The Washington Post CALLS OUT Anti-Diet Dietitians for Promoting Obesity 

As long as extremes get clicks, charlatans will preach them

Bless you Ben, I really appreciate your content for bringing out the actual facts to people who may not know them.

This is so true. I decided to kick the extreme restrictive back and forth of diets. Just focusing on cleaning up my eating. How can I eat more veggies or protein. Staying in a range of calorie to keep me more focus and aware. But not being overly crazy with myself. Even with these positive changes there are still people who expect me to eat between 1,200-1,500 calories of just "healthy" foods bc I am trying to lose weight. Almost feels like I should punish myself for months to lose weight. Instead of just creating new habits and hearing my relationship with food. Doesn't matter to other people if my energy, mood, bloating etc have all changed for the better only the scale matters to them.

Thank you for bringing a balanced perspective to the conversation. 🙌🙌

With such a high proportion of modern diets being ultra-processed foods, I think it is important to set some food ground rules. Go for the less processed stuff. But that includes "health" foods too. I'm sick of getting "what I eat in a day HEALTHY" videos in my feed and the person is eating everything out of packets, everything super processed. "Here's my supergreen blend, here's my high protein cookies, here's my protein fibre shake." I'm not going to feel ashamed when I make a cake, at home, and the sole ingredients are eggs, sugar, butter, flour, and vanilla extract. It's way less processed than some of the "health" foods I've seen touted.

Ive been overweight/obese my entire life and I do actually find that avoiding "certain foods" is the key to keeping my hunger at bay. If I eat hyperpalatable foods like chips my hunger goes haywire. If I eat my broccoli and brown rice I feel satisfied. I have lost 45 lbs so far the past year and could not do it while eating even small amounts of hyperpalatable foods. Incidentally cereal is one of those foods, and I don't even eat general mills crap, I used to eat whole ancient grain shit with soymilk. There's something about it that really ramps up hunger for me.

Put simply it a scale. A happy medium between the two. Adjust to you bodies needs and physical capabilities. Not the most recent fad or self-defeat.

Excellent video. 0:24 - 0:38 is brilliant :)

Great video, and I love the content. It’s been extremely educational for me. A thing I’ve been seeing a lot of is Kettlebell ladders with a specific method of breathing to increase your VO2 max. Is this just another one of those gotcha type trends?

Great video I really enjoy your channel and approach to diet and exercise. Personally I wish people would stop caring about what other people are eating and focus on themselves

Thank you for the video

We do need to recognize that moderation is a subjective term and when you’re dealing with a population that is at an extreme end of the spectrum, what they consider moderate is probably still unhealthy.

I lost 95 pounds since the beginning of 2023. Finally losing weight definitely needed me to completely stop and reject many of the dietary "advice" I got, which took professional therapy to make me understand (with diagnosed Binge Eating Disorder). "Eat less and move more" was particularly harmful as trying to follow that at face value resulted in all sorts of reactions that increased weight. So was fatshaming and foodshaming. "Eat a large salad" is retarded and "portion sizes" doesn't work, both of those are based on flawed ideas. Trying to lose weight by walking, cardio or doing certain exercises at 290 pounds is a waste of time. Calorie counting is based on a flawed understanding of what obesity is. The efficiency of fatloss is deeply rooted in your current weight, and where you are socially, emotionally, physically, mentally and economically. And maintenance is a whole different ballpark. And weightloss and fatloss are two completely separate issues and for many not understanding their difference is actually what lead to failure. The main factor behind obesity is not energy intake, just as the main factor behind limping is not gravity and main factor behind fever isn't heat. The main factor behind obesity is distorted appetite. That's why ozempic works, why ketosis inducing diets like fasting, keto or carnivore works, or why high fiber or protein diets work, which for the most part is about what you add to your diet, not remove. Any method that increase appetite like relying on empty carbs, unsatiating diet meals (its nutrition, not size that matters), sugary stuff like fruits, skipping meals etc is probably just make it worse. So will trying to exercise like a 160 pound person when you're 300. For me I used ADF followed by high protein eat days and (when my body could handle it) walking 100k steps per week took me down under 200. Not everyone can do that, but for me this was long term sustainable, socially compatible, emotionally forgiving, economically doable and allowed me to adjust my diet and exercise after losing weight rather than before.

I am anti-diet because logically, medically, philosopically, socially etc., I can't see any other way. We have tried all the diets, we have tried all the health fads, we have tried all the lifestyle changes, yet we are becoming fatter. There are studies which have shown that the more we diet and the harder we try to slim down, paradoxically the more weight we seem to gain. I am all for eating what I want, enjoying it completely, being conscious of taste and texture and pleasure. I am NOT for eating mindlessly and scoffing a large packet of crisps and suddenly I'm at the bottom of the bag and I have barely noticed. Listening to my body is the only way I can heal from decades of diet culture. And standing up for my rights in the medical world is the only way I can fight back against medical prejudice and assumption. Thank you Ben for covering these topics. You are a source of light and intelligence.

Let’s face it there are metabolically healthy obese. Those are the one that do sports and have few visceral fat… shouldn’t we aim to bring metabolically unhealthy obese to metabolically healthy status ? We focus on making them loose weight but each one of us has a set point weight that the body wants to be in balance with. So… instead of making them lose weight, make them move !!

0:00 do a Heart

I'm sorry Ben, you really aren't plugged into what's happening in the "anti diet culture" debate. The pendulum has swung so far in the other direction, it's just not fair or accurate to say that there are just "some" extreme views. When you have major Harvard med school doctors saying on 60 Minutes that obesity is 100% genetic and that you can eat nothing but lettuce and still gain weight if you're so genetically disposed, and major books coming out saying that obesity isn't unhealthy (see e.g. Kate Manne's "Unshrinking"), this is now the mainstream view of those who oppose "diet culture". And it's dangerous. People now think not only is there nothing one can do to lose weight (it's all genes), but that obesity is not a matter of health anyway ("healthy at any size"). Of course stupid crash diets are bad. But people who are against "diet culture" are not talking about stupid crash diets. They're talking about eating healthy at all.