Losing It: Just Don’t Call it A Diet

Stephanie goes on to say that even though she lost weight, she didn't really diet. I like to use the word journey because for me, this wasn't really a diet. I didn't really diet. This was more of a lifestyle change and a journey to become healthy overall, just saying, you know, I like the word journey. The word diet is very little, very don't like dieting. Stephanie sa is that to lose weight, she started eating healthier, but she still didn't want to

call that a diet. Even though eating healthier is part of dieting. Still, dieting sounded bad to her. Negative. It reminded her of suffering, and she didn't want to deprive herself or starve herself. She just wanted to lose weight and feel confident again. And Stephanie is not the only person fed up with diets. It's this funny trend I noticed recently. People aren't really using the word diet anymore, even when what they're talking about is definitely dieting. Like

this British personal trainer named James Smith. He writes this whole book called Not a Diet Book. It was alish in early on his website. Jam Smith calls himself a disruptor of the billion dollar diet industry, but he also says that among the things the book will help people do is change bad habits and lose fat. It's called

not diet books. It's not. It's more of an empowering book, an education book, a liberation book to you fully understand the things that you need to so the rather you work in with your diet, your diet works for you. What I'm hearing here is the not a diet book is actually a diet book. One more example. There's another personal trainer. This one is a woman named Lucy Bergen. She gained some weight during the pandemic, like a lot

of us did. Then she starts working out intensely for a competition, and as part of that, she takes a photo of herself every single day. Lucy ends up putting all the photos together in a video. She's wearing the same outfit in each photo. It's sort of a rust colored bikini, and there's a calendar in the background with exces over the dates. In the video, you can see the ex's stack up on the calendar as time passes.

Six months of weight loss fly by in about thirty seconds, and sure enough, as that happens, you can also see Lucy's body changing over time. She drops about thirty pounds. In the beginning of the video, Lucy looks unhappy, she's grabbing her stomach and shooting the camera a thumbs down. By the end, she looks thinner. She's also dyed her hair at some point from brown to blonde. It makes

her look almost like a different person. The whole video is kind of like a live action before and after photo, and people love before and after photos, so maybe you can guess what happened when Lucy posted the video on the internet this morning on Take It Off Today, an incredible transformation On TikTok her weight loss video went viral with twelve million views. The Today Show has Lucy on as a guest. They asked her what were you thinking when you took these photos each day? And she says,

I just get to find myself. That it was a short term goal. It wasn't a diet. It was a lifestyle change and that's what's so important. And I loved you hear that it wasn't a diet. Lucy last weight by working out and changing what she ate, but not a diet, a lifestyle change. I reached out to Stephanie James and Lucy about all this, but they didn't provide any comment for this episode. There's a reason everyone is

shying away from using the word diet lately. After hundreds of years of dieting, people have suddenly grown tired of it. Diets are a drag and they don't work so well, so we're questioning them more than ever. Dieting has become kind of a bad word, the d word. But somehow, no matter how hard we try to ban it from our collective vocabularies, we still can't seem to get away from dieting. We're still trying to lose weight and show off our before and after photos and tell people our

secrets to success. We're just following a non diet to do it and refusing to fuss up that it is actually a diet. Company is are getting in on the action too. One of the most prominent examples is now, a popular new weight loss app that's been called weight Watchers for millennials. Newon says it uses psychology to help people build new, healthier habits. But that's not why we're

talking about Noon right now. We're talking about Noon because new actually describes itself in its ads as you guessed, it not a diet. It's different. It's something that I can actually live with if I wouldn't even call it a diet. In this episode, I'm going to get into why people are so done with diets, or at least done with calling them diets anyway. The diet backlash starts with one simple fact diets aren't fun. But there's more

going on here too. I'm also going to look at how companies in the huge and very profitable diet industry are responding, like new which is selling dieting without actually calling it dieting. Are they just tricking us? I'm Bloomberg News Health reporter em A Court and from the Prognosis podcast, this is losing. So the word diet has gotten a bad reputation. Twenty years ago, the South Beach Diet became a multi platform, multimillion dollar phenomenon with a book that

had the word diet on it in huge block letters. Today, fewer people are buying diet books, and fewer diet books are making bestseller lists, according to data from NPD E Book Scan and USA Today company is selling weight loss meanwhile, are working over time to assure people that they are anything but a diet. If you're counting calories, or cutting carbs, or generally changing how you eat to lose weight, that's

a diet. And there are lots of reasons to take issue with dieting, especially the fact that most people really can't maintain weight loss long term. But the word diet, that's not exactly the issue. So I don't people want to diet anymore? I put the question to Darren Cipher, who is a food and beverage industry analysts for the Market Research Company and p D Group. Well, simply put, dieting is not fun and eating is Darren's right. Dieting

is not fun. And in many cases it could drive you crazy and not literally, but yeah, I could do some interesting things with your moods. People think of dieting now and they think of punishment, like our YouTuber Stephanie Rose said earlier, But dieting used to be well, maybe not fun, but trendy. People used to all go on the same diets and complain about them at parties. It was like a group activity. Somewhere along the line, though,

things shifted. NPD group has found that interest in dieting has been declining of American adults say they're on a diet today compared with and at one point about a decade ago, as few as twenty of people were dieting, and Darren says people aren't just interested in how their bodies look anymore, they're also interested in how they feel. This notion of just feeling like your well is becoming much stronger and much more important with consumers because it's

not just about the physical anymore. It's also about the mental. Wealthy, and it's not just the dieting isn't fun. Ideas about what people's bodies should look like are becoming a bit more inclusive, especially for women. I've always been battling this idea that if I was skinnier, if I looked exactly the way I wanted to look, then so many of my problems would go away and I would just be happier. When the ideal body is portrayed as skinny, people try

to lose weight. But the bodies we see are changing at least a little. People in bigger bodies are getting featured on the covers of magazines, in TV shows, on social media, and even on some high fashion runways where ultra thin models have long been the norm. The early Internet played a big role here, helping activists in the fat acceptance movement get the word out about their cause and use tools like blogging to build communities of like

minded people. It's called the body positive movement. Body except in stemmed out of that, and it kind of widens the scope to um people of all racist gender expressions sizes wildly. Eventually, culture started to catch up. In two thousand four, for example, the soap brand Dove made huge waves with its campaign for Real Beauty. One of its most well known ads featured an artist drawing women, first based only on how they described themselves, and then based

on another person's description. When the sketches were displayed side by side, it showed that the women didn't see themselves very accurately. Do you think you're more beautiful than you? Say? Yeah? Companies began realizing they might actually sell more products to people, especially women, by casting models and bigger bodies and expanding the sizes they carry, and media has been changing too.

She's already the first curving model to land the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swim Student issue, and now it seems she's ready for world domination she being the model Ashley Graham. This happened in TV shows like Girls recast the archetype of a female lead, with Lena Dunham sporting crop tops alongside what she herself has described as belly rolls. Platforms with no gatekeepers like TikTok and YouTube have throw

us even more types of bodies into the spotlight. Today, celebrities look a little less like the celebrities many of us grew up seeing, and some of them, like the actress Jamila Jamil, are even making names for themselves by calling out diet culture for being toxic. The diet industry can just off, I'm going off to the diet and details industry, and it doesn't exist anymore. Despite all this change, much of popular culture still looks the same in lots

of ways. The thin ideal remains incredibly prevalent. But we are seeing bigger butts and underwear ads and even stretch marks and plus size models on the covers of magazines. We're all perfectly imperfect. Body positivity always and forever. The authentic and real us focus on how you feel. Forget what other people say. You are enough, exactly as you are. You don't need to change. And this may sound like some kind of motivational speech, but it's actually an ad

part of the underwear company aries body positivity campaign. Underwear companies used to be practically the CEO of wanting us to change our bodies, but these days they've got a new line, except yourself the way you are. Maybe some of this is an increasing recognition that dieting doesn't work so well, especially among younger people, people like me who saw their parents diet and diet and diet some more

without ever really getting anywhere. We're also a lot more aware of the dangers of diets these days, dangers like eating disorders. Today we're talking about body image. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in five women struggle with an eating disorder or disordered. Eating. Restricting how much food you eat is actually a very common risk factor for developing and eating disorder. People are talking much more about these things than they used to, so there's

a lot at play here. We've finally realized that dieting isn't fun. People want to feel good instead and be healthy, which is more than a number on a scale. Body ideals are changing, becoming a bit more inclusive, and there's way more awareness about eating disorders, which are a risk of dieting. All this stuff sounds good, right, positive, We're turning away from diets and more towards feeling good and being healthy. But the diet industry had an answer for that,

and it was wellness. Diets are out and wellness is in. In the same way that people used to all go on the South Beach diet together, Now they're meditating and taking over priced vitamins, sporting apple watches, browsing Goop's website, maybe even drinking those weird wellness shops they sell by the checkout at Whole Foods. Dieting is restrictive by its very nature, but wellness. Wellness means pursuing good health, and

that's pretty vague. Wellness can be anything, anything you want it to mean, or more realistically, anything marketers want it to mean. Wellness can even mean dieting. Tried now and I lost ten pounds, which to me was huge. Remember now, the weight loss app I mentioned earlier now very much

fits into this trend. Here's how it works. New maps out how many weeks or months it will take to reach your goal weight, and then new tries to use psychology and wellness concepts like mindfulness to help you eat differently and also change the way you approach eating. When I went to the doctors, it was just a very cut and dry move more eat less, that's it. Noon taught me. It was more about why I was eating. That helped me take the first few steps and find

that new path. You log your meals on the app, and it teaches you to recognize and eat less caloric foods. But Noon is not a diet, or at least that's what it says. Here's how NEWM advertises itself online. These are all direct quotes, by the way, But now stop the yoyo dining. Now stop dining get lifelong results. I'm focusing on Noon here because it's a high profile window into this trend. Noon and other companies understand that the

culture has changed. Surviving as a weight loss company in a world that at least wants to be done with diets means taking a new approach. To understand how Noom got here, we have to start at the very beginning. For now, that's two thousand eight, Ardem Pakov and S. J. Jong, who are now the company's president and CEO. We're very interested in helping people get healthier. The first product they built, in fact, wasn't a weight loss program, but technology for

an exercise bike. Get Ready one week, Put the bike and other early approaches looked promising at first, but then Artem and say you realized most people don't really exercise consistently, so how many people could their bike really help anyway? And it seemed like a broader issue that people don't really make the kinds of changes that would improve their health. One thing seemed like the exceptions that rule. Though. That's right, weight loss people just don't act if you say, hey,

let's get you healthier, but they do. However, when the question is how do I lose this weight. You can practically see the gears and Artem and Sager's minds turning weight loss. Weight loss is their way in, it's their business opportunity, and that gets you then to start caring about what you're eating, what you're exercising. You know how

you're exercising, whether you're sleeping right, stressing right. Many of the things that help people lose weight are also good for them in other words, of course, that isn't always true, and before you know it, that sort of becomes to all consuming thing that really helps people get healthier Holistically, Artem likes to call weight loss trojan horse, if you will, to people's health. What he means is that weight loss can get people to care about their health. Weight Loss,

in his mind, isn't the goal. It's a means to an end. In the end is being healthier overall, not just thinner. Of course, we also know from research that people can improve their health without getting thinner, but this is how Artem thinks about it. It's worth pointing out too that his background is actually in software engineering. He's not a doctor or anything. In fact, newm is kind of a classic Silicon Valley story these days. Of tech

entrepreneurs trying to disrupt the health care space. But remember there are tons of weight loss programs out there. Newm saw an opportunity to set itself apart with psychology, the why and how of losing weight. Most diets are lacking what what they really lack are the actual mechanism, the how. They're telling you what to do, but they're not telling you how to do it. And that's just like having

a car without wheels, where it won't go anywhere. Because the hard part is the how Noon launched their weight loss app in and what Artom just described. It's an approach that has really worked for now the app has become really popular. How popular well, Noon told us that it has millions of users, but they wouldn't be any more specific. A little tidbit about that name. It's actually moon spelled backwards. Artem says. It's because the moon is there at night, shining like a guiding light when your

willpower is running low. And it sounded very calm and peaceful and sort of psychologically oriented, so we wanted to people to come in and sort of have this more calming effects, sort of like an ulm, right, or the moon indeed, maybe you're wondering how new works in practice. Each time you open up the app, Noon gives you little articles to read and quizzes to do. That's supposed to be how you learn and change your habits. I

actually tried new Mount for this episode. So as an example today, the app had me set a shorter term weight loss goal that would actually be achievable. Here's a little snippet of that lesson. So your short term smart goal could be to limit yourself to a dessert every other day. There was another lesson about making your calorie budget last. It's simple planning. The easiest way to stay within your calorie budget without going hungry is to plan ahead.

Shall we design you a plan to tap below to get started planning, like thinking about whether you prefer large meals or snacking that kind of thing, and then break down your calories on a per meal and per snack basis. Then I took another lesson about how to prioritize your goals based on what's actually realistic. The final one was about how to buy yourself more calories to eat in a day. Did you know you can increase your calorie

budget every single day? It's not magic. It's exercise, but do please let us know if you have found a magical way to burn calories. Remember how Artem said earlier that diets tell you to eat differently, but they don't tell you how, and so without that, it's like a car without wheels. There's a car, but you cannot drive it anywhere without it having wheels. These lessons plus things like tracking food weigh ins and working with new coaches, these are the how part the car wheels that are

supposed to help get you moving. You might have noticed when we were going through the lessons before that the tone of new is friendly, virgin on goofy person. Really, I found the tone a bit condescending. It came off like pop psychology. Like one of the questions at the beginning asked what do you need to succeed in weight loss? It was a multiple choice format and I chose exercise for thirty minutes a day. Nope, the right answer. Simply believe I was selling some friends about it over dinner

one day. Pizza Noom's app would call it a red food and salad a green food. My friends I am called it the goop of weight loss. It kind of is down to the made up sounding name Goop, which is the actress Gwyneth Paltrow's wellness company is known for making questionable claims about their products having health benefits. Back to Noon. Behind all the psychology, nom is kind of your typical weight loss app. New has a food log with a calorie budget. NEWM breaks food down into red, yellow,

and green categories. Yes, like traffic light colors. And you can use the app to track things like exercise and your weight. But somehow though it's not a diet. I put that question directly to artem Pedacough. There's a big difference between a typical diet and a weight loss program.

I'm listening a lot of the diets that we're talking about, and then people have experience with our things that are short term that are fads, you know, something like raspberry keytones or cabbage soup or and our prescriptive eat this, not that, And NEWM doesn't believe in any of those things. So when they say new isn't a diet, what they really mean is NEWM isn't a fad diet. But that's not what the marketing copy says. It says not a diet period. Everyone who goes on NOUM goes on it

to lose weight, that's what it's for. This is Tracy Mann, a psychologist who runs a health and eating lab at the University of Minnesota. I think people who go on it, I believe that it's using different, sort of more scientific methods, but that doesn't mean that you'll lose the weight and keep it off. When I asked NOM about evidence of its long term weight loss results, a spokeswoman pointed me to studies showing people can lose about five of their

body weight or more, a medically significant amount. Those were only a year long, though. NEUM is also working on a two year study that should finish next year, and it says that its methods have been studied and it's always trying to find the best way to help people back to the non die a trend. Tracy says that this is the biggest change she's seen in the almost thirty years she's been working in this area. She believes that people are finally waking up to the problems with dieting.

Something has sort of seeped into people's minds about diets not working. But again, people are not exactly giving up on weight loss here and so The change isn't to not diet changes that people change how they talk about dieting and don't use that word. This isn't exactly the kind of change Tracy wants to see happen. She actually finds it really frustrating to completely superficial rebranding. It's almost a trick that brings me to another point about what

NEWM is trying to do here. Artam told me that NEWMS started off in wheat loss because they believe that's how you get people to play an active role in their health. But if health is really the goal of new why track calories at all? Why put food into categories like red, which everyone knows means stop. Here's what Andreas Michaelidis Nemes chief of psychology, had to say about that.

Andreas is a psychologist. Things like our our calorie trackers, and uh, you know those are meant to Those are meant to just increase your awareness of your daily habits, increase your awareness of of what you're eating. It's you don't have to log every single meal to be in the program. It's not a mandatory log or you know, that's it. It's not about the food that you love is what I'm trying to say, because that screams to

me just like diet. Okay, But Newmes app does encourage you to log your food, Like when I pull it up right now, it's telling me you haven't logged any meals today. And isn't the whole point of logging your meals to become more aware of the food you eat so you make healthier choices or at least less caloric ones. Newm has also been criticized for putting people on a twelve hundred calorie diet, which is really on the low end in terms of how many calories a person should

be eating. Noum says it used to put some women on a twelve hundred calorie diet. It was the minimum amount of daily calories a person using the app could get, but last year it increased that amount by about ten Newm says that although that number is safe and effective, they changed it after feedback from customers. Then there's the traffic light system for foods Andrews says they use it

because it's simple and people like simple. Newmes. Whole thing is psychology, remember, and a traffic light system is easy to keep in mind when people go to the grocery store or make themselves lunch at home. As for red means top, this is what Andreas says about that maybe some people do we have that association, but it's very

clear that it's not a do not eat this. In fact, Andreas says red means eat less of this if you want to lose weight, and to be fair, Noon does make that clear in the app that red doesn't mean cut chocolate cake out of your life forever, which is good because chocolate cake is delicious. But it's worth pointing out that this system doesn't exist in a vacuum. We lived our whole lives getting cues about food from all

over the place. When I log a red food on Noon, I feel like a bad person, like I screwed up. And maybe I might have felt that way anyway neum or not, But NOWM isn't exactly changing the narrative, And I think most people are gonna try to avoid those red foods and maybe twitch a little when they see a red food in the office pantry. Again, that's a diet thing. Everyone knows. Red means stop. We do talk about, by the way, you know, I always like transparency. We

do talk about. Is the red color the optimal one. We've so far stuck because it's a traffic light. The simplicity of it has so far been overriding it. Those are exactly the kinds of things that we sort of spend hours discussing internally. What's the perfect color for it? And is there another? Is there something else we can do? And you might see us change that in the future to lower that confusion. What other color are you thinking about replacing it with? No, that's a that's a that's

a I think it trade secret. Noon told me in July that it is in the process of changing the system from red to orange. Look. Noon is, at the end of the day, a company. It was started by entrepreneurs who brought technology to the world of weight loss, putting the whole psychology thing aside. What makes this app a good business is the technology here. You can put a lot of people through a standardized program relatively little expense.

But calling a weight loss program anything but a diet just seems disingenuous, like gas lighting, like new is trying to trick us like a trojan horse. I asked Artem about that when we talked, Okay, I think it's a it's complicated. People have all kinds of feelings about that word, a k. A diet, and have all kinds of associations with anything and have strong feelings about them in terms of either succeeding or failing or uh, you know, are having mixed success, and so you know, it's it's sort

of a contentious word. So I think we have to be very careful when we use it. UM. I think going back to UM, you know, going back to the basics and the sort of the core principles here is we think a lot of people are What I feel the worst about is a lot of people blame themselves for their lack of success and they said I was given a diet and I failed. In other words, people have had bad experiences with diets. The word brings up feelings of guilt and shame, so we're battling that perception

a little bit. That makes sense as a company, you wouldn't want people to have a negative association with your product right off the bat, But logging a red food in the new map brings up feelings of guilt and shame too. Without having a more in depth understanding of the actual program, it's easy to say, oh, it's a diet, because that's the category that I'm taking a picture or of and putting it into that bucket, and that, you know,

that kind of feels good. But the truth is is that we don't know if the category of what we do exists out there with other kinds of things. We really, really, really believe that this is behavior change, not a diet. This, I have to admit, is where they lost me. Like, sure, I'll concede that people have a tendency to sort things into categories, but I think it's pretty clear why people are sorting this particular program into this particular category. In fact,

NUMA has encouraged it. Since I started New, I've lost seventy pounds. I've lost ninety seven pounds with New I lost on New. We've all seen these kinds of ads a million times before. They're as much of a tired cliche as before and after photos or diets claiming to bring some original innovation to the table that no other diet has ever done before. NEWM is capitalizing on that, embracing it, not rejecting it, and NEWM is also capitalizing

on the diet backlash at the same time. Either way, NEWM wins so If new isn't a diet, what is it? I pose the question to artem. It is a behavior change program that helps you take control all of your health through understanding what's up here. He's pointing to his head. Here. It's a holistic program. But let's you do that. Notice that he didn't say the words weight loss at all, even though that's why people come to this new program to lose weight. NEWM even has you put in a

goal weight when you sign up. I'm not the only person, by the way, who takes issue with how NEWM describes itself, and specifically with the company's claim that it is not a diet. Noon came under pressure about this pretty recently and ended up responding we'll talk more about that in a moment, but first, it isn't just new Nothing is a diet anymore. Take weight Watchers, the iconic weight loss company that's been around for about sixty years. Listen to

what Gary Foster, the company's chief scientific officer, had to say. Well, we started to hear around two thousand sixteen, but heard even clearly and more consistently in two thousand eighteen, was that when people were thinking about their overall wellness and particularly weight in that context that they're thinking had changed that formerly they were ready to metaphorically leave their life

to lose weight. They were willing to do draconian owners things like always eat this, never eat that, eat at this time of day, but not at that time of day, eat high, this low that. Gary also calls this kind of mindset dieters prison. And that is how people think about dieting right, not just as punishment, but as something you go do and then come back and resume your real life. That's a diet myth we've talked about before.

The South Beach diet that was so popular in the early two thousand's was structured like that, you finished it and went back to your life. But the company then known as Weight Watchers was hearing something different from people, and they said, I'm not willing to leave my life to lose weight, and you've got to address the whole met So no longer am I willing to eat in wacky ways. I want to come out of this program eating more healthy, not less healthy. I want to come

out more active, not less active. I want to come out with a more helpful mindset. And I'm want to come out sleeping better, so they were very clear that weight loss is still an outcome they were seeking, but they wanted to do it within a wellness ecosystem. We Watchers took that to heart. The company rebranded to ww literally taking the word weight out of its name. Gary says the name change reflected something deeper, a pivot to

focusing on overall health, not just weight loss. At one point when we were talking, Gary mentioned that people can feel like weight loss is punishment for something they've done wrong. It's almost like I have to go and make up for my past transgressions. That's diet talk. So I had to ask the obvious question, does ww call itself a diet? No, absolutely not. We were just talking with Gary Foster, chief

scientific officer at ww. WW formerly known as Weight Watchers, is arguably one of the best known weight loss programs around. But Gary told us that the program is not a diet, and remember Noon doesn't call itself a diet either. In fact, NOME says pretty clearly in its advertising that it's not a diet. People don't love this, Like I said before, it feels like gas lighting. It also raises some other issues.

People who have eating disorders or a history of them might come to NOM thinking it's a safe space, like NOM itself saying it's not a diet. Reactions to NEWMS advertising finally boiled over earlier this year. The whole thing seems to have been sparked by a tweet. Every new MAD is like, We're not a diet, We're an eating disorder. That was Elena Stone, a twenty eight year old in St. Louis, Missouri, reading that aforementioned tweet. Elena wrote it and what she

wrote hit a nerve. Elena's tweet racked up around a hundred thirty five thousand likes and ten thou retweets. Was just digging constantly all day noon, started trending on Twitter after that, and the company actually ended up responding. But first Elena's story. It turns out she had been hearing a lot of new mads all over the place, YouTube podcasts many times a day. It felt inescapable and actually, she says, she's never used now, but a close family

member has what really uh got me upsets um. They always start with We're not a diet, but they absolutely are. Elena refers to herself as fat. She's used apps similar to Neon in the past. Like my fitness pal, but eventually she became pretty firmly anti diet. It's, you know, for me, been a lifetime of being told what to eat, and I just don't want to do that anymore. I love food, I love cooking, I love baking, um, I

love cheese, I love coffee. You know, I don't want to be drinking up an eighth of a cup of black coffee and choking down iceberg lettuce. Like that's not a life to me. The weave of anti NEWM sentiment that Elena's tweet unleashed online didn't escape the attention of new The company soon published a post on its website in response, and you can probably guess what it said, which is to say that its program is more than

just a diet. Now also said in the post that it takes eating disorders seriously and has several safeguards in place. People can't enter a below normal b m I as their goal weight or join if they report an active eating disorder or a history of disordered eating. NEWM also says coaches are trained to spot issues users might be having. So okay, we're over diets because they're not fun when

people lose weight. Now it's a lifestyle change, not a diet, and companies like NEWM and WW are marketing us these non diets too, but they sure sound a lot like diets. All the stuff does what's really going on here? At the surface, All this can seem like positive change. At the very least, fad diets seemed to be a thing of the past. People shouldn't be going to diet ors

prison black coffee and iceberg lettuce. Isn't a life like Alina said, Maybe we should be thinking about health more broadly than the scale, adding in exercise and eating our veggies, sleeping better. The problem is that we're over dieting in name only. Remember that data from the Market Research Company and p D Group that interest in dieting is declining. Well. MPP Group also found that people still want to lose weight even if they don't want to diet. What that

tells us is that we're not really over diets. Maybe we want to be, but we're not. And the reasons for that they're actually old reasons. They're the same reasons diets have had a pull on us for hundreds of years. Here's Peter Stearns, a history professor at George Mason University. We spoke to him in our second episode. I think partly we're hoping that this will be easier than it actually turns out to be. We humans love a quick fix,

especially for something like wait that makes us uncomfortable. And then there are those other classic things that draw us to diets, like wanting to look good and wanting to be healthier. It's a combination of a cultural and a medical issue, and too much emphasis on either one or the other oversimplifies the problem. So will we ever actually be done with diets or will diets always be with us?

I put the question to Sabrina Strings, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, A scary thought. Sabrina says that it's complicated. People are pushing back on dieting, but then there are others who are still restricting what they eat because they think it's better for them that they'll lose weight and be healthier. And so I think what we often want to see is straightforward progress, but life is a lot messier than that. And this is true,

and we're talking about any form of oppression. As long as weight is important in society, there will be an opening for dieting, even if it's called a lifestyle change or wellness. And that makes sense because for all the changes going on, there's still an intense focus on weight loss that we have in our culture. In fact, that's exactly what we're going to talk about in our next episode. We're going to tackle the big billion dollar question of

weight and health. After all, everyone knows that it's healthier to be thinner, right right, Well, there's a lot more to it than that, and actually the evidence about weight and health is a whole lot sketcher than advertised. We're going to find out why the prevailing narrative isn't quite right and also what happens when someone dares to put

out research undermining the narrative. And so there's just like this constant level of harassment, not just like a scientific discussion, which is what I would have expected, but more like insults. In short, things get nasty. Losing. It is written and reported by me em A Court and edited by Kristin V. Brown. Magnus Hendrickson is our senior producer, Stacy Wong our associate producer, and Blake Maples, our audio engineer. Our theme was composed

and performed by Hannis Brown. Thanks to francesco Leavy and Timnette. Be sure to subscribe to Prognosis if you haven't already, and if you like our show, please leave us a review that helps others find out about it. Thanks for listening, See you next time, h