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Is promoting weight loss dangerous?

bathsheba_c
bathsheba_c Posts: 1,873 Member
Consider this:
-The human body has evolved to favor weight gain in order to avoid starvation.
-Calorie deprivation experiments have shown that even fairly small reductions in food intake can cause psychological distress, including hoarding behaviors.
-Eating disorders are the deadliest of all mental illnesses due to high rates of suicide and permanent damage to internal organs.
-Not eating enough stressed the body, which weakens the immune system and damages the cardiovascular system.
-Almost no one who loses weight keeps it off long-term.
-Being “overweight” after a certain age is protective against early death.

In light of the above, is it actually responsible to promote weight loss? Or would it be more responsible to encourage people to eat a balanced diet and exercise without looking at the scale?
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Replies

  • fuzzylop_
    fuzzylop_ Posts: 100 Member
    All cause mortality due in part to obesity is much higher than the consequences of weight loss (and so-called diet culture) so it seems to me like at the absolute worst, it's the lesser of two evils. Additionally, I think knowledge of how much you eat is helpful to a point. That said, I've been pretty convinced that it shouldn't be something you do forever mostly from some things Eric Helms has written about (particularly the podcast in Nov 2018 he did with Jake Linardon).
  • psychod787
    psychod787 Posts: 4,088 Member
    NovusDies wrote: »
    I wonder if anyone who wants to take cues from human evolution would be so quick to do so if they had to survive somewhere harsh without clothing or tools.

    People who forget the past, are bound to repeat it.... looking back can help us look to the future. While we can not live like cave people. We can look at hunter gather groups and see how they live and take certain things and implement them.