That doesn’t mean what you think it does.

Updated 1.23.2015; reformatted 8.19.2015
This is the first of a new series called as titled above. I suppose I could just put this in a quick notes entry, but in each of these cases, as I read them I had the same thought: This doesn’t mean what the author (or tweeter as the case may be) thinks it does.

What the diet industry doesn’t want you to know?

So this link was tweeted by Linda Bacon, HAES patron saint. But I don’t think it says what she thinks it does. In the end, to lose weight, you MUST eat less. The guru being quoted here simply outlines a different way to achieve this.

'We don't need gurus to tell us how much to eat, what to eat, and what time to eat it. Eating more slowly and enjoying our food trumps all of those things for almost everyone,' Dr Kausman says. 'Our body lets us know how much is enough. People are shocked by how much less they eat when they eat more slowly and stop when they are full.''The reason some people are eating more food than is right for their body is that they're doing a lot of non-hungry eating — eating what they are not physically hungry for.'

And what if (And there are plenty of examples of this around the interwebs) eating intuitively results in your eating more? Well, I think that leaves you in the same place where you’d be in the diet industry— that you’re doing it wrong.

Here’s the thing: I’ve written quite a bit about how I lost the weight. As I’ve speculated previously, with the exception that I deliberately set out to do just that (lose weight), I think many of the tactics I’ve chosen are HAES friendly. But I’m not going to ever write that again, because I’ve come to the conclusion that HAES, as its patron saint defines it, is delusional. But this post is not about that, and so that line of thought will need to wait until a future date.

So maybe addiction isn’t a chemical thing?

I am not a fan of the Huffington Post, however, this article showed up on my Facebook newsfeed. In the article, the author makes the case (based on her research for a newly published book she is flogging) that maybe addiction isn’t a chemical thing. But if that’s the case… doesn’t it make it a choice?? And choices have consequences.

As noted above, I found this on my Facebook newsfeed, but I’m not sure it says what the poster thinks it does. Because people excuse addiction to a certain extent and agree it should be treated because “it’s not the addicts fault” because a person can’t control chemical reactions within the body. Doesn’t this suggest that it is?

Of course, what the author wants people to agree with is that the world is a harsh place for too many and we should work to change this. And I agree with that 100%. But this misery in the world is her answer for why addiction is. People are sad and miserable in their own lives and so are using drugs to mask the pain.

I’ll say this. The hypothesis DOES explain why so many addictive habits end abruptly. Everyone knows a smoker who just up and quit one day—no matter how many packs a day they smoked (my dad was one). And everybody knows the smoker who won’t quit no matter what (my mom was one). Replace smoking with any other substance that people abuse (including food in my opinion) and the point is the same.

What if it’s all a CHOICE? Choose differently, and get on with the rest of your life. Hopefully BEFORE you’ve abused your body beyond it’s compensating ability. If this is true, it’s one of the most powerful messages against fat shaming people. Because if they don’t have any way to not be miserable, then they won’t stop abusing their body. But this point only makes sense if you accept that there is a weight for each human that is beyond what’s healthy, which HAES supporters do not seem to do.

The article is worth a read. Apparently Portugal had a much greater drug problem before legalizing all drugs. Not that the country is without addicts now, but there are many fewer than when arrest was the only answer. Now addicts are given the means to create a better life for themselves. In other words, given a chance to make a different choice.

The US could do a lot worse than emulating Portugal.

Activity level predicted mortality?

Dr Arya Sharma is an obesity management professor based in Canada. In this case, he is highlighting a research paper that he says indicates that activity level predicted mortality (all cause) more than BMI or waist circumference. In other words, move it or lose it- it in the case being your health. Or sitting is killing us.

But, when you go to this link and read the full paper, you do, that physical activity (PA), of course, affects both BMI and waist circumference (WC) , so they had to calculate hazard ratios (HR) in different strata of BMI or WC (meaning that people of the same BMI but different PA levels were compared). But you also find this:

The estimates for avoiding high WC were similar to those for physical activity

.
Sharma didn’t mention WC, only BMI. Why is that? Could it be because lowering WC means lowering weight? Being fit is always better than being unfit. But being normal weight is better than being obese. Why the bold there? Because I’ve noticed that too many people conflated having an “overweight” BMI with having a so-called “deathfatz” (morbidly obese) BMI. While it might not be less healthy to slightly overweight than normal weight, there ARE health ramifications the larger you get.

Meat is better than vegetables?

First let me state again that I am neither a vegan nor a “paleo” diet follower, and never have been. For full disclosure, I will note that I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian for over a decade before resuming eating animal flesh. I will further note for completeness that I am trending back towards a majority plant based diet, though not necessarily vegetarian. A vegan diet, as I’ve noted before, will be my choice if I am ever diagnosed with heart disease or cancer.

It is a fact that many “paleo” dieters are former vegans. Both diets/lifestyles are very arbitrarily restrictive, so perhaps that’s why failed vegans find “paleo” attractive. Both sets of followers tend to be proselytizing as well, and very often launch screeds against each other.

In this article, a “paleo” blogger attempts to demonstrate why meat is more nutritious than spinach, which is supposed to be a proxy for all plant foods. The comparison is nonsense on its face, however, even if you accept his premise, he doesn’t really prove what he intends. He makes the attempt because trying to shoot down a vegan diet on the basis of protein is futile. There are plenty of vegan sources of protein.

No, it still comes down to B12. The only nutrient found in meat that isn’t found in plants is B12. The blogger tries to confuse the issue with Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA), however, there is no evidence (outside the paleosphere echo chamber) that CLA is necessary for anything. Wikipedia notes that it does seem to play a role in weight loss. But B12 remains the essential sticking point for vegans who would argue that theirs is the true human diet. No “true” diet for any species would leave that species in a state requiring supplements to ingest all necessary nutrients.

N.B.”Paleo” is in quotes throughout this entry because there was no one human diet back in the paleolithic era, nor is there one diet currently that defines the term. If there is no one recognized definition, then your “paleo” diet isn’t and can’t be.

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