dieting PSA
Here's a thing that not a lot of people seem to know about dieting (inspired by another toot):
While pretty much every weight loss diet has been effective for some people, *no* diets have been *consistently* effective for everybody.
The magical weight loss diet doesn't exist, and all the constant arguing about which diet is "better" is basically all just diet industry propaganda, it has no scientific basis. They all equally don't work.
And even in the cases where diets do work for some people for a while, they all share the same problem of rebounds; after a while, they stop working, become overwhelmingly difficult, or your body starts otherwise rejecting it.
Even if you're looking to lose weight (and to emphasize, BMI is pseudoscience and fat does not equal unhealthy!), some kind of miracle diet is not going to help you achieve that. All you'll be doing is torturing yourself in the process.
It's pretty much just unknown at this point how exactly the body regulates weight. Regular exercise seems to play a role, but there's quite a bit of evidence that eating habits don't seem to really matter (your body is quite capable of ejecting unwanted input!), and there's a whole lot of possible external factors that we just don't know a lot about.
Bottom line: if someone or something claims to have a magical answer to weight loss or even nutrition, you should distrust them. There are some general things that seem to work, but it is far from a settled science!
re: dieting PSA
@mdstevens0612 The idea of CICO itself unfortunately suffers from many of the same problems; it (IMO baselessly) assumes that there is only one mechanism by which the body can get rid of calories, and that that mechanism is exercise. This is widely repeated, but poorly supported by evidence, and there are a lot of conflating factors.
I'd say it's reasonable to conclude that exercise does play *a* role, but not to conclude that "it's as simple as CICO". There are entirely too many people walking this planet whose circumstances that cannot explain.
And I realize that you also mentioned the complexity and factors such as metabolism, but in this context, I honestly don't believe it's warranted to elevate CICO to a special position as "the main thing" at all. It's just one of many factors.
re: dieting PSA
@joepie91 Well I won't claim to be an expert and CICO is definitely overly bandied about since it can be like telling someone drowning that they just need to breath, but didn't the Twinkie Diet guy basically settle this? Open to being wrong on this one, like I said I'm not an expert.
dieting PSA
@mdstevens0612 @joepie91 You had me in the first half! I was getting my pitchfork out but you did a great service to the complicated truth of it.
Also 💯fuck the dieting and wellness industry.
dieting PSA
@joepie91 Like someone once said, it is as simple as calories in/calories out, and also as unbelievably complex as calories in/calories out. Epigenetics and base metabolic rate and mental health and environment and food availability and economics and so on and so forth. Also fuck the dieting and wellness industry!