The Dead Weight

There is a lot I don’t believe that I read in the diet literature. Many diet books and most of the diet writing on the web is written by people who have no science background whatsoever. This would be fine if they were talking about weight issues from a personal perspective, but they tend to make a lot of broad pronouncements about how weight loss works and how metabolism works and how exercise works. Now, these same people wouldn’t dare to tell you how a carburetor works, but the workings of a carburetor are much simpler and better understood than the workings of the human body. If you don’t know the fundamentals of mass and energy, I can’t put too much faith into your diet and exercise expertise.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t be making my own broad pronouncements, I definitely will. But I don’t contend that things I find to be true for me will be true for you too. There are things I find written in diet books and diet websites and especially diet message boards that seem to have no basis in reality or are at least poorly thought out logically. They make assumptions about how the body works and how dieting works and I think sometimes the only reason they write these things is because they’ve read them before. Or maybe these things are just not true for me. Things like:

Sometimes when you think you’re hungry, you’re really just thirsty, so you should drink a glass of water and your hunger will go away.

What? Really? Is this true for anyone in the world? I’m sure there are some people who have convinced themselves it’s true, in which case, more power to them. At no point in my thirty years on the planet have I ever said, “What I want is a big hunk of lasagna. Wait — no… that’s not it. What I really want is a glass of water.” I wish that happened to me. Instead it’s usually, “What I want is a big hunk of lasgana. Wait– no… what I want is two big hunks of lasagna.” If you believe it to be true that you sometimes confuse thirst with hunger, do you also do it the other way around? Do you ever say, “I thought I was completely parched, but it turns out all I really wanted was some shortbread cookies.” I mean, I realize that we sate both desires by putting something in our mouth, but I don’t think that means your body confuses the two. How poorly calibrated does your body have to be before you start confusing hunger and thirst? What other sensory mistakes do you make? Let me guess:

- “I thought I wanted some cocaine, but really I had to sneeze.”

- “I thought I was horny, but actually I just had to pee. This made for an unfortunate (and messy) moment with my girlfriend.”

- “I thought I was tired, but it turns out I was dead.”