That’s true. So does salt, which is why we also eat too much of that.
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I was hoping to see Maintenance Phase mentioned, because they are fantastic, straightforward, evidence based and funny.
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Gently disagree. It can be a challenge and takes a small bit of exploration to find the intersection of healthy/cheap/easy/yummy/not-gonna-waste-it but it is worth it. If you’re not paying for fancy packaging, shop prices, buy bulk, preparing healthy meals (several at once) is a great option. It took work. Not gonna lie. But I am poor, hovering at healthy weight (sigh, 15 pounds over where I’d like to be, but meh) and I loooooove the food I cook as do most of the people who smell or try it. One of my co-workers smelled my cooking. We dated for months… 
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I kind of agree with both of you. “Healthy food is expensive” is a simplification, but at its heart is true. You can eat well for cheap, but it takes time to seek out those food sources and to prep them. I also think I undervalued the time I spent learning how to cook or to “run a kitchen” (prep food, reuse scraps and leftovers, etc)—the latter is covered a lot less in cookbooks. My grandmother could whip something up from things on hand in no time because she had been doing it for 60 years. It takes me 10x as long and two trips to the grocery store to make it the first time and I have no idea where I can deviate without ruining dinner.
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I mostly agree, but I also think a lot of people who cook underestimate the skill and value of the work and the time/expense it takes to develop the “horse-sense” that competent home cooks have.
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The standard north american diet these days is bad for you. Also, a lot of us move at lot less for our jobs than our parents and grandparents did. I currently work from home at a computer; my job doesn’t include any exercise.
While I agree that complicated diet culture is a bit silly, avoiding the worst excesses of the american diet is just sensible. “Eat food, not too much, mainly plants” is the most quoted line from “In Defence of Food” but a lot of that book is about why traditional diets tended to work.
Itt also sucks that basic food isn’t as nutritious as it used to be; vegetables have less nutrients, fruit has gotten sweeter, etc.
I feel that people are often mad at diet culture, which again can be silly, when they should really be mad at governments letting the food industrial complex run amok for generations, creating unhealthy, hyper-palatable foods. Also, food deserts suck and are another failure of policy.
As someone who has gout and high blood pressure, neither of which require medication when I’m relatively lean, < ~20% body fat, eating a reasonable diet is important to my health. Most people will see markers of health get worse when the put on excess fat, and myself and a lot of people that have been overweight and then lean again(a few times), know that healthy at any size doesn’t apply to us.
It isn’t easy, and it hard for the wrong reasons, but embracing obesity as a culture rather than pushing for better policies strikes me as insane.
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Surely there’s some alternate paths to “eat whatever capitalism waves in front of you without reflection” and “pay people to fuck up how you relate to food.”
In my case, dropping weight took load off my skeleton, to good results. Eating better food, mostly plants, deleting processed sugar, seems to be working well.
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I fooled myself into thinking that I was eating mostly healthy until I actually started tracking my daily dietary intake. Fast food, processed snacks, sugar and carbs made up the bulk of my diet. No wonder I felt so lousy. I definitely notice a difference when I eat food from the produce section and add regular walks and bike rides. I’m at an age (mid 50s) where these choices will play a big role in whether my remaining decades will be either productive or miserable.
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Diet culture isn’t silly, it poisons the way society thinks about weight and body type and what is acceptable and what is not. Weight, in America at least, is seen as a personal, moral choice. In reality it’s a metabolic function that works differently in different people that we really don’t know much about, partly because it’s easy to tell people it’s their own damn fault they’re fat and not so easy to study metabolism in depth.
This is one thing many people who aren’t fat don’t get-that losing over 30#s is not like dropping the extra 5 you picked up on vacation, that you can restrict your intake and exercise and not lose much weight for very long. When I tell doctors about my diet they assume I’m lying.
Every day in America there are millions of people dieting. If these efforts really worked, we would be seeing lots more people being thin. How do you think we got the idea that dieting doesn’t work?
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I was on two different types of weight loss medication and neither one of them made me permanently nauseous and they were amazing for being able to curb my appetite. Too bad they were so damn expensive; I switched employers and the new one didn’t cover it and it would have been $1300/month.
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I think that is the rub. Doing a lot of these things requires 1-Time, 2-$ up front (e.g. to buy bulk or buy the right equipment), 3-more time to learn and experiment.
I don’t think people are lazy. But some people don’t have that time/up front $ and the ship strays dangerously close to blaming people for not having the privilege to have the time/$ to . Unfortunately that can perpetuate things as it becomes pretty disheartening when you can’t find the time or $.
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I’ve lost 30 lbs before, and it was actually easy in terms of the day to day effort. However, it was during covid when I was working less and habitually walked or cycled 1-2 hours a day and ate a lots of lean meats and garden-grown vegetables. So, it was easy when I had a completely different lifestyle, which is of course incredible hard to arrange.
It’s better not to gain the weight in the first place, which is where I think embracing the idea that one shouldn’t pay attention to what one eats, or ones caloric balance, is ruinous.
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Please do not put words in my mouth. I am defining established science as legitimate peer-reviewed independent science. Not anything pharmaceutical companies say. What I said is the consensus of those scientists.
…nor did I say that. All I said is that it’s now established that when people have high cholesterol, it is mostly genetic. Statins are a proper indication in that situation. That is all I said.
I am sorry that you don’t have any faith in science. I can’t comment any further if that is your position.
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Through my 20’s and 30’s I never thought much about my weight because I was young, active and healthy. Fluctuating 10-20 pounds was normal and I didn’t think much about it. After I turned 40, I suddenly realized that I’d managed to pack on an extra 30 lbs that wasn’t going away. I also started experiencing health issues that I had never dealt with before.
Starting at around age 45 or so, It took about 3 years of really dedicated effort to lose that 30# - changing my diet, going to the gym 4-5x per week, staying active despite my desk job and travel, etc… I went from a high of 220 to a rather fit 190 (I’m only 5’ 9" so according to the BMI scale I’m still considered overweight but with my body type I’d look like a cancer patient if I went down to the “normal” upper limit of 170).
Then Covid hit and that 30 pounds came roaring back - along with an extra 10 on top of it. Now at 52, I’m back to 225 and feel like I have to climb Everest all over again. It was so effortless to put the weight back on I look back and wonder how the hell did it happen?
Maybe losing 30 pounds was relatively easy for you but even with eating healthy, watching caloric intake, and exercising regularly it’s no small task for most people - especially as one ages.
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An interesting and enlightening NatGeo cached article re organic food:
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Diet culture is just one of the symptoms of a broader problem - the fact that Americans are forced to eat godawful poisonous crap (either through living in food deserts, or through artificially low prices for it, or through childhood exposure and advertising aimed at children). This godawful poisonous crap is bad for anyone, human or animal, and should not be in our food supply at all. It causes all sorts of health problems long-term. Because the big corporations that make the poisonous crap don’t want people asking too many questions about it, they push the idea of calorie-counting and food restriction, and “individual responsibility” when it comes to obesity. This way you’re still eating the poisonous crap, just not so much of it, and food restriction is so unsustainable that you’ll be back to binging on it in no time.
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Don’t confuse what people eat-their personal diets-with diet culture. There are many good and bad choices people can make about their personal diets, that are intersectional with economics, sex, age, geography and so on. Diet culture is the societal view that thinness is a moral good and that being thin is (or should be) an imperative objective for everyone. It pushes the false ideas that lifestyle changes will change your body, that being fat is inherently unhealthy, that fat people are both the cause of and the victims of their own choices and so on. It drives eating disorders and unrecognized illnesses in the overweight, who are often dismissed by medical caregivers because the obvious reason for their complaint is their weight.
Sure, people should eat the most healthful diet they can, but that has little to do with diet culture.
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Every diet change you have described making is functioning as a backdoor route to reducing your calorific intake. This is basically what fad diets do too - by placing weird restrictions on your food or how you eat, they just make it awkward to consume calories at the rate you did before. The problem is that the strange restrictions of fad diets are almost always unsustainable and don’t help to replace poor diet habits or choices with better ones (and adopting better ones is in various ways inhibited under capitalism in my opinion).
I agree with some of the other commenters who refer to the industrialisation of the Western diet as a major factor in rising obesity and related ill health. A lot of food is highly processed and cheap, unhealthy additives are effectively hidden in these products - often environmentally damaging products, too - profit being the only imperative in their production and distribution. So consumer choice is quite limited because those choices are not made in circumstances of acceptable knowledge or transparency. I think that approaches to diet need to incorporate this understanding in order to be more effective.
I am also however highly skeptical of the anti-diet and fat acceptance movements, which seem to me to focus on a cartoonish characterisation of their adversaries’ judgemental nature and an attempt to turn the framing of the debate away from the distinct health concerns (which are quite overwhelming in both individual and social cost), towards a debate of the problematic social stigmas associated with obesity, while also downplaying the basic fact that we habitually consume calories to wild excess in the developed world, whether we mean to or not, whether that is because of hidden calories in cheap industrial foodstuffs, habit and culturally normalised choices or behaviours, or more likely all of the above. We should not allow ourselves to become inured to the fact that obesity of the degree and extent that we experience in the developed western world is not a natural or healthy state and should not be normalised - much as it is not an individual issue. I think people should stop judging fat people morally because there is a health impact of obesity and recognise that there are a broad range of healthy body shapes, and I also think that the fat acceptance movement needs to acknowledge that there is a health impact to obesity which is not negated by how unfair it feels to be judged according to beauty standards which don’t reflect or include you.
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Home cooking is also not intrinsically healthier. People get all sorts of stupid ideas mixed up with what’s ‘healthy’ based on it being ‘traditional’ or ‘country-style’. My mother in law basically fries boiled carrots in butter, but ‘it’s healthy’ because it’s vegetables.
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I agree that current U.S. culture pushes both the idea that if you’re “fat” you’re failing to eat and exercise right, and that for some people, even a lot of exercise and eating well won’t lower their weight much. And that being over the normal weight can be fine for such people.
But that’s just not true for most people, right? And “lifestyle changes” certainly can change the bodies of many people, and for the better-- by making them weigh less. I mean, a lot of people are bigger than they should be healthwise, and different choices can help them lose weight.
Maybe I’m mistaken in thinking that you’re equating diet culture with a general U.S. culture?
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