Diets & Capitlism

Photo by Fredrick Kearney Jr on Unsplash

I listened to an amazing episode of "All Fired Up" by Louise Adams where she is joined by Fiona Willer to dissect a new fad diet coming out in Australia called the "SuperFast" diet.  If you have time to listen to it, I highly recommend it! They dig into the backgrounds of the "experts" on the diets panels, and the "science" that is thrown around on the diet's website to sell their products to you.

And of course, they discuss a lot about marketing plans, and how everything in diet corporations is entirely geared to make you spend money all while feeling bad about yourself.

Since 95% of all people who lose weight will gain it all back, combined with huge amounts of pressure for us to constantly be losing weight, slimming down, working out, burning belly fat and fighting in every possible way against gaining weight, diet companies/products/sellers are basically GUARANTEED that they will have a huge steady flow of money for many years to come. Especially when you take into account the young children being prepped and geared towards dieting and dieting culture as young as EIGHT years old.  

Many diet programs even say that they expect weight gain to happen, and include a "plan" to make sure that you keep coming back to them! Some popular diet programs tell newcomers that they should make sure to come back every year after they have lost weight to do a "booster" diet to make sure those pesky Xlbs stay off of you! 

This is a common scare tactic to help keep people on programs, by pointing out that even if they CONTINUE to follow the diet exactly they will still gain weight (because it's what the human body does) and those pounds can "add up over time" so gosh dang it, you better avoid that or be considered a failure of a human being!

And diets make money in THOUSANDS of ways. Most obvious is the selling of programs, such as Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem, or Medifast. These programs deliver food to you, and you are only responsible for marginal foods.  Whereas others, such as Weight Watchers don't really sell you food directly but instead offer "support" groups (where you get to weigh-in in front of a bunch of people in a room! Yay!), and others that focus more on exercise programs that come with "diet plans" such as P90X, South Beach, etc.

Other programs just straight up sell you high-caffeine pills full of whatever ingredients (because the FDA has NO idea what is actually in diet pills and has no legal way of regulating them before they hit shelves) off the shelves in Walmart. All with the same promise that you can eat whatever you want, and lose weight without exercising! All the while wreaking your liver, mental health, and making your heart go through hell, all for the sake of losing weight. 

"Now wait," you might say, " [Insert someone you know or even you!] was on [diet] and lost Xlbs and have kept it off!" 

We all know someone like that, or maybe we have been, or currently are that person.  But remember, keeping lost weight off can be a fucking exhausting time for that person. Studies show that as you go on diets, and lose weight, your body essentially thinks that you are experiencing a famine period. As in, it doesn't think there is a lot of food around, so it needs to conserve its energy.  Calories, fat, protein, carbs, all of that is energy.  So as your dieting, and your weight is dropping your metabolism is slowing down. The longer you are on the diet, or the more diets you go on (yo-yo dieting) the slower your metabolism becomes.

Many studies around "The Biggest Loser" contestants have shown that at the end of the show, their bodies burn 500 calories less than what they originally were. This means that to continue to keep the weight off, they will consistently have to eat less than a person of the same size who has not lost weight.  This is due to the effect that dieting has on your metabolism.


Metabolism is a fancy word for your body processing energy. It's an umbrella term for all the little reactions, chemical streams, break-downs, building-ups, storage,  and expulsion that occurs in any living human body. To fuel the metabolism your body uses what you feed it to get the energy to run the giant mechanism of you!

But, when we restrict that energy our metabolism slows down to accommodate for the energy change. It has to ration out the energy it does receive on a smaller basis. 

Think of any time you have had to gas up your car, but you HAD to wait until pay-day.  You don't just run your car anymore to heat it up, and you aren't making any unexpected trips either. You're conserving the gas in the car for things you absolutely have to be able to make (work, court, school, etc.). Versus when you have a full tank and you know that the minute you need more gas you can go more, you drive that car all over, picking up friends, going to the movies and eating out.

It's the same with your body. If it is low on energy and not sure when you are going to fuel it again, it's gonna ration out what it has. And it's the same no matter how fast or how slowly you lose the weight. No matter how you do it, you have to continually eat less amount of calories, or burn more calories just to continue to keep the weight off, much less lose more weight. 

And no matter how you look at it, capitalism and corporations are what benefit from dieting. Not you, not us, and certainly not society. 

And they do all of this by putting all the blame on you! 

If you are responsible for failing the diet (and not the other way around) then you will try again. You will attempt to be better next time. If one program didn't "work" for you, you will just try another, because this program will really work. 

We have been feeding the diet corporate monster for SO LONG that we find it NORMAL. It's NORMAL to spend so much time out of our day thinking about weight, and what to eat, or not eat, when to go to the gym, and wondering if we will lose enough weight to fit into a dress that we will wear once. It's NORMAL to literally BOND with other humans over the hatred of fat, and the desire and the pursuit of losing weight.

We find it normal to exhaust our minds by starving them, to exhaust and punish our bodies to the point of injury for the sake of losing weight. We have created a society so obsessed with the focus on weight loss that we don't have the time, or energy to focus on whats important, much less fight for those things. And that needs to change.

I've said it before, and I will say it again, if I had put HALF of the effort into other parts of my life, that I did with dieting, I think my life would be a lot different, maybe even better and that makes me mad. Mad that I bought into all this bullshit, and wasted some much of my time, my energy and my money on something that is virtually unattainable for bullshit reasons that corporations tell me to believe.  And I hope that when you realize how much of your time has been wasted on that, you will get mad too.  


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