8-31-22: “The Weight of the Evidence,” Essay Outline, Thesis, Counterarguments

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.” 

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." 

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 a counterargument-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). 

To write an effective counterargument-rebuttal, good writers use a variety of sentence structures:

• 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 counter argue 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

Your conclusion 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. 

Some conclusion transitions to avoid:

• In conclusion,
• As you can now clearly see,
• Before we get out of here let me just say, 
• To wrap things up, 
• Just in case you forgot, 
• To sum up what I just said,
• 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 current MLA format as explained in this these videos:

Purdue OWL video for Word 

Purdue OWL video for Google Docs

Title for Your Essay

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. 

• Is Losing Weight for Fools?
• Does Dieting Make You Fat?
• How I Gave Up on Dieting and Became Born Again

Critique of Harriet Brown's "The Weight of the Evidence," Part 1

95-97% Failure Rate

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.

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 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.

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 and stereotactic brain surgery that burned lesions into the hypothalamus.

Either/Or Fallacy?

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 failure 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

1. Brown does a good job of showing how using BMI to measure obesity is unreliable.
2. She does a good job of showing how futile dieting is.
3. 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. 
4. She fails, though, in addressing the real health concerns of obesity, which is a growing problem in America.
5. 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 the 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. She is making a Straw Man. 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 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.

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 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

1. Brown does a good job of showing how using BMI to measure obesity is unreliable.
2. She does a good job of showing how futile dieting is.
3. 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. 
4. She fails, though, in addressing the real health concerns of obesity, which is a growing problem in America.
5. 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. 
6. She cherry-picks evidence to make exaggerated claim that maintenance weight-loss exercise program is hell on earth and to cast doubt on link between obesity and disease.
7. She ignores huge body of evidence that connects obesity to disease and premature death.
8. She uses a Straw Man argument to argue that being skinny doesn't guarantee good health.  

"Why Diets Fail" on Netflix

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.

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 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.

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 and stereotactic 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. The best 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 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.

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. 

(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 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.

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, are less 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.

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 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.