Here we go again: almost all diet advice is wrong (again)

[Sava]

see grib, look what you are doing to poor Lori

[Pedotard]

It seems like all the people in this thread who think obesity isn't a choice are Americans

[N35t0r]

Depression is also a choice! I've hereby decided I'm not depressed anymore. Take that you unmotivated depressed ****ers!

[Pedotard]

Unfortunately not all depressed people can be cured with diet and exercise

[N35t0r]

Unfortunately not all depressed people can be cured with diet and exercise

But they can with motivation! So either they should be OK, or they are lazy.

[Hauldren Collider]

And what part of the brain makes conscious decisions?

Oh good. Now you can explain again how you don't really believe that decisions we make are actual decisions.

Here's the answer to your question: If you get knocked unconscious, you will breathe unconsciously. You won't eat, and you sure as **** won't smoke. If you try to stay up for more than say 72 hours, your body will just collapse and you will sleep involuntary, eventually.

Good lord I can't believe I needed to draw that distinction.

Oh yeah, also, if you don't breathe or sleep you'll die. If you eat a little less and don't smoke not only will you not die, you will actually probably stave off dying by quite a bit. So there's that.

[Hauldren Collider]

OK Lori. Here we go again with how decisions aren't really decisions and everyone's just a little fragile snowflake who isn't really responsible for the stupid **** they do, cause can it really be considered their fault?

Life lesson: Yes they ****ing are.

Willpower, for the purposes of this thread, is more or less just being able to not make obviously bad choices, like overeating or smoking. Evidently a lot of people lack the self control to avoid making obviously bad choices. Here's the part where you and I seem to diverge: If you're making obviously bad choices, it's your fault. Even if you (a hypothetical person, not you specifically) are making obviously bad choices for some mystical reason that makes it totally not your fault (a notion that I disagree with but will run with for the sake of argument), the only person in the world who can fix that is you, which makes it not something worth trying to blame on anyone else, and absolutely fair game for everyone else to blame on you.

[Lorizael]

Yeah, I'm not going to be able to make any headway here. HC, I hope you never find yourself in a place in your life where you are unable to not make "obviously bad choices." For one, it's a terrible, terrible place to be. And two, your seeming need to find someone to blame will, assuming you stick to your current mode of thinking, cause you to take a giant steaming dump on your self-esteem which will, according to what research in psychology tells us, do the exact opposite of helping you. Nevertheless, given how utterly lacking you are in any notion of empathy, ending up as a self-loathing masochist might be the only way for you to come to understand the astounding depths of your ignorance concerning human psychology. Later.

[Hauldren Collider]

If you're not gonna blame yourself for when you **** up, exactly how do you expect to stop ****ing up? Your post almost seems to accuse me of never making stupid mistakes (flattering, honestly). I've made plenty of stupid mistakes. When I make them, I try to recognize they were stupid, I blame myself for making them and recognize that it's my fault, and then I try to avoid making them again. Most people call this process "life".

[Dr Strangelove]

Jeez this thread got bloated fast. I could have told you all that years ago if you asked me. However, modest limitation of fats and saturated fat is sensible if you have high cholesterol. Modest limitation of salt intake is sensible if you have hypertension. Multiple small meals is useful for some people with GERD. Skipping breakfast is a really bad idea if you're on anti-diabetic medication. Unfortunately specific advice given for specific situations is often taken by amateurs and turned into more generalized recommendations that aren't warranted.

[Lorizael]

If you're not gonna blame yourself for when you **** up, exactly how do you expect to stop ****ing up? Your post almost seems to accuse me of never making stupid mistakes (flattering, honestly). I've made plenty of stupid mistakes. When I make them, I try to recognize they were stupid, I blame myself for making them and recognize that it's my fault, and then I try to avoid making them again. Most people call this process "life".

Habitual self-blame (which is what ends up happening if you **** up a lot and decide that the solution to ****ing up is to blame yourself) tends to create a negative self-concept. You start to view yourself as a bad person. You start to believe not that your mistake was a result of any particular action on your part, but a result of your intrinsic character. You screw up because you're a screw up, not because you happened to screw up. That way lies madness. I know this personally, for one, and I know this because the research says I'm right. There are much healthier attitudes to take that don't involve blaming oneself for one's screw ups (and don't involve blaming anybody else, either). Blame is simply not necessary.

And all of this has nothing at all to do with the concept of blame itself, which rests on some notion of personhood and free will. Most modern philosophers are compatibilists, which means they've basically given up on attempting to define some sort of metaphysical free will, which means that issues of blame and responsibility are issues of pragmatics rather than anything grounded in reality. And if we must fall back on pragmatics, then my previous paragraph applies, where psychology tells us that blame is not at all healthy.

[Aeson]

If you're not gonna blame yourself for when you **** up, exactly how do you expect to stop ****ing up?

Ideally you would understand the specific factors that lead to the problem, and address them specifically, instead of blaming some metaphysical concept of self.

Willpower is a difficult thing to address because exactly how it operates is impossible to map out. However on a high level of abstraction we can understand it is, or is a result of, a causal physical process. It is easy to find examples where entangling the concept of self with problems in these sorts of areas is a reinforcing feedback into the problem.

This is why 12 step programs invariably start with accepting an inability to control a specific factor. That is the first step in regaining control over it.

When I make them, I try to recognize they were stupid, I blame myself for making them and recognize that it's my fault, and then I try to avoid making them again.

We're still waiting for you to apply this process to your posting habits.

[Alexander's Horse]

Unfortunately specific advice given for specific situations is often taken by amateurs and turned into more generalized recommendations that aren't warranted.

So true, I learned my lesson on that when I googled some words in doctors reports when Mrs Horse was quite ill recently. I won't do that again. We both got an unnecessary scare.

Her wonderful specialists have our total child-like trust now. Especially since one of them is a great doctor and very friendly but also famous and obviously feared by everyone at the hospital, especially the interns. I found out pretty quickly he doesn't like questions that may indicate a degree of googling, and who can blame him

Although we do still have a nagging question and we need to find a way to bring it up, which is frustrating.

[I AM MOBIUS]

I think this thread has proved to me that HC is a far more odious and hateful creature than even BK - one day he will get his comeuppance and he won't even be able to understand why...

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Unfortunately not all depressed people can be cured with diet and exercise

Quite a few can, though. Outside of psychiatric treatment, just about all doctors agree that eating healthily and getting loads of cardio under sunlight is a great step towards treating depression. And it treats obesity too. Win/win!