Often, messages that pose as health promoting are actually the opposite. There are obvious examples, like the doctor pushing��an all-meat diet, or the telling the world that voluntarily getting stung by bees will reduce inflammation. But the more dangerous messaging is subtler, more insidious, and widespread: that fat bodies are inherently unhealthy.

In a recent article, health��columnist Jane Brody points out that Americans have been hit harder by COVID than most other countries, then blames this on our personal health habits, namely diet and exercise. She spends most of the column raising alarm bells about quarantine weight gain,��high-calorie foods, and fatness in general.

In doing so, she’s not promoting healthier habits. The truth is, health and weight are not nearly as entwined as we think they are. (Not to mention��there’s far more to America’s COVID crisis than personal health; limited access to health care, systemic discrimination and inequality, and the��politicization��of the virus have all played huge roles.) Overemphasizing weight loss is stigmatizing and can actually be detrimental to individual health. Here’s why we need to rethink this kind of messaging.

“Fat” Does Not Mean “Unhealthy”

Brody talks of the many people in her life who have “packed on quite a few pounds of health-robbing body fat this past year.” This is��an undeniably stigmatizing statement, and��it also makes a major assumption that happens to be false: that gaining weight, or being naturally��bigger-bodied, is inherently unhealthy. (As a journalist, ��’m constantly irritated that other journalists can write��things like this without citing a shred of evidence, whereas I have to add an entire paragraph with several citations every time I suggest that weight loss isn’t always a helpful or realistic goal.)

It’s possible to be healthy at a higher weight, just as it’s possible to be unhealthy at a lower one. One ��even found that Danish adults in the “overweight” BMI category actually lived the longest. Being at a higher weight is associated with a higher risk of certain diseases, yes, but that doesn’t mean someone at a higher weight is necessarily unhealthy. “You absolutely cannot infer health information or information about one’s health behaviors based solely on their weight,” says , a researcher at the University of Connecticut’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and��Obesity. Someone in a thin body may be completely sedentary and eat a diet of mostly processed foods and very few fruits and vegetables, while someone in a larger body might be extremely active and eat loads of nutrient-rich foods.

All of this to say:��the relationship between weight and health is far too complicated to make blanket statements like “health-robbing body fat.” Both weight gain and weight loss can be healthful or harmful.��It all depends on context.

Eating Well Isn’t Simple

For years, Brody has presented herself as a living example of —about 50 years ago, she lost 40 pounds in two��years and has kept that weight off since.��In this particular column, she offers up her personal eating regimen as the solution to pandemic weight gain (and fatness in general): eat a diet “based primarily on vegetables, with fish, beans, and nonfat milk [as one’s]��main sources of protein,” along with a bit of portion-controlled ice cream, the occasional burger, and daily exercise. But while that approach may seem realistic compared to all the fad diets out there, experts warn that it’s not as accessible as Brody makes it sound.

This “I can do it, so can you”��attitude is out of touch with many people’s reality, says , a dietitian based in��Albuquerque, New Mexico. The nonprofit Feeding America��estimates that can’t afford enough nutritious food to meet their needs, and Bloomberg reported earlier this year that . Stressors like working multiple jobs, raising children (especially as a single parent), lacking health insurance, and living in unsafe neighborhoods also��make prioritizing good nutrition more complicated. Health behaviors often have more to do with someone’s privilege than their motivation, Jackson says.

Even if everyone did eat according to Brody’s recommendations, it doesn’t mean we would all magically be at what Brody and the BMI��scale (the��height-to-weight ratio used to group people into weight categories)��deem��a “healthy” weight.��“Weight is not simply calories in, calories out,” Himmelstein says. In fact, the body��actively resists weight loss: a�� published in the International Journal of Obesity explains that the body generally adapts to calorie deficits by burning fewer calories, using less stored fat for energy, decreasing the fullness-signaling hormone leptin, and increasing the hunger-signaling hormone ghrelin. It’s also widely accepted that there’s a genetic component to obesity, and in Current Obesity Report outlines the significant amount of evidence suggesting that stress plays a big role in body weight as well.

“Weight and weight gain are the result of our genetics, our physiology, our environment, our personal stress levels, and our behaviors,”��the authors write. Assuming that weight is impacted only, or primarily, by our behaviors, is wildly inaccurate. And��maintaining weight loss long-term is even harder than acheiving it in the first place. A in The BMJ found that while diets lead to weight loss and health improvements in the first six months, these benefits typically disappear by the one-year mark.

Shame Doesn’t Motivate

Relentlessly encouraging weight loss does more harm than good. “Fat-shaming messaging increases weight stigma, which increases stress and inflammation—which are negative health outcomes,” says Amee Severson, a dietitian and the owner of in Bellingham,��Washington.��A in Obesity, of��which Himmelstein was the lead author, found that individuals who reported experiencing weight stigma had higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, than those who did not. Chronically elevated levels of cortisol have repeatedly been linked to an increased risk of many diseases, as outlined in this published in the EXCLI Journal.��And a in Health Psychology, also authored by Himmelstein, found that coping with weight stigma can negatively impact both physical and mental health.

While articles like Brody’s are presumably meant to promote health and healthy behaviors, they actually do the opposite. A small of 93 college-age��women��in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that those��who saw themselves as overweight felt “less capable of controlling their eating” and consumed more calories after reading a weight-stigmatizing news article��than those who read a non-stigmatizing article. A larger in Preventative Medicine found that experiencing weight stigma as an adolescent significantly increased a person’s risk for binge eating and unhealthy weight-control behaviors as an adult. And, as Severson points out, it makes bigger-bodied people less likely to seek out health care, too.

Live and Let Live

No one owes it to the world to be healthy. “I think that every single person has the right to choose how important health is to them,” Severson says. People are allowed to have different values, and healthy behaviors like eating nutritious foods and getting regular movement are not a moral obligation.

Health is personal, and what is considered healthy when it comes to eating and other behaviors varies between individuals. It’s incredibly difficult to give effective health advice to a large audience, but there’s still room for health-promoting messages in the media. We need to think��critically about the harm��certain messages may cause. Mandating fruits and vegetables for people who can’t afford them is offensive and misguided. Demonizing fat and weight gain is demoralizing and harmful to people who live in larger bodies. We know that shame doesn’t motivate healthy behaviors—and it��absolutely harms health.

The post Fat-Shaming People Won’t Improve Their Health appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Most gym memberships cost $50 to $100 a month. Spreading that cost over time, is it possible to get the same results at home? Wes Siler details his own setup��that’s helping him stay in shape��from his basement. Products mentioned include the ($1,600), ($150), ($115), ($75), and the ($35). All together, that adds up to $1,975. An investment, sure, but one that’s offset by skipping the gym for less than two years.

The post How to Build an Epic, Affordable Home Gym appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

We’re in the midst of a global pandemic and national political upheaval unlike anything we’ve seen in the past 150 years.��Still, wellness influencers, , and even are finding plenty of time to fret about dieting and weight gain. In response, anti-diet nutritionists, therapists, and activists have to point out that a too tight grip on your eating habits and����that leave��you and physically uncomfortable.

I agree. In April��I wrote about how quarantine-induced worries linked to��food and exercise can backfire, and why a more relaxed approach to food��leads to better health. However,��this is easier said than done. Our relationship with weight and diets is complex, and it can be tough to distinguish a healthy habit from an unhealthy one.��If you’re working toward��a healthier mindset about��food, a good first step is to identify your own food rules��and then challenge them.

A food rule is any kind of black-and-white thinking about food. Some might be holdovers from a specific diet you’ve tried in the past, like the idea that you should avoid carbs, or that there’s a static��number of calories you should eat in a day. Others are extreme versions of generally sound advice,��like the idea��that you must only eat whole foods,��or that sugar and processed goods are explicitly off-limits.

Some of these ideas are grounded in ,��but there’s a critical difference between food rules and healthy eating habits. The latter are flexible:��you prioritize nutritious ingredients��but don’t agonize over what to eat��and aren’t stressed if you go a day without vegetables or finish a meal feeling overly full. Food rules are rigid: you have strict parameters��around how you should eat, and feel guilty or anxious (or like you need to compensate) when you don’t eat according to that plan. “Following food rules can be physically, mentally, and socially exhausting, which impacts overall quality of life,” says , a dietitian and certified personal trainer. Here are six��new anti-rules to learn��in the new year.

There Are No Bad Foods

Morality has long snuck into the way we talk and think about eating. Look at��the way that various foods are��marketed: something��low in calories, sugar, and fat might be��labeled “guilt-free.” High-sugar, high-fat, and high-calorie foods are deemed “sinfully delicious,” an indulgence to feel a little ashamed of. It might seem normal to think of certain foods as good or bad, seeing as how moralizing eating patterns is a��natural product of our culture’s fixation on healthy living. But that doesn’t mean it’s helpful, says Chan.

If a certain food is deemed inherently bad, and eating it is bad behavior, it isn’t a huge leap to think you’re a bad person for eating that way. Food quickly becomes a source of stress and shame, rather than nourishment and pleasure. , an anti-diet dietitian, expertly called��out the problem in an Instagram : you aren’t a horrible person with no self-control because you ate some ice cream;��you just ate something delicious because you wanted it. Thinking of it this way makes it easier to let go and move on. The point isn’t that ice cream is nutrient packed or that it should be the cornerstone of your diet—those��wouldn’t be accurate or helpful, either! It’s that there’s never a reason to feel guilty about eating, no matter the nutritional value of the food.

Forget About Clean Eating

Clean eating is such a common phrase that it might not raise an eyebrow, but it’s problematic, too. It implies that other foods and ways of eating are dirty,��which falls into the same moralizing trap mentioned above. Plus, there’s no real definition of what “clean” means. “People start developing arbitrary rules about their food, which leads to restrictive and unhealthy food patterns,” says , a dietitian who specializes in intuitive eating and sports nutrition.

There’s evidence to back this up. A of 1,266 young adults published in the journal��Nutrients found that over half the participants had heard of clean eating and thought of it as healthy, but that their definitions of clean��were all over the place. The researchers pointed out that while clean eating is often portrayed as healthy, it is often linked with disordered eating. It’s a dichotomous way of thinking, “characterized by extreme ‘all bad’ or ‘all good’ views toward food,” the paper states. Additionally, someone can use clean eating to mask behaviors like severe calorie restriction, claiming that they’re avoiding various foods for health reasons when in fact they may have an underlying eating disorder or disordered-eating behaviors. The researchers also found clean eating to be associated with nutritional deficiencies, since restrictive behavior can go undetected and unchecked for so long.

If you want to eat healthfully, a better approach is to prioritize nutrient-dense foods—fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, legumes, healthy oils, and lean proteins—without vowing to only eat these foods. It’s a flexible and realistic approach that won’t have you constantly questioning whether certain foods are clean enough or not.

Stop Tracking Your Intake

Religiously counting calories or macros��(carbs, fat, and protein) probably isn’t going to have the effect you want it to. One of 25 existing studies published in Frontiers in Psychology found that restricted eating habits rarely led to weight loss and, in fact, often corresponded with weight gain.

There’s no consensus on why exactly this happens, but a in the International Journal of Obesity explains that the body is designed to protect against weight loss. Restriction-induced weight loss��precipitates��physiological adaptations, including fewer calories burned overall, less fat oxidation (converting stored fat to energy), a decrease in the fullness-signaling hormone leptin, and an increase in the hunger-signaling hormone ghrelin. Even if someone who has lost weight successfully manages to override their hunger signals, their metabolism may��still be slower than before, making it increasingly harder to keep burning��fat.��This might be why many dieters don’t see the results they want from calorie counting.

Soto instead encourages an intuitive eating approach: eat what you want, when you want it. Our bodies know to seek out the variety of nutrients that they need to function, and proponents of intuitive eating explain that��paying close attention��to your cravings will naturally lead��to a nutritious diet. When it comes to gauging how much food your body requires, it’s far easier to eat until you’re satisfied than it is to count and track calories.

Don’t Demonize Macronutrients

Popular as the keto diet��may be, there’s no evidence that a low-carb diet is any healthier than one that includes a balance of all macronutrients. The same goes for low-fat diets. A of 121 previously conducted, randomized controlled trials published in The British Medical Journal��found that none of the diets limiting certain macronutrients like carbs or fats are any more effective at improving health than a regular, varied diet.

Still, it’s common to demonize certain carbs or fats, even if you aren’t on a particular diet. Maybe you pass on the bread basket because you don’t want to eat too many carbs, or always use nonstick cooking spray instead of oil because you’re wary of adding too much fat to a meal. Soto says this isn’t necessary. All three macronutrients play an important role in health and function. The recommend getting anywhere from 45 to 65 percent of your calories from carbs, 10 to 35 percent from protein, and 20 to 35 percent from fat. There’s a lot of wiggle room there. Most people’s intake already falls within these ranges, so striking the perfect balance of macros day after day isn’t something you should overthink.

You Don’t Need to Burn Anything Off

Food is more than just a source of energy, Chan says. “We eat food for so many reasons, and it’s important to honor those,” she says. “We connect with our culture through food, we connect with others over a good meal, and we eat for pleasure and nostalgia, all of which supports overall well-being.”��But the idea that you must earn food with a grueling workout��is still pervasive.

Trying to compensate with exercise when you feel you’ve eaten too much can have a significant negative impact on your quality of life, Chan says. At worst, it sets into motion a cycle of overeating, compensating, and overeating again. Instead of beating yourself up, or trying to atone for eating more than feels comfortable, just let your body do its thing and digest. You’ll feel fine again soon, and chances are you’ll feel less hungry later on.

Yes, there’s nuance here. Food still fuels movement, and there’s nothing wrong with adjusting your intake accordingly when you’re training. The important thing is to not be too rigid��or punish yourself for eating too much. A strict calories-in, calories-out approach to fueling isn’t very effective��anyway. There’s refuting the popular idea that eating 3,500 calories leads to one pound of weight gain, and equally that fitness trackers are notoriously terrible at measuring the actual number of calories burned during a workout.

Be Mindful and Flexible

“Ditching food rules opens the door for nutritious foods, not so nutritious foods, and everything in between to be enjoyed,” Chan says.��The goal isn’t to give up on good nutrition��but to make it less stressful and more sustainable. If your intention is to feel your best, be mindful of how different foods affect your mood and energy levels. Use that to guide what you choose to eat, instead of sticking to black-and-white��rules that set you up for failure.

The post There Are No Rules for Healthy Eating appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

is a nationally acclaimed orthopedic surgeon and sports-medicine doctor who cohosts the popular radio show . Whether you want to know about bunions, better sleep, or running your first marathon without getting hurt, Dr. Cole can offer an expert’s take. Eric Haunschild, his research assistant, also contributes to this column. Have a question? Email AskADoctor@outsideim.com. The doctor is in.

Does apple cider vinegar actually do anything for your body or gut, or is it just something Goop has been selling us? If it is good, how should we be supplementing with it?

Apple cider vinegar (ACV) has been touted as a holistic cure-all for decades, and it’s as popular as ever in the wellness world. Proponents claim the pantry staple has all sorts of positive benefits:��,��, and promoting��, to name a few. And in theory, certain properties of ACV suggest that these claims may have some truth to them. For example, ACV contains B-complex vitamins, which ��in the body. But the anti-inflammatory properties��of these vitamins haven’t been studied��in the context of vinegar consumption. That’s the problem with most of the claims people make about ACV—they just haven’t been proven, one way or the other.

ACV also has plenty��of antioxidants, and ��may help reduce chronic disease burden as we age. However,��scientific studies on antioxidants have been inconclusive, and there isn’t really any research about ACV’s antioxidants and their effects. When it comes to the gut,��it’s possible that the��acetic acid in ACV could aid our��digestion and thus ease gut issues,��particularly as we age and produce less of our own stomach acids.��In theory, adding another acid may help achieve the same thing, but whether it actually works is also, as yet, unproven.

However, there are a few evidence-backed, measurable physiological effects, including��increased satiety: in a small study from the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2005, participants who supplemented a standard meal with ACV reported feeling more full than those who didn’t. Another randomized controlled trial, in the Journal of Functional Foods from 2018, found that regular supplementation of two tablespoons of ACV daily for three months contributed to modest weight loss of a few pounds when compared to controls. So it seems apple cider might offer a small boost for those interested in weight loss—but that’s not necessarily a��health benefit, unless you’re working toward��a specific goal that��you and your doctor have agreed would be beneficial for you.

ACV has also been shown to offer a small amount of help modulating blood sugar and insulin levels after you eat a meal, but not so��reliably that it could replace traditional treatments and medications.��A recent meta-analysis in the����reported that in studies that collectively evaluated over 300 Type 2��diabetics, ACV supplementation did have beneficial effects on blood-sugar levels. However, most of the individual studies used small sample sizes, and while the results were promising, they were still pretty minimal.

If you’re interested in experimenting with supplementation, it’s safe to take ACV in small doses. Recommendations vary, but an ounce a day diluted in water is a safe place to start. The only notable side effects of overconsumption are an upset stomach and, if you take it undiluted, a sore throat or��weaker tooth enamel over time. Just don’t expect a miracle, and remember that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

��’m obsessed with my Theragun��and generally any type of self-myofascial release, like vibrating foam rollers.��Is it possible to overuse tools like this? The Theragun feels fantastic, but it’s also pretty aggressive.��

From to ,��it seems like everyone (including myself) nowadays is raving about the benefits of self-percussion therapy devices. Manufacturers claim that these devices accelerate recovery and muscle repair, improve blood and lymphatic flow, and relieve stiffness when regularly used��before and after exercise. While some of these claims are likely overblown, there is some evidence that these��devices can alleviate delayed onset muscle soreness—and as long as you aren’t finding that the tool is leaving you achier than you were when you started, you’re probably fine. The key here is to listen to your body, and stop if it starts to feel painful.

Most of the benefits listed above��are anecdotal; of the above claims, the only one with��scientific evidence behind it is that these devices��can��reduce soreness following vigorous exercise. A 2014 study in the examined delayed onset muscle soreness. One group received vibration therapy after exercise, and another group had regular massage therapy. Those who received vibration therapy had a greater reduction in pain 48 hours after an intense workout compared to the massage-therapy group.

When using a percussive device, you can expect to feel some transient, mild soreness over the area being massaged, but you should use common sense. If you are percussing over areas that result in significant and increasing pain of a different character than simple muscle soreness, back off. These devices should only be used on muscle—other sensitive areas, such as an inflamed tendon or bursa, may benefit from a mild manual massage but should not be aggressively percussed. Percussing bone, in addition to being extremely painful, has no benefit. With these considerations in mind, using a Theragun on tired muscles may fast-track your post-workout recovery, and as long as you pay attention to your body, there is no real risk of overuse or injury.

The post Does Apple Cider Vinegar Actually Do Anything? appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

When I was 14 years old, I went on my first climbing trip to the Sierra with a man in his late twenties, a mentor of mine. We piled into his small pickup truck, smashed between ropes and climbing gear.

Above the rearview mirror was a little sign that read “Baked Goods.” The words were circled and had an X��through them.

I thought it was weird that anyone would hate baked goods, but I was thankful to be there, so I didn’t say anything. We stopped at a bagel shop to fuel up. I was a late-blooming child, and food was simple to me back then: you eat when you are hungry and play the rest of the time. I ordered two bagels with extra cream cheese and consumed them before we left the parking lot. I barely felt full after I finished.

“You aren’t going to climb anything after those bagels,��Rodden,” he laughed. “That’s like two days’ worth of calories.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I felt ashamed and dumb, like I didn’t know an important rule of climbing, or eating. The seed was planted.

Two years later, in a crowded stadium after a World Cup competition, one of my climbing heroes told me that she lost five pounds before every competition, then gained the weight back afterward. I started losing weight before comps, too, only I didn’t gain it back afterward. Weight loss, I decided, was a path to the podium.

One of the problems was: it worked. At least I thought it did. I made the podium at World Cups and won the Junior National Championships four years in a row, but I couldn’t celebrate my success because I was busy comparing myself��to my peers. No one ever explicitly told me to lose weight, but in my mind, being thin equaled��success. So I scrutinized how my competitors looked and what they ate or didn’t eat. I wanted to match or better them.

My thighs were skinnier than my knees until my late teens. I didn’t get my period��until I was 19. When I finally did, I felt like a failure—it meant I was gaining��weight.

The climbers I saw in magazines were desperately skinny��and usually scantily clad. I started to notice that most of my peers and competitors could still wear children’s clothing. I scoped out��people’s teeth and tried to guess��who threw up.��My eating became so stringent that I would go to bed hungry every night and only feel comfortable eating prepackaged��and preportioned��meals, so I knew exactly how many calories I was consuming.

Sadly, my behavior was only rewarded. I performed better, and I got more sponsorships with each competition won. I was featured in movies or advertisements��for first ascents and barriers that I broke. It was a win-at-all-costs system that, at the time, I was happy to be a part of. And it seemed that the culture was happy to have me there, as long as I was performing. I felt in control and empowered to manipulate my body to achieve the impossible.

But as I got older, nature took over. At some point, I no longer weighed as much as a child. I felt like an elephant as I matured.��I started getting my period regularly. I moved from an extra-small climbing harness to a small one. Women’s bodies change. While men just seem to get stronger, our center��of gravity shifts. We get hips and breasts. I felt that I was losing my edge.

I transitioned away from competition and toward��big walls and hard traditional climbing. But one thing that didn’t change was my eating or how I felt about my body. I was ashamed of it. I pined to have a six-pack and muscular arms so I would “look good” in a sports bra.

At the time, I was married to professional climber . At almost every photo shoot, ��’d be asked to take off my shirt. Tommy was able to leave his on. “Can you suck in your stomach,��Beth?” the photographer would ask. I hated wearing a sports bra without a shirt.

This was the same era when I established , a 5.14c crack at��Yosemite��that would take over a decade to be repeated—by a man or a woman. It was the hardest trad climb ever established by a woman, and here I was, worried that my stomach was too big.

In my late twenties, after a decade of pushing the limits of climbing, my body started to break down. Tendons, ligaments, bones—they all started to collapse after 15 years of deprivation. My climbing cascaded from elite to elementary in a matter of months. Depressed and��harboring��self-harmful thoughts, I gained weight. ��’d overhear people say, “What happened to Beth? She’s really let herself go.” Unable to perform, my pay was understandably cut. I felt like damaged goods.

I almost gave up climbing. I completely lost sight of why ��’d started in the first place: because I loved it, and it was fun. Fortunately, with time and a lot of work and understanding about what is truly healthy, I rediscovered that climbing was not and should not be a send-at-all-costs culture. It required changing my inner dialogue and��changing who I interacted with, both in person and online, and learning to walk away from unhealthy conversations. I had to normalize normal. It took years.

Losing weight worked��for my short-term performance gains��but was extremely harmful in the long run. We need to start celebrating a culture that values sustainability, longevity, and health.��It’s time to let go of��the unrealistic expectations of what our bodies should look like.

That doesn’t mean we have to lower our��standards of what’s possible in climbing. Last year I went back to El Poussif, a boulder problem in France’s��Fontainebleau Forest that I hadn’t tried since 2003. It’s everything I love about climbing:��technical and subtle and requiring��you to be strong and smart to be successful. When I first��tried it, I naively thought I would do it quickly. But I got shut down,��hard.��When I returned 15 pounds heavier, I assumed I was set up for a similar spectacular��failure.��But I tried to silence those thoughts.��I had been climbing well,��better, in fact, than I had since before having my son, and was starting to realize that maybe weight isn’t the only path to success. I always thought my previously leaner body would be higher performing, but I had never done a direct comparison. After a few hours, I��stood on top of the climb, elated. El Poussif��showed me that I could climb hard—harder even than before—with a heavier body, a healthier body.

This year��I started climbing in just a sports bra again. It’s been five years since I had my son, and I was tired of waiting for my prepregnancy body to come back. I am heavier and softer than ��’ve ever been, but I no longer feel the need to suck in my stomach for the camera. I know that representation matters, and that a simple act like proudly baring a soft belly in a distorted culture can make a huge difference. I hope that all climbers—men, women, young and old—can see examples of all body types being celebrated in climbing. I hope that the climbing community can change.

The post Climbing’s Send-at-All-Costs Culture Almost Ruined Me appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Scroll through Twitter or take a look at trending articles, and it’s clear that people’s feelings about food and body image are all over the place right now. The age-old “”��joke is reaching new heights. ��has been trending on and off for weeks. The headlines about healthy cooking and at-home exercise range from ��to ��to .��

I get it—we’re all looking for things to bond over right now, and body insecurities are, unfortunately, fairly��universal. Anxieties are running high, and eating��is a common response to stress. It’s natural to be��a little concerned about how things might change if you can’t stick to��routines. But frankly, all this fearmongering��around food and quarantine weight gain is��unhelpful bullshit, and it’s not something you need to buy into.

That’s not to say you’re bad for being worried about these things. We live in a fat-phobic culture that pushes all kinds of food and exercise rules��on us, whether we realize it or not. But instead of beating yourself up about (very understandable) changes in your routine, consider using��this time to establish a better relationship with food and your body by loosening the reins.��

Comfort Food Is Your Friend

If you’ve been gravitating toward��certain comfort foods and eating more than usual, that’s normal. “A lot of us use familiar coping mechanisms, such as eating, to help deal with anxiety,” says , a registered dietitian who specializes in intuitive eating. “These times are unprecedented, so we turn to what feels safe.” Eating familiar food can bring some normalcy to a time that is decidedly not normal.��

We use food as a source of comfort for several reasons. First, there’s that highly palatable foods temporarily activate��pleasure centers in our brains. Second, food is accessible. Therapy and expensive self-care habits are financially out of reach for many, and some inexpensive coping mechanisms—certain forms of exercise, time with friends and family, normal daily routines—may be��off the table for��now.��

Catalano’s advice? “Let it be comforting. Let it be joyful. Let it be satisfying and nourishing.” As this quarantine progresses,��you’ll develop new routines and other strategies for managing anxiety, she says, and you’ll probably start relying on food less.

Diets Usually��Backfire

When you’re feeling insecure or anxious, dieting might seem like a great way to regain some control. “It gives you a purpose,” Catalano says. “It gives you a plan that is supposedly going to change your whole life.”

The problem? Diets don’t produce lasting results. A in the journal��Social and Personality Psychology Compass looked��at existing weight-loss studies and found that virtually all dieters abandoned their diets and regained lost weight within five years. Likewise, an ��published in looked at 121 clinical trials studying different diets��and found that while most produced weight loss and improved heart health at the six-month mark, none led to significant weight loss or health benefits at the 12-month mark.��

Instead of changing your life for the better, restriction typically leads to overeating. “The more you obsess about what you’re eating or how much you’re eating, the more [you’re going to want to eat],” Catalano says.��If you have a complicated history with dieting or��food, you may feel especially out of control right now—boredom and stress could be the immediate trigger for overeating, but long-term restrictive patterns��are��the root cause.

Remind yourself that food isn’t the reason you’re feeling so uneasy right now. “The food is not the problem,” Catalano says. “The anxiety and the emotions are the problem; the food and the eating are the symptoms.”

Eat Intuitively

It might feel scary to give yourself permission to eat whatever you want, but it’s the right choice. “Eating enough is the best way to support ourselves during a time like this,” says Heather Caplan, registered dietitian and host of the podcast��. “Stressing about whether your meals are healthy enough��or macros are balanced��or calories are in check��may feel safe, but it’s not actually improving your health.” And don’t fall prey to any headline or company trying to sell��you an immunity-boosting food or diet—no single food has the power to do that.

Move Along

You’re probably moving less right now, which can be challenging if regular exercise is important to you. There’s nothing like being bombarded with existential dread and having��nowhere to channel that energy. But you can still use physical activity as a way to deal with overwhelming emotions. “Try to incorporate movement into your day, instead of just structured exercise,” says Caplan, who works with athletes and is a runner herself. “We can absolutely use movement like��walking, running, yoga, dancing, or even a virtual fitness class��to help cope with stress and anxiety. Let it be a coping mechanism without also being a way to try and manipulate your body.”

“You don’t have to be following a training plan or hitting a certain mileage every week to stay healthy,” Caplan says. In fact, a few weeks or months off from��intense exercise can be a good thing, especially for people who are used to rigorous workout regimens. “It will give your body time to relax and transition into a rest and recovery phase,” says ��a certified strength and conditioning specialist and founder of New Jersey–based .��“You may start to detrain a bit within two to three weeks, but��we have this wonderful thing called muscle memory. Once you get back to your regular routine, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how quickly your prior fitness level comes back, especially if you were very fit to begin with.”��

If you’re feeling really uncomfortable about scaling back, now is a great time to examine your relationship to exercise. Caplan recommends getting curious about why you want to move: “Is the desire to walk or run triggered by a bad body image moment? Is it to ‘burn calories’? Is it because you’re worried about weight gain?” Those are signs that you’re using exercise as a way to control your body, which can be stressful and unhealthy.��

Put It into��Perspective

At this point, you might be thinking: “OK, fine, but won’t all of this make me gain weight?” That’s a fair question, and the answer is: maybe. But try to remember that all of��this��is temporary—once you get back to a more typical routine, your body will likely also return to whatever a typical weight is for you. Although there’s a lot we don’t yet understand about weight “set points,” research indicates that your body will fight significant loss or gain in order to maintain a certain weight, and small fluctuations��are normal, Catalano explains.��

“Gaining weight during this period, I want to be super clear, is not a problem,” Catalano says. “If the worst thing that happens to you from this is that you gain a few pounds, then consider yourself lucky. Everyone’s routines, everyone’s habits, everyone’s quality of life is drastically changing right now.”

And if you do gain more weight than you’re comfortable with,��that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be less healthy. “Weight changes may be an indication of disease, but weight alone isn’t a reliable measure of health,” Caplan says. A�� in the��American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that 35 percent of obese subjects in several previous studies were metabolically healthy. And a�� in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked at a total of 100,000 adults in Denmark over a period of 40 years and found that those in the overweight category had the lowest mortality rate (that is, risk of death). In other words, the relationship between weight and health is complicated��and not perfectly understood.��

Just Do Your Best

The bottom line here is that you shouldn’t stress about what you’re eating or how much you’re exercising right now. We’re in uncharted waters with the COVID-19 pandemic and current quarantine guidelines, and it’s fine to turn to food as a source of comfort. While your exercise routine might change, you can still use movement as a way to decompress and establish some sense of normalcy. Remember that what’s happening is temporary, and trust that your body can handle it.

The post It’s OK to Eat More and Exercise Less During Quarantine appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

On a chilly morning last October, Jim DeBattista, 47, came trundling across the finish line of a one-mile run looking gassed. DeBattista, a youth football coach from Philadelphia, is a contestant on ,��the infamous weight-loss game show that rebooted on January 28 after being abruptly canceled in 2016. The mile run is one of many fitness challenges contestants tackle, and DeBattista is dead last. There is good news, though. His time has improved the most among all the players since their last mile run two months earlier, from 20 minutes to around 13, which has helped move him a little closer to the show’s $100,000 grand prize. When he hears the results, he gives a little fist pump. DeBattista may have lost the race, but he wins the day.��

��’ve come to check out the new Biggest Loser, which purports to have been “re-imagined for today’s audiences” by taking “a holistic, 360-degree look at wellness,” according to a press statement circulated a few months before its premiere. That could just be marketing boilerplate, but it’s in sync with a fast-changing fitness industry that has recently been retooling itself to be more inclusive, less abusive, and more focused on whole health than��looks��and performance. Or so its proprietors would have you believe.��

The episodes were being filmed just a few miles from my home in Santa Fe, on a 2,400-acre recreation complex called Glorieta ���ϳԹ��� Camps. The run ends on a grassy campus at the center of the facility. Nearby is a large man-made lake surrounded by clusters of outbuildings. Piñon- and juniper-studded hills��laced with hiking trails��rise in all directions under a cloudless sky. As the contestants race toward the finish line, the show’s two new trainers—Steve Cook, 33, a former bodybuilder from Utah,��and Erica Lugo, 33, a single mom who runs EricaFitLove, an online personal-training business—pace them, shouting encouragement.

The show’s new host,��former trainer��Bob Harper, stands nearby, ready to announce the results. At 54, he looks like a pillar of health, especially for a guy who��almost��died��a couple of years ago. In 2017, Harper had a heart attack midworkout at a gym in Manhattan. He went into cardiac arrest, but a doctor happened to be at hand��and initiated CPR, saving his life. His close call, Harper later told��me, increased his empathy for The Biggest Loser contestants—after his heart attack, he says, he “couldn’t walk around the block without getting winded.”��

In keeping with his newfound feelings of empathy, the revamped show is what he calls a “kinder and gentler” version of the original. Gone are the infamous temptations,��demeaning��stunts like digging through piles of doughnuts for a��poker chip worth $5,000��or being forced to carry around a slice of cake for a day. When Harper’s not lording over the weigh-ins with wizened commentary, he gathers the contestants for heartfelt therapy sessions. At the end of each episode, contestants are no longer dismissed by a group vote, as in the original, but are let go based on the percentage of their weight loss that week. Those who are sent��home are set up with an aftercare program that includes a one-year Planet Fitness membership, a personal dietitian, and access to a support group.

When The Biggest Loser reboot aired earlier this year, its most striking quality was not what had changed��but how much had stayed the same. I watched the premiere with a mix of disappointment and dismay as the contestants grunted and cursed their way through workouts, barfed into buckets, and got yelled at by Cook and Lugo. There was virtually no mention of diet, stress, sleep, meditation, or any other staples of the wellness revolution. Instead, in the first episode, the contestants were told by Harper that they had, variously, Type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, high cholesterol, and a “90 percent chance of dying from an obesity-related complication.”��

The public response to the revised show has been less than kind. “The Biggest Loser is a vile fat-shaming shit-show that science (and human decency) says never should have been reborn,” ��Yoni Freedoff, a family-medicine doctor and an obesity expert in Ottawa, on January 28. The next day on Jezebel, : “The Biggest Loser is an amazing illustration of how… America treats fat bodies as grotesque or tragic failures and exploits them for entertainment.”��

On the New Mexico set, when I asked what had changed and improved since the original, there was almost a winking acknowledgment from Harper and others that, hey, this was cable TV. While they had abandoned or toned down the show’s uglier antics, why would they alter a formula that worked? “We have weigh-ins every week, just like we did before,” Harper told me enthusiastically. “I mean, The Biggest Loser without a scale is like American Idol without a singer.”��

When The Biggest Loser debuted in 2004,��obesity��was being branded as a public-health crisis in most developed countries. By the early aughts, two-thirds of the adult U.S. population was overweight or obese. In May 2004, the World Health Organization released its to address the “growing burden of noncommunicable disease,” of which being overweight and/or obese was listed as one of the top six��causes. Much hand-wringing ensued about how, exactly, to overcome this��rising trend, but one thing seemed indisputable: losing weight was paramount.

At the time, diet culture was going through its own transformation. Carbohydrates were out; dietary��fat was in. Low-carb diets had been around for a while—the Atkins Diet, perhaps the best known, first appeared in the 1970s. But popular interest in this new paradigm surged after Gary Taubes’s story, “What if It’s All Been a��Big Fat Lie?,” appeared in in 2002, challenging, if not upending, the low-fat dietary standard that had been promoted by doctors and medical associations since the 1960s. Other fads were also underway—Loren Cordain’s The Paleo Diet was published in 2002, followed by The South Beach Diet in 2003—but the pitch was always the same: if we just ate the right stuff, like, say, bacon and eggs, the pounds would melt away and good health would return.��

Into the fray came The Biggest Loser. Plenty of weight-loss programs teased us with dramatic before and after images, including Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem, and Body for Life. But no one had showcased those transformations on television��while we watched. As the , around��2003, J.D. Roth, at the time a 35-year-old reality-TV producer, approached NBC��with the idea of a show about obese contestants transforming themselves into thin people by burning off huge amounts of weight. How much weight?��the network execs wanted to know. “A hundred pounds!” Roth told them.��

Prevailing medical wisdom advises that the most weight it’s reasonable and responsible to lose is about one to two pounds a week. But The Biggest Loser participants lost much more—in some cases, more than 30 pounds in a single week. The dramatic changes were��driven by calorie-restricted diets and unrelenting exercise. The show enlisted a pair of charismatic trainers—Harper and Jillian Michaels, the fiery fitness coach from Los Angeles—included plenty of real tears, and featured humiliating challenges��that made fraternity hazing rituals seem quaint.

Critics were appalled. “There’s a loathsome, mock-the-fatty undertow to The Biggest Loser,” Gillian Flynn ��when the first season premiered. “But what’s the point of making them squeeze in and out of car windows too small for them? Or forcing them to build a tower of pastries using only their mouths?”��(When reached by ���ϳԹ���, NBC Universal declined to comment on past or current criticisms of the show.)��

The point, of course, was ratings. Audiences, as well as the show’s participants, seemed willing to shrug off the abuse, given the end results. The first season’s winner, Ryan Benson, who worked in DVD production, shed an astonishing 122 pounds during the six-month production, going from 330 to 208. Some��11��million viewers tuned in to watch the season-one��finale, according to Nielsen ratings. The program was a hit and would carry on for 17 seasons, making it one of the longest-running reality shows of all time.��

Things changed in the early 2010s. In 2014, Rachel Frederickson won the 15th season after she lost 155 pounds—60 percent of her body weight, since she started the season at 260 pounds. When she appeared in the finale, she was unrecognizable next to the hologram of herself from the first episode. According to her new body mass index��of 18, she was, in fact, clinically underweight. Many viewers were aghast. The show seemed to have become some sort of dark, dystopian comedy.��

Audience numbers had been slowly shrinking since The Biggest Loser’s peak viewership in 2009, but between 2014 and 2016, they dropped sharply, from about 6.5��million to 3.6��million average viewers per episode. Then, in May 2016, the show was dealt a nearly fatal blow. Researchers from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) ��that followed 14 former Biggest Loser contestants over the course of six years. The participants had gained back most of the weight they lost on the show, and in some cases, they put on even more. Almost all had developed resting metabolic rates��that were considerably slower than people of similar size who had not experienced rapid weight loss. Although, on average, the participants managed to keep off some 12 percent of their starting body weight—which makes the show a success relative to most diets—the study indicated that the kind of extreme weight loss hawked by The Biggest Loser was��unsustainable. It was also , given the risks associated with weight fluctuation. (NBC Universal declined to comment on the results of the study.)��

The study may have emboldened former contestants to speak out about their experiences on the show. In an incendiary New York Post piece published shortly after the NIH study appeared, ��that they had been given drugs like Adderall and supplements like ephedra to enhance fat burning. Reeling from controversy, and with ratings down, The Biggest Loser quietly vanished. There was no cancellation announcement. It just didn’t return for season 18.

The Biggest Loser may have imploded on its own accord, but it may also have suffered collateral damage from a cultural shift that was undermining its entire premise. Even as the show was gaining popularity in the mid-aughts, health researchers and activists were questioning the effectiveness of a conventional diet and exercise—long assumed to be the unassailable solutions to weight problems. Maybe we were going about this all wrong; maybe our body weight wasn’t the issue. The problem was our obsession with losing it.��

Uncoupling weight and health is a tall order. It’s a medical fact that body fat can infiltrate organs, especially the liver, where it disrupts insulin action. Diabetes and cardiac-risk factors soon follow. But that doesn’t always occur, and since at least the mid-nineties, there has been ample evidence that there are��individuals who, while still at heightened risk for cardiovascular disease,��are what researchers call metabolically healthy obese—that is, fat but fit.

The idea that being fat might not be so bad—or at least less bad than our frenzied efforts to be thin—has been around since the fat-acceptance movement of the sixties. More recently, movements like ,��or HAES, which grew quickly during the nineties, have leveraged a growing mass of research suggesting that body size in itself poses fewer health risks than some popular approaches to weight loss. HAES proponents point out that, while body fat correlates with poor health, the role of weight itself as the sole cause of chronic disease is exaggerated. What’s more, they argue, weight cycling (losing fat and then regaining it) tends to result in more problems than remaining at a higher but stable weight. Hardcore diets and draconian exercise regimens can also lead to eating disorders, body dysmorphia (hating the way you look), and risky interventions like using weight-loss drugs.��

“There is such a sharp disconnect between what we know from scientific research and what is transmitted to the general public,” says physiologist Lindo Bacon, author of the 2008 book Health at Every Size. “It’s appalling, and I think The Biggest Loser represents the worst of it.” HAES has plenty of critics, who contend that the movement attempts to normalize obesity��and therefore poor health. But the larger point may be this: losing weight can be so difficult that it often thwarts��efforts��to develop better habits, like eating nutritious foods or being regularly active.

It took a while for market forces to catch on. Many��folks still put their trust in diet and exercise programs to get and stay fit. But the myth of transformation was largely created by marketing agencies—that is, before the government stepped in to enforce more transparency in advertising. The diet industry has been slapping disclaimers on products since 1997, when the Federal Trade Commission required Jenny Craig to inform consumers that dramatic weight loss “wasn’t typical” for those using its program.��

But such caveats hardly slowed down the industry. The diet business doubled between 2000��and 2018, according to the market-research firm Marketdata. By 2018��it was generating around $72��billion a year. It took a whole new generation to realize that none of it was working.

“Terms like ‘diet’ and ‘weight loss’ just aren’t cool anymore,” says Kelsey Miller, author of the memoir Big Girl and creator of the , which launched in November 2013 on the online publication Refinery 29. “People were ready to hear something that wasn’t about changing their bodies or manipulating their bodies��but rather accepting their bodies. A lot of beauty standards were ridiculous, and we were starting to listen to this rational part of our brain that was saying, Let’s just drop all this nonsense.”��

The market began to tilt in the 2010s, and many weight-loss companies struggled to stay relevant. Dieting had left such a wide wake of disordered eating, stress, and anxiety—along with more intractable issues like anorexia and bulimia—that many people started to reject the approach altogether. (One popular recent book is Caroline Dooner’s The F*ck It Diet.) The anti-diet movement champions intuitive eating, which lets natural hunger and satiety signals guide food intake as opposed to calorie counting and macronutrient experiments. Weight Watchers, which essentially created modern diet culture back in 1963, rebranded itself as WW, a wellness��company, in 2018.��

When the body-positivity movement gained momentum around 2013, largely thanks to social media, it spread the message that teaching overweight people to hate themselves as a motivator was a bad idea. One reason the rebooted Biggest Loser has met such strident blowback is that it brazenly reinforces those prejudices. Shaming and scaring overweight people about their weight has been shown to exacerbate issues like overeating and depression, not resolve them. The show��also reinforces weight bias. In one small��but well-publicized 2012 , viewers who watched only a single episode of The Biggest Loser came away with increased negative opinions about large��people. In 2019, scientists at Harvard ��that looked at public attitudes toward six social factors—age, disability, body weight, race, skin tone, and sexuality—and how they changed over time. Their results concluded that when it comes to implicit (or relatively automatic) biases, body weight was the only category where people’s attitudes worsened over time. However, explicit (or relatively controllable) biases��improved in all six categories. Because lower body weight also tends to correlate to higher levels of socioeconomic privilege in the United States, fat shaming functions as a kind of classism.

Still, there have been noticeable changes in some public opinions, thanks to influencers, models, athletes, and brands that have taken a more weight-neutral position. When Ashley Graham became the first plus-size model to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition, in 2016, the photos of her were heralded as a��victory for body positivity. In January, when Jillian Michaels ��expressing concern that��the pop singer Lizzo��might develop��Type 2 diabetes, she was swiftly denounced for “concern trolling” and body shaming. Lizzo��responded��that she “had no regrets” and “deserved to be happy.” She probably was.��She’d just won three Grammy Awards and was on the cover of Rolling Stone.

During my second visit to The Biggest Loser set, I watched the contestants grunt through a Last Chance Workout—the final fat-blasting gym session before the weekly weigh-in. The high-intensity circuit involved treadmills, rowing machines, battle ropes, free weights, and other torture-chamber accoutrements. The trainers barked. The contestants slogged away. I didn’t see anyone throw up, but they looked like they were about to.

This scene wasn’t a one-off: workouts and fitness challenges fill most of the show. It’s easy to see why they’re the most prominent. Who wants to watch people eat a salad��or sleep really well��when you can watch them doing box jumps until they crumple?

If dieting has fallen out of favor in recent years, so, too, has our frustrating and often fruitless attempts to sweat our way to thinness. Physical activity has many extraordinary benefits and is arguably the first line of defense when it comes to personal health. But research has taught us that working out is a weak strategy for sustainable weight loss. In 2009, in the wake of several prominent studies, a Time magazine cover story blared, “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin.” Ultimately, this wasn’t an argument to stop going to the gym, but it was a reason to stop flagellating yourself��in a quest to shed pounds.

Part of the problem is that many people understand weight loss to be a thermodynamic issue. This may be fundamentally true—the only way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you consume—but the biological reality is more complex. Researchers have shown��that the more aggressively we take weight off, the more fiercely our body fights to put it back on.��One of the insights provided by the 2016 NIH metabolism study is that such��metabolic effects persist for years after the��initial weight loss;��the body��lowers the��resting metabolic rate (by as much as 600 calories a day in some cases) and reduces the production of leptin, a hormone that helps us feel full. “The metabolic slowing is like tension on a spring,” says Kevin Hall, a senior NIH researcher who led the study. “When you pull on the spring to stretch it, that’s the lifestyle intervention, the weight loss. The more weight you lose, the more tension there is, pulling you back.”

A popular theory suggests that we have a body-weight set point that works like a thermostat: your brain recognizes a certain weight, or weight range, and adjusts other physiological systems to push you there. How, when, and how permanently that weight is set is a matter of much debate. It’s fairly well understood that genes play a significant role in determining our body mass—some of us simply put on weight easier than others—but around the late 1970s, the average weight of Americans began to climb significantly��relative to previous decades. It wasn’t our genes causing the uptick.

One of the thorniest problems in obesity research may be that we live in bodies engineered for a very different world than the one we inhabit now. Scientists often refer to our modern surroundings as an “obesogenic environment,” where a host of factors, including food supply, technology, transportation, income, stress, and inactivity, contribute to weight gain. For many years, the weight-loss industry has convinced us that, by disciplining ourselves to embrace the right diet and exercise, we could��whittle ourselves back down to a more socially acceptable weight. But it has failed to produce the kind of health outcomes we might expect. The reality is that the twin forces of genetics and environment quickly overwhelm willpower. Our weight may be intractable because the issues are so much bigger than we realize.

When I talked to trainer Erica Lugo on The Biggest Loser set, she seemed less fixated on weight loss than she’s portrayed to be in the show. “The fitness industry is so hung up on being a certain size or having a six-pack, and ��’ve struggled with that on the show a couple of times,” she told me. “Fitness is a mindset. I want people to know that, and I want everyone to feel accepted. I don’t want them to be embarrassed or feel like they can’t��do things or even try.”

A few weeks later, while I was watching early episodes, something surprising happened. While I fully understood how the show can manipulate my emotions, I still found myself caught up in the stories. I got misty when 400-pound Robert Richardson was sent home in the first episode because he had “only” managed to drop 13 pounds in a week. When Megan Hoffman, who’d been struggling since the start, started flinging tractor tires like a beast in the second episode, I was thrilled.��By episode seven��(of ten), the show hits its emotional peak when the five remaining contestants get video messages from home. The stories are human and relatable—a son with a recovering-addict mother,��a distant husband wanting his wife to “get healthy.” The message is clear: gaining weight may be as much psychological as it is physical.

Despite The Biggest Loser’s wellness head fake, and regardless of its woefully outdated tone and thinly veiled fat shaming, I now understood why, for its millions of fans, the show was a beacon of hope. How many of them, when faced with unrelenting negativity about their weight, yearned for inspiration and motivation, for agency, for the belief that they could reclaim ownership of their bodies?

I wasn’t sure how to reconcile this in our bold new world of woke fitness. How could you endorse a show conveying��the idea that self-worth was tied to BMI? On the other hand, anything that prompted positive change, no matter how small, seemed like a step in the right direction. Obesity never warrants discrimination, but acceptance and compassion shouldn’t eclipse��concern for��health risks either—a in The New England Journal of Medicine concluded that, by 2030, nearly 50 percent of Americans will be obese.��

About a month after the show wrapped, I talked on the phone with contestant Jim DeBattista, the youth football coach. I wondered how his experience had been��and how he was doing now that he’d been home for a while. “It’s going great!” he said cheerfully. “My big goal was to make this work after the contest was over. I knew I wasn’t going to be living in a bubble. But so far, I haven’t put any weight on, and ��’m eating more and working out less.”��

I asked what had been his biggest takeaway. “You have to surrender your old habits,” he said. “The old me led me to be almost 400 pounds. I had to completely change who I was, and the show helped me do that. I can’t lie. Now��when I see a Dairy Queen, I hit the gas.”

The new Biggest Loser wants us to believe that the journey of transformation is internal and individual, that we can shape our bodies to our will. But what if it’s not us we need to transform��but the world we’ve built? Real wellness—regular movement, nutritious food, social connection, access to health care, and quality rest and relaxation—can’t be at war with the way we live. It has to be baked into our lives, our schools, our work, and our cities. It may not prevent us from getting heavier, but it would certainly make us healthier. And that would be a big win for everyone.

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Forty-five��million Americans��, and though they might see short-term success,�� of those people regain the weight they lost. That’s because dieting, at least as we’ve been doing it,��.��

We’re made to believe that diets fail because we��lack willpower or discipline. But the odds are stacked against a person trying to lose weight through dietary restriction. Recent research has shown that our bodies have a set weight range largely , and a�� found that if you dip below your natural weight, your brain triggers changes in metabolism and energy output to get you back to normal and prevent further weight loss.��

Fixating on appearance and weight also affects our well-being. A ��published in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass indicates that many of the poor health outcomes associated with ��could instead be traced to the stigma against bigger-bodied people and the stress it causes.

In short, what ails us isn’t weight—it’s our obsession with it, according to��, a registered dietitian nutritionist��and New York Times contributor. In her��book,��, which came out in December, Harrison proposes that the solution isn’t weight loss—it’s burning diet culture to the ground.��We’re trained to believe that being thin means you’re healthy and being fat means the opposite, Harrison says, when you can actually be healthy at any size.

“Weight bias explains much if not all of the excess health risks in people with larger bodies,” Harrison says. “Framing people’s body size as an [obesity] epidemic is weight stigma.”

The overzealous pursuit of thinness—under the guise of a visual indication of health—has an unfortunate byproduct: the foods, lifestyles, and body types that don’t fit into this��narrow paradigm are demonized, Harrison argues. When a low-carb diet or a juice cleanse is dubbed “clean eating,” the natural assumption is that other ways of eating are dirty. Before-and-after photos celebrate weight loss��but also imply that a bigger body is a problem to be solved or a project to be worked on. Complimenting someone on looking thin suggests that something was wrong with their body before. Harrison also notes that our physical spaces reflect these ideals, like how bus and airplane seats only accommodate people of a certain size. Clothing stores often don’t carry sizes that accommodate larger bodies, and��if they do,��the options are typically few.

“The way [wellness and diet culture] conceives of health is bound up in healthism: the belief that health is a moral obligation, and that people who are ‘healthy’ deserve more respect and resources than people who are ‘unhealthy,’” Harrison writes. “Healthism is both a way of seeing the world that places health at the apex and a form of discriminating on the basis of health.”

Anti-Diet explains that discrimination itself can lead��to a wide array of��negative��: a�� from Obesity Reviews��found that repeated weight loss and gain can lead to blood pressure and heart problems. A�� in Obesity��found that people who had experienced�� in the past year were twice as likely to have a mood or anxiety disorder��and 50 percent more likely to have a substance-use disorder than those who had not.��

Institutional fatphobia can also affect the quality of health care that��larger-bodied people receive, Harrison explains. Women with high BMIs—above 55—are almost 20 percent less likely to get gynecological cancer screenings��and have to deal with disrespectful treatment, unsolicited weight-loss advice, and inappropriately sized medical equipment in the doctor’s office, a ��found. That kind of treatment leads larger-bodied people to avoid spaces where they can expect to be stigmatized, like doctor’s offices or gyms, according to research from the�� and the��. While there is a correlation between and health outcomes like hypertension or heart disease, high weight alone doesn’t necessarily cause poor health—there are other risk factors to take into account.

It is possible to change what and how you eat without becoming a part of diet culture yourself. Instead of going keto, quitting sugar, or committing to Whole30, Harrison suggests her readers try something a little simpler:��intuitive eating, which basically means eating what you want without stress, shame, or restriction��but with careful attention to how your body feels. (If you’re looking for a how-to guide on the approach,��check out Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch’s��.)

“Diet culture convinces us that honoring our hunger, seeking satisfaction, and feeling full will send us down the road to perdition. It tells us our instincts…are��bad and wrong,” Harrison writes. “We have the capacity to get back to a place where our relationships with food are as simple as they were when we were babies—where hunger and pleasure are nothing to be ashamed of, and where fullness is a signal that we can take our minds off food for a while.”��

Anti-Diet offers a much-needed unbrainwashing for anyone feeling stress, stigma, or shame about their appearance, diet, or activity levels. Even the socially conscious reader will have an aha��moment when Harrison debunks something they have accepted as truth. Though some of the more nuanced concepts are tricky to absorb, like the ways in which diet culture infiltrates progressive movements like food activism, Anti-Diet is an approachable read for anyone ready to untangle their eating habits from their self-worth.

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Since 1980, the government-issued have been the de facto bible of healthy eating. They’re updated every five years based on an ever-evolving body of nutrition research, but despite constant headlines proclaiming breakthroughs in diet science, they haven’t changed all that much in the past four decades. Nutrition science is always moving forward, sure, but the basic principles of healthy eating hold steady.

While some people are coming around to the idea that fad diets don’t work, that so-called superfood aren’t magic, and that healthy eating looks different for everyone, it’s easy to get confused about what advice to follow—and what diet habits to avoid. Here’s what you need to know about how to eat well, without obsessing over details or feeling guilty about food.

Prioritize Unprocessed Foods

The key recommendations of the most recent guidelines are to eat plenty of fruits,��vegetables, legumes, whole grains, lean proteins, nuts, and seeds,��and to��limit saturated fats, trans fats, added sugars, and sodium. Food activist and author Michael Pollan even further: “Eat food. Not too much.��Mostly plants.”

“Whole foods have stood the test of time��and have repeatedly been��shown to be healthy,” says Shivam Joshi, an internal-medicine physician at��the New York University��School of Medicine whose research focuses on nutrition. “They improve cholesterol and blood-sugar levels��and reduce the risk of several chronic diseases.” When foods are processed, he says, they’re generally stripped of important micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), as well as fiber. At the same time, sugar, salt, and fat are often added to make processed��foods taste better and go down easier, he says. So��these foods are less nutritious, and we tend to eat them in larger quantities.

This isn’t to say that processed foods need to be avoided at all costs. “Make processed foods the exception, not the rule,” says Kristen Gradney, a registered dietitian in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Abandon Diets and Labels

A fad diet or weight-loss program might yield some early results, but science overwhelmingly shows that diets just don’t work long-term. A in Social and Personality Psychology Compass looked at several comprehensive weight-loss studies and found that most people regain lost weight within a few years; in fact, a in Nutrition Journal found that dieting can actually lead to weight gain.

What’s more, diets typically come at a mental, financial, and social cost. “Diets are usually labor-intensive and take a lot of money and/or a lot of time,” Gradney says. This isn’t sustainable��and doesn’t leave people with the skills they need to actually eat healthfully. She recommends steering clear of any program that promises quick or easy weight loss, requires a “magic” product, or comes with a complicated set of guidelines or steps that must be strictly followed.

Even when it comes to plant-based diets, like vegetarianism and veganism, it probably isn’t necessary to be so extreme. Joshi himself is a vegan, but he doesn’t prescribe veganism or vegetarianism to his patients. Instead, he tells them to eat mostly unprocessed, plant-based foods��and to eat animal foods sparingly. “No research has really been able to show that going full-on vegan is better,” he says.

Just because traditional diets don’t work��doesn’t mean there’s no way to improve your relationship with food��or no value in learning to eat in a way that makes you feel better. Since dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch published in 1995, many others have adopted the approach for their clients and themselves. The��idea is to get in tune with your body’s particular wants and needs when it comes to food, and then use them to eat in a way that feels good to you. Even among dietitians who don’t practice intuitive eating, many focus on implementing healthy behaviors—drinking more water, eating more fruits and vegetables, not always using food to cope with stress and emotions—instead of prescribing diets.

Let Go of Food Guilt

Even the simple mandate to eat mostly whole foods can leave you feeling guilty if you slip up. It’s easy to think of nutrient-dense whole foods as good and processed foods as bad, but moralizing food comes with its own set of risks. “That way of thinking leads you to internalize: ��’m eating a bad food, therefore ��’m bad,” Tribole��previously told ���ϳԹ���. “It’s a really black-or-white way of thinking, but actually, health and nutrition exists on a gradient.” A truly healthy person is someone who is flexible and realizes that no one food can make or break their health—and that eating habits shouldn’t shape their sense of self.

Eating well is about long-term habits, not individual food choices. This also goes for things like cooking from scratch, shopping local and organic, and meal-prepping healthy food staples—all of them can contribute to healthy eating, but you shouldn’t feel guilty for not doing them if they don’t work with your budget, schedule, or preferences.

Approach Supplements and Superfoods with Skepticism

“There are cases when supplementation is appropriate,” Joshi says. For example, someone with a proven iron deficiency will likely be prescribed an iron supplement by their doctor, along with advice about eating more iron-rich foods if possible. “Apart from that, most people are overdoing it with supplementation,” he says. Before you decide to supplement your diet with a vitamin or mineral, check with your doctor to make sure it’s something you actually need.

Gradney explains that nutrients fall into two categories, water-soluble and fat-soluble. There’s not a significant risk of overdosing on water-soluble nutrients, like vitamin C and the B vitamins, since our body gets rid of whatever we can’t use. But fat-soluble nutrients, like vitamin E and vitamin D, get stored in fat tissues, so eating them (and thus storing them) in excess can negatively impact key bodily functions.

As for superfood supplements? Skip them. “People are so quick to supplement with ashwagandha or turmeric or whatever snake oil is the supplement du jour,” Joshi says. Often these are harmless, and sometimes there’s even a placebo effect. “But I have seen people with adverse outcomes, generally in the kidney or liver. It’s always a risk, because we just don’t know what’s in these things.”��You’re better off eating more fruits and vegetables, says Gradney, because they’re known to be “high in antioxidants, biologically accessible, and full of great nutrients without additives.”

Do What Works for You

Here’s the thing about dietary guidelines: they outline a way of eating that has been shown to yield the best health outcomes for the largest number of people. They serve as general advice, not personalized nutrition mandates. Ultimately, you are the only one��who knows how different foods and ways of eating make you feel. Honor that. Use your own personal experience to guide what healthy eating looks like for you. Gradney recommends paying attention to which foods or eating patterns make you feel your best, physically and mentally. If something works for you (and doesn’t stress you out or make you obsess about food), do it. Make sure you’re eating fruits and vegetables, drinking water, and moving your body every day, she says—otherwise, there’s plenty of flexibility in healthy eating.

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There’s no denying that childhood obesity is a significant problem. from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that one in five children in the United States is obese. Obesity is associated with a wide range of diseases and disorders, including heart disease, cancer, and joint degradation. It is against this backdrop that Weight Watchers, recently rebranded as WW, launched ,��an app that by having them track what they eat and regularly check in with a health coach. On its face, Kurbo may seem like it could potentially be helpful. But dig a little deeper, and there’s plenty of reason to believe it’s actually quite dangerous.

“The second you say you’re going to do something to combat childhood obesity, people are just going to assume it’s a great thing,” says , a California child psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders. “But that’s patently false,” he says. “If Kurbo has the reach it desires—millions of kids—then it will be the initiation of eating disorders for many, and people will die.” ��

Stotesbury isn’t just being dramatic: eating disorders have the of any mental illness. Studies show that between of children and adolescents with eating disorders die as a result.

And because children’s brains are still developing, they are to learned psychological disorders—ones that are largely influenced by one’s environment and behaviors—like anorexia and bulimia. that childhood weight loss programs can create or exacerbate disordered eating and body image issues. A found that over half of 18- to 25-year-olds who used what researchers called “healthy eating” and fitness apps reported negative feelings like guilt, isolation, and obsession. In a of 14- and 15-year-olds, dieting was the most important predictor of developing an eating disorder. Those who dieted moderately were five��times more likely to develop an eating disorder, and those who practiced extreme restriction were 18 times more likely to develop an eating disorder than those who did not diet. The National Eating Disorders Association youth focusing on “clean eating” can be just as dangerous.

For this reason, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued in 2016 advising doctors and families not to discuss weight loss or dieting with children, and instead to focus on healthy lifestyles.��

“I would never, ever, ever broach dieting with a child,” says Stotesbury, who has young kids himself. “Weight Watchers’ whole thing, which seems to be Kurbo’s approach, is ‘Eat whatever you want—but with rigorous tracking and math.’” he says. “And to me, this is eerily similar to dieting.”

Though Kurbo does not explicitly mention dieting on their website, the “” tab shows pictures of children ages 8 to 17 with one of two stats: how much weight they lost or how much their BMI dropped.

Kurbo uses a traffic light system—green for fruits and vegetables, yellow for lean proteins and grains, and red for foods like candy and soda—for kids to track and score their food consumption. The company��boasts that this system is “scientific” and founded upon a program developed and tested at Stanford Health Care. But that’s not entirely true. The traffic light system was first by Len Epstein, at the University of Buffalo. And while Stanford’s pediatric weight loss program uses the traffic light system, there are some crucial differences between the two approaches: the has screening for entry, and is built around 25 in-person weekly meetings between groups of 12 families and healthcare professionals.

Kurbo has no screening or in-person meetings (where trained professionals can more easily spot psychological distress), and only uses “certified” health coaches, who, , have no standard medical certification. (I reached out to Kurbo to ask about this, and a representative told me that coaches come from diverse backgrounds but are all “passionate about health, must pass an extensive background check, and undergo training on the Kurbo approach to behavior change.”)

None of this is to say that we should accept rates of childhood obesity as they are. But a questionable band-aid solution won’t help, and could do more harm than good. It’s not surprising that Kurbo is already facing skepticism and a on the internet. Many similar apps have been born and proliferated in Silicon Valley, where Kurbo makes it home. And while the intentions of the digital start-up culture may be noble, when it comes to health, a common theme has emerged: captivating stories, lots of hype, little benefit, and great potential for harm. Kurbo seems to fit this bill.��

“Addressing childhood obesity in a safe and effective way will require nothing short of an overhaul of culture and food policy change,” says Stotesbury. “Not a dieting app for kids.”��

Brad Stulberg () coaches on performance and wellbeing and writes ���ϳԹ���’s Do It Better column. He is also bestselling author of the books and . Subscribe to his newsletter .��

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