The Nutrition Grouch
The weight loss industry is, has been, and always will be a dumpster fire. People like to say health & wellness (of which weight loss is a part of) is “broken” or full of “misinformation” but that is being too generous because it implies that some of it is good or that it is actually fixable. It is damaged beyond repair. If it were possible, I would burn it to the ground and start over.
While it is impractical to try to summarize what’s wrong with the industry in one podcast description, my premise is this: there is a truly astronomical amount of information that neither our media nor our professionals are able to communicate to you in a meaningful way without losing all context, applicability to real life, and/or the ability to see how all of the pieces fit together.
The media should just stop covering health & wellness because their soundbites explain nothing and are little more than headlines and talking points. They may raise awareness but not understanding, leading to the illusion of explanatory depth. Academics actually know what they are talking about and could help educate us but are too busy with their work and only some are engaged with the public. Most academics look down on and laugh at the quacks and zealots in the field but it’s the quacks and zealots that have the real power.
Businesses do not have the right people in place (PhDs or medical professionals) to drive product and service development (that’s left to the MBAs). After the brand is established, the number one rule is that you must protect and promote the brand no matter how myopic, self-serving, or unimportant that brand is. Healthcare is for the (already) sick and public health is so surface level.
When it comes to their health, the public is lazy. They want the most entertaining, convenient, and positive information available, even if it is at the expense of achieving their goals. Hard work, I think not. Let me take the path of least resistance and “do it on the side”. There’s no reason for real change.
Instead of being stuck in pedaling the news of the day, disconnected factoids and tidbits, overly reductionist, cliché, idealistic, magic cures, easy fixes, secrets, tips, tricks, hacks, fads, gimmicks, cherry-picked, binary, good/bad, flashy, insanely optimistic, exaggerated, fantasy land, sunshine and rainbows, theoretical, testimonial based weight loss information -- let’s come up with a more comprehensive, systematic, sustainable, realistic, semi-automated, results-oriented, pragmatic approach to weight loss with a slice of common sense.
I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time (years and decades) thinking about the thousands of nuances of weight loss (just Google Energy Balance Nutrition Consulting, The Paper Database, or The Science of Dieting). I’ve also spent thousands of hours trying to understand why the health & wellness field isn’t actually science based despite the information being readily available.
I am so fed up and exhausted by it all. It is so broken that on many days I want to say forget it. I’m done with this. It can’t be fixed. I’m a smart motivated guy that can take my talents elsewhere (LeBron). But something keeps drawing me back. It’s like a sickness or a bad relationship. I just can’t get out of it. At my core, it’s who I am. In this podcast I want to offer you truly science-based weight loss advice, critiques of the weight loss industry/diet culture, and thoughts on my experiences and failings in the profession. And with that, I bring you The Nutrition Grouch.
The Nutrition Grouch
The Major Mistake Nutrition Education Keeps Making
We keep treating nutrition and weight management as a logic and reasoning problem when it is not. The math is simple, eat fewer calories than you burn, and you'll lose weight. If you know the number of calories in a food, you'll make the decision to eat it or not eat it to stay within your daily calorie budget.
Yes, weight loss is a calories in/calories out math equation, but it is also so much more than that. We need to spend more time looking at how food decisions are made and how to better control our food environment.
The nutrition field seems to think that we can "educate" our way out of the obesity epidemic. That if people had the "right" information, they would make better eating decisions. But eating decisions are not born out of logic and reasoning.
Eating decisions are controlled more by our emotions (whether conscious or subconscious), the food environment, and the pleasure and reward we get from eating sugar, fat, and/or salt, than by knowing what is "good" for us or "bad" for us.
We're not going to out reason, or outwit, manipulate or hack our physiology to decrease our hunger or increase our metabolism through various diet strategies. We've been there, tried that (food doesn't work but medicine can).
Nutrition does not exist in a vacuum, separate from all the other parts of peoples' lives. We need to take a more wholistic approach at looking at the individual's emotions and stressors that lead to food decisions. Rather than focusing on the food, we need to focus on the individual.
We also need to find ways to "replace" the pleasure people are getting from food by engineering other daily pleasure inducing opportunities into their lives whether that be phoning a friend, watching Netflix, or going for a walk.
Some of the topics in today's episode include:
Weight loss is about the person, not the food (0:42)
We keep treating nutrition as a logic & reasoning problem (1:12)
Everything you eat will kill you! (2:33)
Muddying the waters of nutrition education (3:01)
We treat nutrition as an isolated problem separate from the rest of your life (5:16)
The logic & reasoning brain centers are separate from hunger and satiety (6:59)
The frontal cortex has to override the primitive brain centers (9:00)
Why we evolutionarily crave sugar, fat, and salt (9:37)
Broccoli, bananas, and chocolate bars (11:13)
The frontal cortex is lazy and only turns on when it needs to (12:27)
Risk/reward and our inability to forecast into the future (13:12)
Appetite regulation research is so super confusing (15:28)
The 3 books that radically changed my view on obesity (18:20
No one on this planet has categorized more papers on obesity than I have (20:17)
Diet and exercise aren’t enough (22:32)
Relying on willpower is just plain stupid (22:53)
The grocery store and fast food chain explosion (26:06)
From 3% to 40%: how the prevalence of obesity skyrocketed over the years (26:59)
Knowledge is worthless without application (28:37)
Weight loss comes from eating less garbage (28:58)
The rider and the elephant (30:12)
All diets target either your brain, your metabolism, or both (35:21)
You can’t manipulate or hack 100,000+ years of evolution with food (36:30)
But you can hack weight loss with medicine (37:28)
Trying to get away with as much as you can (39:58)
Atkins is a snack food company and not a weight loss company?!! (41:35)
Obesity results from a prolonged, persistent energy surplus (44:59)
An overreliance on food reward and food pleasure (45:27)
I hate talking about eating as an addiction (46:29)
Breaking the cycle: dissociating food from reward and pleasure (48:20)