Dr. McDougall's Online Discussion Board

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/18/opin ... e=Homepage

This article seems to be along the lines of what Doug Lisle has said at times. Thoughts anyone?

openmind wrote:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/18/opinion/weight-watchers-kids.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

This article seems to be along the lines of what Doug Lisle has said at times. Thoughts anyone?

My opinion is that muddled thinking produces muddled results.

The article is sub-titled "A registered dietician explains why you should never put your child on a diet". 'Diet', as used in the article, seems to imply 'calorie restriction'.

I agree that calorie-restricted diets rarely work in the long run, but the proposed solution will not work either... when applied in a food culture where most food is hyper-palatable CRAP.

Numerous studies have found that intuitive eating — getting back in touch with your body’s innate cues about what, when and how much to eat, instead of following what some diet guru or app tells you to eat — is linked to better health outcomes than even the most “flexible” diet.

On the hand, I believe that something must be done. 20% of children aged 12-19 and 18% of 6-11 year olds are obese! Not just overweight, but obese.

For me, "getting in touch with my body's innate cues" only worked once I was able to detoxify my body and overcome CRAP withdraw.

I think that the science of nutrition can be taught in a factual, non-judgemental way -- excess weight is caused by excess calories... and you can limit calories and still feel satiated by applying the principles of calorie density.

Those principles work. They really work.

This is just my opinion, of course.

Cheers,

sirdle wrote:

openmind wrote:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/18/opinion/weight-watchers-kids.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

This article seems to be along the lines of what Doug Lisle has said at times. Thoughts anyone?

My opinion is that muddled thinking produces muddled results.

The article is sub-titled "A registered dietician explains why you should never put your child on a diet". 'Diet', as used in the article, seems to imply 'calorie restriction'.

I agree that calorie-restricted diets rarely work in the long run, but the proposed solution will not work either... when applied in a food culture where most food is hyper-palatable CRAP.

Numerous studies have found that intuitive eating — getting back in touch with your body’s innate cues about what, when and how much to eat, instead of following what some diet guru or app tells you to eat — is linked to better health outcomes than even the most “flexible” diet.

On the hand, I believe that something must be done. 20% of children aged 12-19 and 18% of 6-11 year olds are obese! Not just overweight, but obese.

For me, "getting in touch with my body's innate cues" only worked once I was able to detoxify my body and overcome CRAP withdraw.

I think that the science of nutrition can be taught in a factual, non-judgemental way -- excess weight is caused by excess calories... and you can limit calories and still feel satiated by applying the principles of calorie density.

Those principles work. They really work.

This is just my opinion, of course.

Cheers,

I agree; what I found missing from the article is that by having only healthy choices available at home (no chips, no cookies, no sausage), a child should naturally lose weight.

The caveat being: it's very hard to regulate what your kid eats outside of the home. Schools, churches, friends, family are all there to give them a seemingly endless supply of unhealthy choices.

My nephew has always been heavy. He’s 10 now. A couple years ago my sister-in-law switched to organic milk. He disliked the taste so much he quit drinking it and lost 10 lbs that summer by switching to water. Turns out he had been drinking 24+ ounces a day, mostly mixed with chocolate syrup.

The author wrote a diet book based on 'intuitive' eating. The first part of most diet books is about why everything else has failed you, why this is different, and why it will work for you. She shortened this spiel into an editorial.
Part of the message is that you can't shame a person into eating less calories, and that calorie counting doesn't work well in practice. That is sensible enough. I don't know what she means by intuitive eating, and she doesn't explain it well in the article, but it doesn't sound too promising. Doug Lisle and others have explained why our simple intuition on what to eat fails us in our unnatural food environment. Part of how I practice the McDougal woe is to remove the 'unnatural' foods from my personal environment/menu. Some people have labeled this type of restriction as psychologically unhealthy, and claim it can lead to food disorders. To me, the two may be correlated, but the relationship is not causal.