For fans of Adam Conover out there, I’m sure you’ve seen this episode. It follows a charming, overweight/obese man who struggles with losing weight, while Adam debunks his misconceptions about weight loss, the sugar industry, extreme weight loss television, and general self-worth.
There’s a lot to appreciate about this episode. It convincingly critiques the prevalence of processed sugar in modern diets and how it poses enormous risks to heart health and waistlines. It also takes a jab at those awful weight loss shows like The Biggest Loser. Adam makes great points about how “low fat” does not automatically mean “healthy”, and how the extreme weight loss methods portrayed on television are incredibly harmful and unsustainable.
Where this episode REALLY suffers is in the positive takeaway segment. Since his show is guided by facts, published scientific studies, and critical thinking, I assumed that the final portion of the show would revolve around how weight loss is only realistically achieved through creating a calorie deficit below your TDEE and maintaining that through food tracking.
Instead, the episode takes a bizarre turn into r/fatlogic territory. He makes a few salient points about how we should be kinder to ourselves and make small changes to improve our health, but then makes a weird claim that a UCLA study found that there’s no direct link between weight and health?? I can’t find anything about that study, and that sounds way under-researched, which is very off brand.
He encourages us to not make a big deal about our weight and love ourselves for “who we are”, but this is problematic. You can “love yourself” while still taking calculated long-term steps towards losing weight and improving your health, they aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s weird of him to try and separate weight loss and emotion, only to end the episode saying “love yourself and forget about losing weight!”
For a long time I took his word as gospel since his show is usually so well researched, which is why I stopped caring about losing weight for many years. But this messaging is misleading, careless, and inaccurate. Anyone can lose weight by creating and maintaining a caloric deficit.
Also in the second act of the episode, he takes a crack at calorie tracking, essentially saying that since it’s not 100% totally accurate, there’s no point in doing it. Again, misleading and incorrect. While it may not be completely numerically accurate, there’s an entire body of work that proves that the psychological and behavioral changes that come from tracking your food intake lead to long term weight loss.
Aaaaaand this is u/AstroGrizzly ruins everything!
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