Essay #1 (Essay worth 200 points): Is Losing Weight a Fool’s Errand? Due March 11
The Assignment: Is Losing Weight the Domain of the Rich?
Consider the difficulty of losing weight as argued in Harriet Brown’s essay “The Weight of the Evidence” and Sandra Aamodt’s essay “Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet”; consider the advantages of having disposable income to buy healthy food as evidenced in Joe Pinsker’s “Why So Many Rich Kids Come to Enjoy the Taste of Healthier Foods”; consider the prevalence of food deserts in low-income communities; and consider the expensive weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, Zepbound, and others; then write an argumentative essay that addresses the claim “losing weight and keeping it off is the domain of the rich.”
Suggested Outline
Paragraph 1: Explain systemic injustice as it pertains to losing weight.
Paragraph 2: Explain the argument of self-agency as it pertains to losing weight.
Paragraphs 3: Present your argumentative claim or thesis.
Paragraphs 4-6 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal paragraph.
Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, which is often a dramatic restatement of your thesis.
Your last page is an MLA-format Works Cited with a minimum of 4 sources.
What Is a Strong Thesis?
A strong thesis should be argumentative, demonstrable, and sonorous (strong in authorial presence).
- Argumentative: The thesis or claim presents an argument that by definition is in opposition to another proposition. In this regard, the argument sets up a sort of challenge or duel. Sometimes, this duel is a zero-sum game with a clear winner and loser. More often than not, however, this duel results in both sides being partly right and finding common ground and common understanding.
- Demonstrable: The thesis or claim is followed by reasons or mapping components. The reasons or mapping components determine the body paragraphs and in essence “outline” the essay.
- Sonorous: The writer has an informed opinion and has reached their opinion by testing it. This “testing” comes from studying opponents’ views and considering and reconsidering their opinion. Only after going through this “trial by fire” testing, does the writer achieve the confidence and authenticity to present a thesis that is sonorous. In this context, sonorous means resounding, strong, salient, and confident. In other words, writing that is sonorous means having a strong authorial presence. As of writing, the anodyne, bland prose style of ChatGPT is incapable of a strong authorial presence.
Thesis That Supports Self-Agency Argument
The systemic injustice argument is that because life is unfair with golden-paved roads leading to the land of milk and honey for the rich and thorny briar patches leading to the land of forlorn decrepitude for the working classes, the working classes should, when faced with the prospect of healthy eating and weight management, curl up into a ball and die. This impulse to give up because everything for the rich is easier is both self-destructive and morally repulsive. Firstly, waiting for institutions to balance the scales of justice while we languish with morbid obesity, high blood pressure, and other conditions signaling our premature death is a fool’s errand. Secondly, when we play the role of helpless victims, we only serve to accelerate our demise. And finally, when we look to history’s heroes of self-agency and determination, we can find the tools to empower ourselves without the privileges and advantages of the rich.
***
Thesis That Supports the Systemic Injustice Argument
It appears our champion of self-agency would like a round of applause for his rousing call for the working-class poor to take responsibility for their health and weight management. Clearly, he is a cheerleader for “history’s heroes of self-agency and determination,” and he feels empowered giving us a lecture on self-determination and free-will in regard to making “healthy life choices.” But I’m afraid to say that as much as I admire the rhapsodical tone of his rhetoric, his argument that the working-class poor can compete with the rich when it comes to healthy eating collapses under close scrutiny. Firstly, the schedule for a single mother working three jobs to feed her children precludes a daily two-hour workout at the gym, a daily ritual of “mindful” meditation, and an hour practice of sweat-inducing Ashtanga yoga followed by a two-hour cortisol-reducing aromatherapy massage. Secondly, the cost of wholesome foods is well beyond her budget. Organic grass-fed, hormone-free protein and local pesticide-free produce costs ten times the amount of frozen fries and chicken nuggets so that her attempt to “eat organic” will send her into quick bankruptcy and render her and her children homeless. Third, a working-class single mother who is highly disciplined and scrupulous in her time management will still lack the time to prepare her and her family the kind of healthy meals the self-agency cheerleader champions. In other words, the self-agency cheerleader is full of hot-air rhetoric and short on specific facts to bolster his argument. In the final analysis, this self-agency avatar sounds more like an aspiring social-media influencer high on his own empty bromides and short on real facts.
***
ChatGPT Prompt and Response
Building Block Assignment #1 for Losing Weight Essay is due February 25 for 25 points.
Building Block #1 for Losing Weight Essay: 2 Paragraphs
For the first paragraph, explain the societal and systemic injustice argument that losing weight is far more difficult for those who are economically challenged.
ChatGPT Response:
According to the authors at HMN24 Biological Optimisation, self agency is the following:
Personal-agency, also known as self-agency is a psychological term describing an individual with complete control over themselves and their entire life. When someone talks about personal-agency, or when someone says that a person has high agency, they’re describing someone who is assertive and someone who believes that they are solely responsible for their own thoughts, feelings, and actions. Others may influence their thoughts, feelings, and actions, but ultimate control resides with them. People with high agency are critical for society because they have the willpower and the know-how to impose their ideas on the masses. Leaders and not followers.
DEFINING PERSONAL-AGENCY
Personal-agency is the power to see things through, no matter what anyone else says or suggests. It’s the power of will that drives a person to face a dire situation and win. It’s a trait that defines successful people who just don’t take no for an answer. Personal-agency is one of the most important skills in life, and it’s what drives us forward against all odds. Everyone plays by the same rules, but people who have high personal-agency can see things through, no matter how impossible they might seem at the beginning. All successful people like Jeff Bezos, Sheryl Sandberg, Michael Jordan, and many others display this incredible trait, one which has helped them reach never-before-seen heights, that has forever changed the entire world. Personal-agency is power over oneself. A power that keeps you going forward until you reach your goals, no matter how big the obstacles may get.
THE BENEFITS OF PERSONAL-AGENCY
High agency comes with benefits that can shape the reality around people. First and foremost, this virtue can help you get out of pretty much any situation, no matter how tough and hopeless it might look. People with prominent personal-agency traits can think outside the box and risk everything to get to their goals. During this event, they have full control over their own feelings and thoughts, and always keep their eyes on the goal. Things might become complicated at points, but people like this can improvise, and they go and jump over any obstacle in their way. The control they have over themselves is full and complete. That means that they’re almost always on top of how they feel, what they think, and what they do. Their happiness doesn’t depend on others, how much money they have or material possessions. People like this can make themselves feel happy in any situation and at all times. It’s one of the most important factors every person needs, to feel good about who they are.
POTENTIAL DRAWBACKS
While high-agency provides all kinds of benefits, everyone needs to get through tough times, and in some cases, it can be counter-productive. For example, if a person with high agency is surrounded by many low-agency people, they might seem too dominant and assertive to everyone else. They’re the overly positive person and when that doesn’t align with the beliefs of those around them it can create conflict. Others may also feel threatened and as a result, have a lower sense of value. Since achieving high agency takes a lot of work, low-agency people will often push high-agency individuals away, keep a safe distance or even attempt to lower that person's value through defamation of some sort. Not always because they’re bad people, but because they feel bad about themselves and feel like situations are out of their control. It’s like being the one person in the room that's not drinking alcohol or displaying a common situational behaviour. It makes people feel uncomfortable as the level playing field it creates becomes compromised. Another area where high-agency can have a negative impact is listening to orders. If a high-agency person gets an order that doesn’t look like the best idea to them, or if it’s just wrong, these people will have a problem completing the task. They often have a hard time doing something they wouldn’t normally do, or something they think is wrong. In this case, they will either try to find a better way of doing things or won’t do as they are told at all. That can have serious consequences at work, relationships, and other areas of everyday life. People like this will always stick to their own ways rather than compromise with others. It can also come across as arrogance.
CONSEQUENCES OF LOW PERSONAL-AGENCY
Having low personal-agency means that you’re not fully aware of your existence and what life really is. In other words, you don’t have the skills needed to see further than what’s obvious. You may grow up in an area that has a common or defined path of life. You struggle to see beyond that process and look outside the confines of that narrative. Instead of focusing on important things in life, most of your conversations revolve around the information you’ve garnered from television or the internet. You struggle to cope with deeper or philosophical topics. Instead of trying to understand you choose to switch off and stay within your comfort zone. Low self-agency people don’t ask or refrain from asking questions. They take things how they hear them and rely on other people to frame their narrative. They don’t have the willpower to learn or to adapt, which is why most low self-agency people don’t have lofty aspirations or notable drive. To put in simple terms, low agency people won’t risk things, they won’t go against the tide, and they won’t question orders or other people’s thoughts.
CAN YOU WORK ON IT?
Yes, yes, you can. Low personal-agency is usually the result of the way we live and the people we surround ourselves with, rather than a trait we are born with. It’s driven by mindset. Everything that keeps our attention away from the realities of life impacts our agency levels. Whether that’s watching things that remove us from reality, depending on computers and technology or stimulating our brain with other artificial methods, the result is a loss of will and disinterest in progression. Instead of acting like a true individual who wants to understand life the best they can, low agency people surrender themselves to others and enter a fully passive mode. You can fix that by taking control of your life and thinking about what makes you happy. Think about what life really is and understand that you have the power and ability to change the reality around you. Start refraining from letting others dictate your life and make the most out of it by living an active life, both physically and psychologically. To exercise and to educate ourselves is a prerequisite to living with purpose.
CONCLUSION
Personal-agency is something we all need to get through life. It’s a driving force that makes us unstoppable and allows you to reach our goals if you truly believe in yourself. Modern society and media largely keeps us passive and puts a barrier in the way of us reaching our true heights. Wake yourself up from the slumber of technology and understand that you have the power to change the world.
For the second paragraph, explain the self-agency argument that says the challenge to lose weight should not be abnegated because of societal disadvantages.
ChatGPT:
Building Block #2 for Losing Weight Essay: Due March 3
Due as an upload for 25 points.
Building Block #2 Assignment Description: Write 2 Paragraphs
For your first paragraph, you will write your claim or thesis in which you support, refute, or complicate the claim that losing weight and keeping it off is the domain of the rich.
For your second paragraph, you will develop a counterargument-rebuttal paragraph in which you present an opposing view to your argument and give this opposing view, a counterargument, and a rebuttal.
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).
Instructions for This Assignment
One. To write an effective counterargument-rebuttal
- 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 __________________________.
Using the Above Templates Is Not Plagiarism
I strongly suggest you use these templates. Using them is not a form of plagiarism. You are taking structures that are commonly used by professional writers and filling in the blanks for your own purposes.
Be sure to provide compelling and accurate counterarguments.
Do not use weak or misrepresented arguments to make your rebuttal easier. The stronger the counterargument, the stronger your rebuttal, and the strength of your rebuttal determines how persuasive your argumentative essay is.
Be sure to have sufficient detail for your counterargument-rebuttal paragraph. Aim for 150-200 words.
***
Common signal phrases
We read in Author X’s essay that:
We read in Corbin Smith’s essay “Alan Ritchson’s ‘Reacher” Is a Gigantic, Unstoppable Force” that Jack Reacher embodies “The four virtues of Stoicism.”
According to Author X, and As Author X writes:
According to Corbin Smith, the Stoical Hero balances his passion with his powers of reason. As Smith writes: “You are passionate, but not completely driven by your baser instincts.”
Author X argues that and As Author X observes:
Corbin Smith argues that Reacher’s appeal rests largely in the sheer physicality of its star Alan Ritchson. As Smith observes: Ritchson “is a slab of rock-hard marbled beef with an unnerving square jaw and blue eyes that cut holes through steel.”
***
“The Weight of the Evidence” by Harriet Brown
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
None of this stops doctors and researchers from recommending weight loss for health reasons. Donna Ryan, professor emeritus at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, co-chaired the National Institutes of Health panel that recently developed new guidelines for treating obesity, including calorie-restricted diets and commercial diet programs. “Those who have a BMI of 30 and up need treatment, no questions asked,” they wrote. I asked Ryan why, given that so few people keep weight off and given the risks of yo-yo dieting, the committee backed the same old ineffective treatments. “I’m not familiar with any of the research that says yo-yoing is bad for you,” Ryan told me. “I’m not convinced there’s any harm whatsoever in losing and regaining weight.”
Why do doctors keep prescribing treatments that don’t work for a condition that’s often benign? I suspect one reason lies in the fanaticism that often seems to drive the public debate around weight. Last January, for instance, when Flegal’s meta-analysis showing a low risk of death for overweight people hit the news, one of its most vocal critics was Walter Willett, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health. He told a reporter from NPR, “This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it.” A month later, Willett organized a symposium at Harvard just to attack Flegal’s findings.
Willett’s career, like countless others’, has been built on the obesity-will-kill-you paradigm. Tam Fry, a spokesperson for the National Obesity Forum in the U.K., also dissed Flegal’s work. “This is a horrific message to put out,” he told the BBC. “We shouldn’t take it for granted that we can cancel the gym, that we can eat ourselves to death with black forest gateaux.”
Actually, Flegal’s findings suggest nothing of the kind. But Willett, Fry, and others seem to see them as a dangerous challenge to a fundamental truth. UCLA sociologist Abigail Saguy, author of What’s Wrong With Fat?, says people are often invested in their own thin privilege. “They want to think they’ve earned it by working hard and counting calories, and they cling to it,” she says.
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?”
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.”
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.
It’s hard to think of any other disease—if you want to call it that—where treatment rarely works and most people are blamed for not “recovering.”
Over the years, Robin Flamm, a full-time parent from Portland, Oregon, has bounced in and out of Weight Watchers and Overeaters Anonymous, gone paleo, done Medifast. Everything worked—for a while. She’d lose 30 pounds and gain back 35, lose 35 and regain 40. She thought she needed to exercise more, eat less, work harder. Like most of us, she blamed herself.
At age 48, she decided she’d spent enough time hating her body, wishing herself different, feeling like a failure. She started seeing a therapist who offers an approach called Health at Every Size, though she was skeptical at first. In the current “obesity epidemic” climate, the idea of pursuing health separate from weight, of accepting that people come in many shapes and sizes, feels radical.
She felt both terrified and relieved to put away her scale, delete her calorie-counting app, and start to rethink her beliefs around food and health. While most obesity docs insist that restrained eating—counting calories or points or exchanges—is necessary for good health, not everyone agrees. About 10 years ago, Ellyn Satter, a dietitian and therapist in Madison, Wisconsin, developed a concept she calls eating competence, which encourages internal self-regulation about what and how much to eat rather than relying on calorie counts or lists of “good” and “bad” foods. Competent eaters, says Satter, enjoy food; they’re not afraid of it. And there’s solid evidence that competent eaters score better on cardiovascular risk markers like total cholesterol, blood pressure, and triglycerides than non-competent eaters.
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.
***
My personal analysis:
Dietary Nihilism
Brown suggests giving up in paragraph 1. 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.
Weaknesses in Harriet Brown's Essay
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.
Summary of Harriet Brown's Strengths and Weaknesses
- Brown does a good job of showing how using BMI to measure obesity is unreliable.
- She does a good job of showing how futile dieting is.
- She does a good job of showing how the dieting industry is profit-driven more than health-driven and shows how this industry dates back to a hundred years.
- She fails, though, in addressing the real health concerns of obesity, which is a growing problem in America.
- She also fails in using a large brush to pain dieters as unrealistically aspiring to some glamour image when many of us have real health concerns. Using such a large brush is in critical thinking language called using an oversimplification.
- She cherry-picks evidence to make exaggerated claim that maintenance weight-loss exercise program is hell on earth and to cast doubt on link between obesity and disease.
- She ignores huge body of evidence that connects obesity to disease and premature death.
- She uses a Straw Man argument to argue that being skinny doesn't guarantee good health.
"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.
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.
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.