Diet Cults

I want to lose weight this year, many people resolve in January. In doing so it is easy to encounter different diets that they can pursue to help them with this quest. Diet Cults: The Surprising Fallacy at the Core of Nutrition Fads and a Guide to Healthy Eating For The Rest of Us may be a very important book to consider in the quest for a good diet!

I loved this book! I love finding new healthy recipes to try and new things to consider while I am weighing a healthy diet. But I have often felt wary of certain diet approaches. When people tell me that they are going to start eliminating meat or alcohol from their lifestyle I actually do find that if they are citing reasons pertaining to cost or trying to be healthy I applaud them. But when they talk about a more Puritan ethic I often find myself being cynical and wanting to challenge them. And back when I was single I made a point of ordering a glass of wine on a date who cited more "moralistic" reasons for not drinking alcohol just to make it through the date.

I had also noticed that when I have tried to follow diets that it was hard to associate too much with people who did not follow the same diet. When I tried to eat vegetarian back in college when I worked at Bible Camp I noticed that I was turning down the hospitality of my host families when they served a meal that consisted of meat. This was the beginning of my own questioning on the practice of excluding meat from my lifestyle. I felt like to exclude a food group is to exclude people who eat that particular type of food since much of intimate human interaction takes place over a shared meal.

It would have been a different story if I had a legitimate allergic reaction to meat but I was just an idealistic college student who was concerned about the amount of resources that it took to produce meats that I ate. Don't get me wrong, I think that this is actually a very legitimate reason to curb meat consumption however I later found that it was not a healthy long term option for me to exclude meat from my diet. But I would still be on the quest for the true diet for much of my twenties.

Matt Fitzgerald's book stresses that there is NO SUCH THING as the ONE TRUE healthy diet but that people are recruited into diets on the premise that there IS a ONE TRUE diet. And once the diet regime that they follow is very akin to cult like behavior. Some of the things he cites are that weigh-ins in a meeting are a shaming practice, making a food forbidden is an absolutist rule, meals are more ritualistic.

He couples this with actual scientific research about nutrition that I personally find fascinating and stresses considering the source of the information presented about a diet before incorporating it into a lifestyle.

While I am NOT a scientist I do find myself sometimes concerned that we are living in a world where people often follow celebrity advice instead of scientific advice when it comes to our lifestyle. In my quest to be healthy I am also on a quest to make sure that I evaluate the information that I am presented with.  This book provided me tools for helping me on both of these quests. I can not recommend this book enough. Before buying the next book that might be another fad diet I would recommend reading this book first. However if the fad diet book has a lot of fish recipes, let me know what it is because I love cooking with fish and always welcome new recipes!