I saw an article posted on Facebook called “The Big Problem With Oprah And Other Celebs Who Tout Diets” I started reading the piece and it was pretty good. The author, Jean Fain, who identified herself as “a psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders” was doing a decent take-down of the celebrity diet culture including the quote:
From where I sit, clean eating, lifestyle plans, weight management programs, juice cleanses, support systems… they’re all diets, and they’re all bound to fail. But with their intoxicating blend of impossible expectations, misguided authority and restrictive guidelines, celebrity diets are predestined to fail spectacularly.
Yes! This all day! The article was going great until it hit this:
Self-compassion also means never going on a diet. When you’re self-compassionate, there’s no need to count points or calories or carbs. That’s because you generally appreciate your body and the food you feed it. You naturally eat less and weigh less without dieting.
What? I couldn’t believe it (that’s not true – I could believe it because we live in such a screwed up diet culture, I just didn’t want to believe it.) It turns out that the author of the article is also the author of the book called “The Self-Compassion Diet.” The irony of her claiming that diets don’t work – except her diet – and that “Self-compassion means never going on a diet…you naturally eat less and weight loss without dieting” while marketing her book “The Self-Compassion Diet” was not lost on me.
I left a comment in the Facebook discussion:
I think that this is seriously problematic, especially in an eating disorder context. She conflates weight and health, and then she says “When you’re self-compassionate, there’s no need to count points or calories or carbs. That’s because you generally appreciate your body and the food you feed it. You naturally eat less and weigh less without dieting.” While I’m sure saying that helps her sell her diet book, it is completely unsupported by evidence.
She replied:
Ragen, there actually is a study that says just that. I don’t have the citation handy, but if you email me I’m happy to send it to you after vacation.
So she sent me the study that, remember, she claimed showed that “When you’re self-compassionate… You naturally eat less and weigh less without dieting.” Let’s take a look, shall we:
- The entire sample was 159 college students from 18-25 years old (9 were omitted from the final results by the study authors for being “outliers”) so the sample is not exactly robust.
- 74% of the subjects were “normal weight” to start with so, even using their own messed up ideas about weight and weight loss, we’re down to 39 of the participants having “weight to lose”
- BMI was only taken only once, by self-report. They did not track a change in BMI or a change in weight at all in the study, so the data are silent on whether self-compassion leads to weight loss.
- In fact, it’s a study of “associations.” That means that the study is completely correlational, and causality cannot be drawn at all. That’s why the word “may” occurs 53 times in 10 pages.
- There seems to be quite the hurry to suggest, based on correlation, that having self-compassion leads to a lower BMI. But it’s just as (if not, perhaps, more?) likely that having a lower BMI in a thoroughly sizeist society may lead to greater self-compassion, since a person with a lower BMI will likely have less experience being ceaselessly barraged with an epic ton of sizeist shame, stigma, bullying, and oppression, while living in a world that isn’t built to accommodate them, all of which gives fat people the message that we aren’t worthy of any compassion – self or otherwise. But sure, it could be that having higher self-compassion causes a lower BMI…. Regardless, that conclusion is beyond the scope of this study.
I asked Deb Burgard, a PhD, eating disorders specialist, and psychologist to check my work just to be sure, and she generously agreed and provided this excellent analysis as well:
The actual hypotheses come back as:
Self-compassion will be positively related to mindful eating
Yes (college students who are exposed to one are probably more likely to be exposed to the other)
Self-compassion will be inversely related to eating disorder symptomatology
Nope (only dieting)
Self-compassion will be inversely related to BMI
Yes (but we don’t know if thin privilege makes it easier to have self- compassion or if dieting is actually the moderator here since the process of dieting is a mindfu*ck that creates a barrier to self-compassion, or if weight stigma creates the barrier, or something else)
Mindful eating will be negatively related to eating disorder syptomatology
Yes (This is pretty much a tautology since the operational definition of one is the opposite of the other)
Mindful eating will be negatively related to BMI
Nope
Mindful eating will moderate the relationship between self-compassion and eating disorder symptomatology
Nope
Mindful eating will moderate the relationship between self-compassion and BMI
Nope
Here is what I find most interesting: (From the discussion:) “This study found that self-compassion negatively predicted eating disorder symptomatology and dieting-related eating disorder symptomatology specifically . . .” (p 234). Actually, self-compassion was unrelated to actual ED symptoms (bulimia, food preoccupation, oral control) and only to the dieting subscale (which was not one of the hypotheses).
So you can imagine that people who are thinner are less likely to diet and also less likely to be exposed to cultural expectations that one is a loser if one can’t “successfully” diet/be thin.
The fact that these researchers are touting mindfulness or intutive eating or self-compassion as a way to be thin is an expression itself of weight stigma.
There are numerous examples in the text of the assumption that higher BMI people must eat more, eat in a more disordered way, etc. but their own finding is that mindful eating is unrelated to BMI!
In any case, this research says exactly zero about the idea that if a higher-weight person has self-compassion, they will lose weight. In fact, that idea may itself be an example of how stigma and oppression make it harder for people to feel supported in practicing self-compassion, since the fact that their bodies don’t stay thin must mean they do not really deserve self-compassion, or they must not be doing it right, or whatever specific f*ckery is on today’s menu.
I think it’s worth delving deeper into that last bit, because it’s easy to think “Hey, even if the weight loss doesn’t happen, the person still ends up with more self-compassion right? So isn’t that a good thing?”
The problem is that’s there’s every chance that when you tell fat people to believe that self-compassion will lead to weight loss, then those people are likely to end up believing that they are not doing self-compassion “correctly” and/or that they don’t deserve self-compassion if they aren’t simultaneously becoming thinner (which they are unlikely to do, especially in the long-term.)
At the same time, you suggest that other people can judge by someone’s body size whether or not they have self-compassion, which just adds to the tremendous stigma and stereotyping that fat people deal with. And that’s oppressive.
So I think that, however well-intentioned she may be, Jean is harming people. From my perspective, she is co-opting the idea of self-compassion in order to make a profit by misleading fat people into buying a big book of magical weight loss beans. Regardless of her intentions – which, again, may well be good – I think that the impact of her work is harmful, and her belief that this study supports her claims is nothing short of disturbing, as is the idea of someone who conflates self-compassion with body size (and markets the diet book she wrote) identifying as a specialist in working with people who have eating disorders.
To be clear, what she is doing is legal – people are (for now) allowed to try to sell promises of weight loss, however unlikely they are to be successful. But we don’t have to buy what they are selling – and we have every right to expect that they will be able to provide evidence that actually backs up their claims.
Regardless, the bottom line here is that we are all worthy of compassion, including self-compassion, at any weight. The only outcome we can currently prove about developing more self-compassion is that it will increase the amount of compassion we have for ourselves (and I’m a fan of that.) I think that self-compassion is not a diet; and anyone who says it is, is trying to sell something.
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Excellent analysis – I hope you sent it to her.
Yeah. I just love how she wrote that whole book based on ONE study. A small one, with bad science, at that. But you’d think that, as a so-called expert, she’d at least quote two or three studies. That way, she can say, “Studies show…” As it is, she can only say, “Study shows…” which sounds ridiculous.
Especially if the study doesn’t actually show that, anyway.
ONE study? Sheesh.
Outstanding article!
I cannot emphasize enough how truly excellent this is. THANK YOU RAGEN! and Deb!!!!!!
Very well written. Self-compassion is a good thing. Trying to tell people it will make them thin is a bad thing.
I wish people would just encourage other people to have self-compassion. Our society is way too good at telling us what is wrong with us.
Just as bad: saying that people with self-compassion are thinner than people without. That doesn’t imply any weight loss, but it does imply that fat people have less self-compassion than thin people. And that’s just a giant load of BS.
Very true.
Anecdata: A lot of fat people who are in horrible, stressful or abusive situations will lose weight without even trying when they escape that situation.
Is this a function of “self-compassion makes you thin” or more a function of “stress/abuse/hatred makes you fat”?
My money’s on the latter. Not that correlation proves anything, of course.
Although I do think that there have been multiple (More than ONE!) studies showing that stress relief leads to improved overall health, and I also think that there have been multiple (more than ONE!) studies showing that improved overall health in fat people leads to *some* naturally occurring weight loss, due to the fact that the body becomes more efficient at absorbing and using the nutrients ingested.
So there’s that.
But this idea that thin people have self-compassion, and fat people don’t, or they don’t have the right kind of self-compassion, or they’re doing it wrong, or something, and that if they did it right, they would naturally become thin… That’s just nonsense.
It’s a fairy tale meant to make thin people feel good about themselves.
Yeah, let’s stop abusing/bullying each other and see if that improves health.
this reminds me a lot of conversations i’ve had with friends about fat acceptance…
me: no i don’t diet, i don’t care what i weigh as long as i stay comfortable and happy and more or less healthy.
them: oh that’s nice for you, that’s a good way to do it! that way you’ll start losing weight, right, since you stopped thinking about it!
me: ……… friend no.
You might “start” losing weight, but you probably won’t “continue” to lose weight, or ever reach your “ideal” weight.
I did lose about 25 pounds when I stopped dieting. Then I hit my new set point, and feel very comfortable there. Well, aside from all my health issues, which were there before the set point. But I do feel better than I did when I was dieting, is the point. I feel so much better, now that I’m not always hungry, cranky, shaky, and obsessing about “I PAID for those calories, and I’m going to eat every single one!” eating my yogurt with a spatula to get every single yogurt molecule out of the cup. Yeppers. Feel much better now, despite the ongoing pain and illness.
Just releasing that one stressor in my life made a big difference. I feel… compassionate about myself.
Of course, it could just as easily have been a side-effect of new medication. I really can’t say for sure.
Interestingly, that 25 pounds was the magic-number 10% of my body weight, when I was at my highest. And yet… My illnesses and other assorted health issues DID NOT GO AWAY! What’s up with that? They promised me that if I lost the 10%, “significant” magic amount of weight, it would go away! Doctors say that all the time! People who think they are doctors, because they read an article, or because “everybody knows” say that all the time!
I’m wondering, though, if the fact that it came off without me even trying, and has remained there for a while now, will that mean that I can finally become a 5% person, and keep that “Significant weight loss” off for five years or more? Or will it not count, because it was not enough to make me thin?
I wonder, if we got rid of the diet industry, entirely, and people just stopped trying to intentionally lose weight, would that 5% of people who can keep off a “significant” weight loss for 5 years or more actually go up a few percentage points?
Or will our bodies naturally go up a few pounds, as we age, and that five year point won’t actually be reached, but we won’t care, because we’re not dieting and stressing about the number on the scale, anyway?
My dad just spent 6 wks in the hospital in and out 3 times since Christmas (he’s been out 6 wks since the last time, and has just left the country as he got the go-ahead to travel), and this bought of illness coupled with his hospitalization in 2015, he’s lost 20% of his weight, and is now at the sickest point in his life. But he believes that all he has to do is lose another 50% and he’ll be like new.
I believe his problems stem from statins and weight stigma, as he really believes all the hoopla about fat ppl being a drain, more “morbid”, etc. Each thing he went in hospital for, and all the things they found, are common side effects (or intended effects?) of statins, and known outcomes of weight loss (he previously won the huge key from weight watchers back in the early 90s for completing his goal (I believe it was this that gave him gallstones).
So sorry to hear that. And with his mindset, I’m afraid it won’t really improve any time soon.
Well, I hope his trip goes OK, at least.
Hi Ragen, I’ve been following your blog for about a year now. I’d been struggling with self-acceptance and decided I needed to start unlearning the unhelpful/confusing/harmful messages about health, self-worth and body size that I’d been taught by society at large, and the media in particular. Your writing has been INVALUABLE to me in helping to “retrain my brain”. One thing in particular that keeps me coming back to your page is your ability to clearly and (can’t state this enough) accurately (!!) describe scientific findings. As an (almost) psychologist (I’m ABD) and quantitative researcher nothing makes me more frustrated than when data are misconstrued, and/or conflated to suit a particular person’s viewpoint. That’s not how science works! So THANK YOU! (p.s. I also love the way you imbue your logical analysis of scientific facts with passion and a tiny bit of rage against the weight-loss machine.) Love, love, love.
Actually, I think this world could use a lot more compassion, not just self-com passion. If everybody could just stop with the idiocy and hate (self-hate) and worry less about how other people look, it would be a better world.
Yeah. It’s a lot easier to have self-compassion if you’re not being hated on every day by the rest of the world.
Compassion for others enables self-compassion, both for ourselves, and for those people who are feeling our compassion for them.
But, if more people felt compassion, for themselves OR for others, the diet industry would go belly-up. (or would that be six-pack abs up?)
Oh, I’d love to see the diet industry go belly … yeah, six-pack up. 🙂 Of all the industries out there, it’s truly one the world can do without!
I suppose having self-compassion means that you spend less time stuffing your feelings, so that’s why they say you eat less?
Now, intuitive eating, where you listen to what your body says it wants, may or may not lead to changes in your weight or health. However, you’ll probably feel better, overall, because you’re more likely to be ingesting the actual nutrients your body wants, when it wants them. And the thing is, the body doesn’t need all nutrients all the time, and sometimes, you can have too much of certain nutrients, and so your body will want something else (or maybe just give you the message “anything but that, please.”) to satisfy its needs.
Self compassion, I believe, will lead you to be ABLE to eat intuitively, because it allows you to ignore the messages of the outside world, and focus on yourself, in a positive manner.
So, if someone wrote a book about self-compassion, and how it generally means you’re more likely to eat what your body needs, and you’re generally more likely to engage in movement that makes you feel good, and you’re generally more likely to take whatever steps you need to take to protect yourself from the ocean of poison in which most people are swimming every day, as well as the “slings and arrows” of body-shaming and other forms of hatred with which humans in our society tend to attack each other on a regular basis, then yes, I’d probably buy that.
And if, as is my own theory, the stress hormone (I believe it’s called cortisol?) is one of the primary causes of weight gain, heart disease, diabetes, and all those other “fat diseases,” then practicing self-compassion should have a positive effect on that, as well.
And self-compassion is certainly good for your own mental health, as well as relationships with others, because if makes it easier to forgive other people, even if you acknowledge those people as toxic, and plan to avoid them. So, there’s that, too.
Self-compassion is just generally good for you, in a whole lot of ways. I’m sure there is plenty of stuff she could put in a book. Why did she have to go THERE?!
I found that when I was dieting, I was not being compassionate to myself. I was obsessing over what I was eating, if I was exercising enough, berating myself for “giving in” and having this or that, etc.
I gave it up. I’m not any lighter, but I’m a lot happier and more content. I still struggle with some body issues, but that’s just going to take a while to get over. As a previous poster so eloquently put it, I am working on “retraining my brain”.
This woman is working too hard, I swear! Nobody has to go to such length to convince the American public (women) that being fat is bad dieting is good even if it doesn’t work, that good self esteem means you are thin and if you are not thin you are a walking catalog of very bad things and screwed up thoughts ideas and behaviors in need of fixing. the connect Don’t Be Fat!” has been pretty well dyed in the wool of red white a blue by now, and the complex maze of double and triple speak this woman has (spent, three whole months?) coming up with is pointless. Fat=bad is not a phantom conspiracy. You get up every day to a barrage of imagery, conversations article and tip on how deranged you are how off base your thinking how screwed up your body, and EVERYONE has the solution. The diet diet, the no diet diet, the exercise and diet diet, and the exercise and maybe diet diet, the pills, plans, programs, positive thinking, lifestyle altering, mind set adjusting, BMI impacting free for all that is American Advertising does not need to be couched in negate speak! We get it, we’re fat fat, were all gonna get sick and die and you are gonna help us to help ourselves… Got it Thank you, Next…
Was an article in NYT, I didn’t read it, it opened with “Why won’t more Americans Diet.” There’s the cross over to a holocaust, not only are we incapable of getting and staying thin, we don’t want to. ABSURD. ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT NEEDED! ASP! We Will do it by force if we have to! You fatties will get in line or else! So you really think you need to throw in the self esteem mumbo jumbo. Hey hasn’t this one been done before? W. Charise Goodman’s book The Invisible Woman mentioned a dieter or claim said something like “People with high self esteem make healthy food choices.” yeah yeah we got it…
Thin=healthy in body and mind…fat= yadda yadda…
Ouch, you saw Why Won’t More Americans Diet, too. Was that a train wreck of self-righteous privilege, condescension, and attempted guilt-tripping, or what? “I just don’t understand why you would choose to be unhealthy when you could be healthy!” sobbed one doctor, conflating “unhealthy” with “bigger than I like to see actresses on TV” and “health” with “eating below your base metabolic rate to purposely induce catabolism so you will look thinner when your fat cells dump,” which isn’t actually healthy. “It must be because it’s so hard to eat less when you’re used to gorging!” another wailed, because all fat people do that. Every last one. He doesn’t have to provide any evidence the people he wants to eat less are in fact eating too much right now because Everybody Knows that’s How You Get Fat, duh. And of course, they want to force and coerce us back into the dieting fold “without stigmatizing us,” because marking out a group of people as broken, inherently diseased, and undeserving of human respect or autonomy without stigmatizing them is totally a thing you can do. “Look at all these people who’ve successfully lost weight!” they concluded, trotting out honeymooners who’d “successfully” lost a few pounds for a few months, which totally means you can go from fat to thin and stay that way forever if you’re just “good” (read: compliant) enough.
Here, General Fatphobic You, I will explain to you why more Americans won’t diet. It’s NOT because, as you speculated in your disgusting article, we’ve given ourselves over fully to debauchery and are now spending every day atop a pile of [insert your favorite “forbidden” food here], eating as much as you want. It’s NOT because we don’t have some kind but firm thin hand guiding our lives. No, we won’t diet because diets don’t work. Losing weight and keeping it off permanently on a diet isn’t “hard,” it’s objectively, non-hyperbolically impossible for the vast majority of people, and your own research backs that up, which you know. We’ve noticed your emperor’s nekkid ass-crack and subsequently decided to no longer buy your magic slimming cloth only Good Fatties can see. We are no longer cowed (pun intentional) by your insults or dazzled by your authority. We’re demanding answers and finding you don’t have any – that you NEVER had any. That’s why more Americans won’t diet.
I respectfully love you
Me too!
“We’ve noticed your emperor’s nekkid ass-crack and subsequently decided to no longer buy your magic slimming cloth only Good Fatties can see. ”
This sentence wins the internet! Five stars!
This NYT article should do better research. Aren’t 90% of Americans currently dieting? That is particularly high in my book.
The article was covering a new university study published in JAMA, and from what I read, the “problem” (as they fashion it) isn’t that there aren’t a lot of people dieting, it’s that the number of people dieting has been steadily dropping for the past few years.
The most frustrating thing about the articles covering this study (and this wasn’t the only one) is a shared *total unwillingness* to consider the possibility the diet industry’s dishonesty and history of poor health outcomes is the problem – that maybe *they’re* the ones who need to change to better support public health. Instead, they’re spending their resources and brainpower speculating how fat people got so “arrogant” and how they get us back under control. What a crock.
I know, I mean isn’t it a given that Americans esp women diet at pretty much standard levels 80% plus since the twenties? I really can’t say as I know too many people who aren’t “on a diet” Maybe to really be “on a diet” means we have to either be enrolled in some program, eating the specialty diet foods, on pills, or signed up to get gut destruction surgery?
I’m still waiting for people to go back to pushing tapeworms as a cure for obesity. It can’t possibly be worse than what’s currently offered.
Well, at least tapeworms was natural… who knows what’s in the drugs… A tape worm is just doing the job it was intended to do, the surgery rips out healthy body parts … People are so whack I swear!
Sad to say, I actually looked into acquiring a tapeworm, at one point. I didn’t do it, thank God, but yeah. I wanted to. I was that desperate.
Education about the reality of how dieting Does. Not. Work. came at just the right time for me.
I guess I’m just “too arrogant” for my own good, because I refuse to do that to myself any more, and I believe that my fat body deserves to avoid actions that would put a thin person in the hospital and under psychiatric care, and I CERTAINLY refuse to be praised for being so “good” as to perform actions that would put a thin person in the hospital and under psychiatric care. Yep. Totally arrogant.
Flaming. It is scary just what they think they can do to people they see as too fat and needing for the betterment of society to be UN FATTED right away. I can see why they are so po’d At least the fatties, before we got so militant,(see arrogant) used to agree with them and their attempts to help us stop being so fat and upsetting them sooo much.
WHAT WOULD THESE PEOPLE DO IF IT REALLY TURNED OUT OR BECAME ACCEPTABLE FOR FAT PEOPLE AND PEOPLE WITH FAT SORT OF FAT VERY FAT ALMOST FAT AND FAT FAT TO JUST BE FAT!!!
Whole sections of society would have to rethink and re set the value systems. That is something no society wants to do. Even though we have a completely new society, different people living every fifty to one hundred years or so we are so determined to just keep on with the status quo.
It soothes the mind, fills the coffers of the diet industry, makes doctors feel useful, righteous, right and superior, and provides an easy societal scapegoat for truly frightening things no one wants to look at in life.
Health, power, money, morality, boundaries, sex, sexuality, gender issues, freedom, food, wan’t, need, primal instincts and advertising.. all tied up with my adipose tissue. Yeah, looks like hell soup to me. I can’t IMAGINE being a fat child in today’s world. I think I’d move to Tahiti and raise my kid on a beach with no access to television…
*sigh* Me, too.
The sad thing is that the clueless will read this and go, “Duh, of course you won’t lose weight doing that! You just need to eat healthy and exercise.”
You. Don’t. Get. It.
We. STARTED. With. That.
Let me tell you about the diet cycle. The one reduction industries RELY on to stay in business – the one they would fail without, if their customers actually lost weight and kept it off (Warning: VERY disordered behaviors and thoughts described ahead):
First, you start off “eating healthy and exercising.” This actually is good for you, and supports your health in many ways, but you do not lose weight. I don’t mean you lose weight slowly and get impatient, I mean you do not lose weight at all.
Next, since every aspect of society is still on your back about you being too fat literally every moment of every day, and since “eating healthy and exercising” isn’t resulting in weight loss, you start to starve. You start to overexercise. NOW you start losing a little weight. NOW you start getting compliments. NOW the people who used to sneer at you and passive-aggressively ask if you Really Need To Eat That start asking how you did it. You say you started eating healthy and exercising, and you may even believe it, but that isn’t what you’re doing. You’re vomiting in planters and chewing gum and drinking half-gallons of lemon-water to try to sick away the hunger. And you’d keep on doing that, except…
Third, you start to regain. You did not “go back to your old habits,” but the regain happens nonetheless. You will try to look for excuses this is your fault. You will blame the non-sugar-free stick of gum you chewed to get you through lunch. You will blame the diet soda you had to drink instead of lemon water that one time. You will blame the reasonable meal you couldn’t get out of eating with your family.
And THAT’S when you start to get desperate. THAT’S when you start to consider the tapeworms and the external stomach pumps and esophagus stints and the gut balloons and the stomach staples and the tongue grafts and the Victoza that is not for weight loss except when you call it Saxenda and the bariatric surgery.
Maybe you do one or some combination of those things and maybe you don’t, but either way…
You fully regain all the weight you lost. Maybe you even gain more than you lost. And like Wile E. Coyote chasing Road Runner, you think, “Golly, it’s probably because I did all that fad stuff instead of just eating healthy and exercising!”
So you start off “eating healthy and exercising.” This actually is good for you, and supports your health in many ways, but you do not lose weight…
Oh, my gosh! If only the rest of the world could read this comment, and believe it!
So much truth here. I did not do everything. I am proud to say that I did not do the scary weight loss drugs. never did speed.
I did actually buy the scary weight loss drugs, but I looked at the packaging, and the side effects, and the ingredients, and said, “Wait. What?” aaaaannnnnddddd kept them in my medicine cabinet, to stare at me and remind me, every time I opened it, that I needed “eat healthy and exercise,” so I wouldn’t be reduced to taking speed.
I did do the pro-biotic gut-cleansing power fiber pills, though. Daily diarrhea. So not fun. Also, didn’t work.
Now, the only “pro-biotic” I will take are active yogurt cultures in my store-brand cheap regular (NOT sugar-free, NOT fat-free!) yogurt. Yes, I eat the “decadent” yogurt, with actual calories and fattening fat. And I feel much better. Because nowadays, anything sugar-free or fat-free (unless they simply didn’t use sugar or fat in the recipe, in the first place, like, you know, steamed broccoli) will make me so sick! I can’t eat any of that fake diet food any more without getting sick!
This. is. not. healthy.
But eating the “decadent” and “sinful” 1% fat yogurt with the real sugar in it? Makes my digestive track happy and makes me feel good. And I have maintained my weight since I stopped dieting, too. So hooray! And the rest of the world who wants my fat body to disappear can go soak their heads.
And that’s why, if you’re about to say, “But have you tried…?” you might as well stop right there, because the answer is yes. We tried it. It did not make us thin. There is research that will tell you it did not make us thin. There is further research that will explain the exact biological mechanisms behind it not making us thin. And you’re not going to look at any of it, because as long as you can maintain that fantasy where every fat person is just one sincere act of diet penance away from being a thin person, you can think of the cartoonishly evil way both individuals and society at large treat fat people as “tough love” instead of cruelty and oppression.
DING! DING! DING!
You nailed it!
There should be some cartoon villain, “Dr. Tough Love” who routinely goes around hurting and humiliating fat people, in the most outlandish and bizarre ways possible, to show how much he “cares,” all while ignoring all the evidence Captain Science tries to show him.
On that note, here’s a slogan they can use. TAPEWORMS: Better company than a TBL trainer.
Pahahahaaaa and probably far more intelligent as well!
“When you have self-compassion, there is no need to count points, calories or carbs, blah blah blah, you will naturally weigh less.”
Actually, as a diabetic, I do have to count carbs, because I’m trying to keep the blood glucose numbers within a certain range.
Also, I did lose some weight when I started treating my diabetes. Not enough to shut anyone up about how horrible and unacceptable my body is, of course.
I didn’t “naturally weigh less” because of “self-compassion.” I lost a little weight because of treating a problem with my third rate endocrine system.
What a crock of shit.