Anti VS Diet culture - Who wins?
Opinion and belief live on a spectrum.
How people come to those opinions and beliefs typically comes from 2 routes;
They tried the one approach but it didn't pan out for them specifically or were unable to maintain the demands and so swung the other direction. Classic zero-sum thinking.
They haven't tried either approach, but one fits their preferences and social group ideologies/narratives better and so vehement loyalty is applied. Classic tribalism thinking.
Truth is. Diets do work and they don’t work.
Of course, they work!
They work because there is abundant evidence that they work. People make nutritional changes that match their environmental demands, personal preferences, and goal-specific needs, maintain them for long enough and with enough effort/intensity, and voila! Health and fitness improvement.
They also fuck some people up.
People make radical changes by restricting and avoiding certain food groups making them more likely to be hyper-seductive and uncontrolled in the future.
Some people don’t restrain themselves or adjust their behaviors enough and so get all the feelings of expected results without actually seeing any. It’s all wretch and no vomit.
Some people go with the latest trend, and some people repeat the same faulty mechanism over and over again.
Others ignore logic and starve themselves and others ignore logic and add butter to their coffee. The list goes on.
Ideologies are frameworks with little wiggle room and potential for personalization and that just doesn't fit the world most of us live in anymore.
Dietary approaches are popularized with certain subgroups in mind;
Paleo = CrossFit
Veganism = Ethically minded
Carnivore = Masculinity
Weight watchers = Every day Mom/Pop
They pitch themselves to niches in the hopes of making new tribes with vehement loyalty. Pyramid scheme 101. Don’t fall for it.
My 2 cents;
When it comes to making changes to your nutrition, nobody knows what you need better than you. Nobody knows your environment, your preferences, and your needs better than you. Sure you can use a framework (I wrote about this the other week), but tailoring it to your specific situation is the key to making lasting change and not suffering unnecessarily.
Diets work when they set out demands for change. They don’t work when they don’t consider the individual.
