Is a lie. And NPR should know better than to allow them to be a sponsor.

No-Diet Magical Diet That Changes Everything About Weight Loss

Here’s my beef (a food I rarely eat for my own reasons): companies know that to be heard as a sponsor on National Public Radio gives them a legitimacy cachet that they really want and need. That said, a so-called no-diet diet product, which I have heard pitched like a little girl’s softball, is Noom, which is turning out to be just another evil diet product that leads to disordered eating.

Look, folks. There is no fix, there is no quick fix, there is no magic sauce or easy button. Learning to eat well for YOUR body, at YOUR age, at YOUR activity level is both a life-long process as well as a loving lesson in kindness.

In fact, this article really pulls apart the bullshit story that anything but just one more food-restriction diet which ends up doing serious damage:

If you read the stories, it’s the same damned thing. Slick ads, bouncy-bouncy happy-Dappy motivational messages all hiding what is effectively starvation. In particular, what troubled me was this:

The other giveaway is a diet: It uses the same “traffic light” system for categorizing foods as green, yellow, and red that many other weight loss programs rely on.

Every other diet that uses the traffic light system, allots users a certain number of “red foods” per day (in my test of the app, I was told they could account for 25% of my daily intake), which technically means no foods are off-limits.

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But my list of “red foods” includes some health food staples, like peanut butter, chia seeds, almonds, full-fat yogurt, cheese, and olive oil. “‘Red’ foods simply raise a ‘red flag’ for foods that contain a lot of calories without filling you up!” the app says.

But these are the foods that do fill us up, argues Shana Minei Spence, RDN, a dietitian in Brooklyn. “The denser a food is, the more filling it will be” explained. “Full-fat cheese, yogurt, peanut butter, and so on are more satisfying and satiating, and the more satisfying and satiating a food is, the more content you’ll feel after eating it.”

Any eating program which effectively reinforces the false message that there are good and bad foods, which reinforces eating disorders, is BAD. Any program which arbitrarily states, without a doctor’s input, without carefully working with YOUR unique needs, is bogus and bullshit and a fast track to disaster. To that, this from the author’s experience:

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Also: Plan to spend a few minutes each day reading a lesson on how to change my eating and exercise habits. Lesson №3, for example, explains the importance of choosing foods with lower caloric density, like hardboiled eggs instead of fried.

Along with these lessons on “the psychology of weight loss,” the app encourages me to log my weight, exercise, water consumption, blood pressure, and blood glucose daily, along with everything I eat.

And it gives a daily calorie budget; to lose weight at a “cheetah” pace, I’m told to eat 1,200 calories a day. By the time I finish logging my breakfast and morning snack (a smoothie, followed by a bagel with peanut butter and a banana), I have… exactly 34 calories left.

Are you kidding me about weight loss?

We trade motivational memes for good nutrition, all to the Holy Grail of weight loss, all the while teaching ourselves disordered eating. The worst of it is that people who might otherwise never have developed an eating disorder could get one thanks to Noom.

And here’s the real truth of research, which is neatly manipulated, as stats can be, to make them sound so successful, speak to the lie: According to a 2013 review of common commercial weight loss protocols, people lose around 5–10% of their body weight in the first year of any diet, but over the next two to five years, they gain back all but an average of 2.1 pounds.

As published research can’t claim any better: 64% of people who stuck with the program lost an average of 7% of their body weight after five months on the plan, according to the 2016 analysis the company includes in its press kit.

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But there is no data offered on whether these users maintained the weight loss over the subsequent two to five years. When most dieters regain. And a study followed 43 people — only 36 of whom completed the program. That “64%” is just 23 people.

The ONLY way we win at this game is to stop asking fake programs and fake products to do the work, the same way Others argues that we stop asking dating apps, which only profit when we fail, to do the real work of learning to be in life, have interesting lives, and find people the organic way. Like learning to eat well for ourselves.

Now, while the red meat thing tends to, in my mind, be negotiable because of what I’ve read about it, that is up to the individual to do their own due diligence.

The rest, however, is solid. For example, it doesn’t take much online sleuthing to learn that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” came out of the nascent cereal industry, and nothing else. NOTHING ELSE. Thanks to Kellogg’s, it’s now gospel. And like a lot of gospel it’s dead wrong.

The idiot Food Pyramid was heavy if not completely influenced by American grain farmer lobbies. Not because it was good science. It was big money: Big money pays for big lies. That is the diet industry. AND the wellness industrial complex. AND Big Food. AND the entire fitness and weight loss world. Big money pays for big lies, big lies keep us addicted to chasing dumb answers instead of seeking obvious science.

For a part, the supplements I take, and there aren’t many, are based on my bloodwork and what both my doctor and nutritionist advise, largely because I’ve had to remove some key foods to prevent kidney stones.

That is very different from gorming every damned thing in a Whole Foods supplement aisle because some idiot Instagrammer promised they make you slim, any more than sunshine on your arsehole gives you sexual power.

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Believe that, honey, I got swampland to sell you. Being from Florida, I know swampland.

When you decide that it is worth the investment in taking care of yourself instead of demanding to be able to avoid the hard work of eating better and moving more, you have a better shot at functional fitness and a vibrantly healthy body.

But to chase the chimera of magical weight loss is a long-term disaster. I lived it for way too long, and at 34, canned that bullshit. While I still had a food OCD, I bloody well changed how I ate forever, and that was all she wrote. For 34 years, I’ve learned to watch my body for signs, red flags, pain, whatever, the very important conversations your constantly-changing, ever-fascinating form is having with you to say, please pay attention.

While I love and support NPR, I am dismayed that they allow Noom to put their dishonest, unscientific message on a trusted news source. But that is how Big Lies operate. They cozy up to what you trust, get value from the glow of association, and like all businesses who support NPR, there is that underlying message that we can trust you, you’re one of the good guys.

ANYTHING that misleads you and me about basic dietary intelligence is not one of the good guys. Given the company that good man has these days, I don’t trust anyone.

This leads me back to the single basic point. Learn YOUR body. Hire a competent nutritionist. Get the science skinny on YOUR blood, YOUR hormones, YOUR needs. Again, it is kindness. Any system that is not specifically designed by competent, science-based facts that arise from the chemical makeup of your unique body is trash, in my opinion.

And being joined at the hip to NPR does not make Noom any less of a liar than Goop or other idiot influencers. More’s the pity that NPR took their money, and let them in the house.

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