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?
What Students Have Taught Me:
- 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.
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.”
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