I'm sick of the "it's just calories in, calories out, idiot!" bullshit. It's at least partially wrong an woefully incomplete. Telling a fat person to eat less is like telling a depressed person to get out more. I know because I've been at the receiving end of both.
For one thing, it ignores that the calorie consumer has feelings. First, running a calorie deficit makes you physiologically hungry. You can fight the hunger, but no willpower or strength of character is going to make it disappear. Going on a diet is a constant fight against your body. And that doesn't even get into the psychological reasons people eat. Articles like this one make no effort to account for this. They don't explore the negative effects. Being hungry all the time is really fucking distracting. And they certainly don't try to weigh those downsides against the potential benefits.
And those benefits to dieting are very much "potential". Study after study has shown that diets don't work in the long term; people usually gain the weight back. The article smarmily dismisses metabolism as a factor. But losing weight slows your metabolism down. You end up needing to cut you intake even further than someone who's been steady at the same weight [1].
I've been fat and I've lost weight. My maximum weight exceeded my minimum (post-max) weight by about 100 pounds. Right now I'm somewhere in the middle. To the extend that I've had sustained weight loss, it has been by making gradual, sustainable changes to my lifestyle. And these changes haven't used weight as a target. Getting into running, replacing some foods with other foods, and working on my mental health are all fairly sustainable in their own right. They make me feel better and healthier. The correlated weight loss is incidental. When I did use weight as a target, I did more harm than good. Exercising and dieting to the point of passing out for a whole day after a long run did make me lose weight, but it didn't make me healthier. In fact, my running got slower.
Leave fat people the fuck alone about their diets. The panopticon of shame and ridicule doesn't help.
"And those benefits to dieting are very much "potential". Study after study has shown that diets don't work in the long term; people usually gain the weight back."
I'm sorry, but this is misleading BS. Studies have found that diets don't work for most people cause most people just suck at sticking to diets, not because CICO is somehow fundamentally flawed. To imply the second is dishonest.
It would be like saying that suggesting people to work out to get in shape is useless cause studies have found that most people don't stick to exercise plans.
"Leave fat people the fuck alone about their diets."
Unfortunately we can't. Cause obesity is a real public health crisis and diets is why. That's not to say that we should encourage fat shaming. But we need to be honest and not coddle people
The fact that people don't stick to diets is why they don't work. This is what I mean about discounting the human element. A solution requiring every individual to do something incredibly difficult is no solution at all. It's like if we tried to help everyone having a hard time with technology to RTFM and ridiculed those who didn't. It's not what you do when you're actually trying to solve the problem.
You said it yourself in your original comment: small and sustainable changes are the way to go. I agree that much of the cultural discourse around dieting is harmful. The promise of every diet commercial is that if you eat in this special way for three months you'll be the picture of health and then there is no need to worry about what you put into your body. This is not only a bad plan for being healthy, but it also heaps additional shame on a person when they are unsurprisingly unable to maintain the significant lifestyle changes required by the diet.
The bottom line for me is that both 1) CICO is the dominant consideration in weight loss and 2) small and sustainable changes made over time are far healthier in the long run than an instantaneous and significant change. Of course, point (2) applies much more broadly to any health or lifestyle goal.
For one thing, it ignores that the calorie consumer has feelings. First, running a calorie deficit makes you physiologically hungry. You can fight the hunger, but no willpower or strength of character is going to make it disappear. Going on a diet is a constant fight against your body. And that doesn't even get into the psychological reasons people eat. Articles like this one make no effort to account for this. They don't explore the negative effects. Being hungry all the time is really fucking distracting. And they certainly don't try to weigh those downsides against the potential benefits.
And those benefits to dieting are very much "potential". Study after study has shown that diets don't work in the long term; people usually gain the weight back. The article smarmily dismisses metabolism as a factor. But losing weight slows your metabolism down. You end up needing to cut you intake even further than someone who's been steady at the same weight [1].
I've been fat and I've lost weight. My maximum weight exceeded my minimum (post-max) weight by about 100 pounds. Right now I'm somewhere in the middle. To the extend that I've had sustained weight loss, it has been by making gradual, sustainable changes to my lifestyle. And these changes haven't used weight as a target. Getting into running, replacing some foods with other foods, and working on my mental health are all fairly sustainable in their own right. They make me feel better and healthier. The correlated weight loss is incidental. When I did use weight as a target, I did more harm than good. Exercising and dieting to the point of passing out for a whole day after a long run did make me lose weight, but it didn't make me healthier. In fact, my running got slower.
Leave fat people the fuck alone about their diets. The panopticon of shame and ridicule doesn't help.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/88/4/906/4650207?login...