#and makes it harder for people with eds to recover
it’s weird when i step outside of my firmly anti-diet social circle and hear a person talking about doing some pretty severe calorie restriction as if that’s totally normal. like how the fuck do i even begin explaining to someone i barely know that eating only 1300 calories a day is extremely bad for you and that basically everything they think they know about nutrition is false.
the average thin person is so afraid of becoming fat that they’ll do things which are extremely bad for them on every level with zero upsides (calorie restriction is even likely to cause future weight gain!) and this is completely normalized in mainstream culture. anti-fat discrimination is so deeply ingrained in the systems of our society and it’s so fucked.
Diet people never even seem to remember that a calorie is only a measurement of energy, specifically the energy it takes to raise the temperature of water by one degree. Theres no single solid definition of what a “calorie” is in your food and most labelling of such is just spitballing but people talk about it like it’s a literal 1 to 1 measure of how fat a food will make you.
I’ve read that the less you digest a food item, the rougher calorie estimates get. It’s hard to really tell how much energy you get from nuts, for instance.
The part that none of the dieters seem to realize is that if you drive a car slowly, you burn less gas.
Basically, they think “calorie in = calorie out”, so if you eat fewer calories, surely you will start burning your fat reserves, right? But the body has the option to lower your metabolism. Conserve energy by burning slower. Which means:
- the brain needs energy. You are now objectively stupider.
- the immune system needs energy. You are now vulnerable to more disease.
- the muscles need energy. You are now “lazier” and weaker.
Your body has decided how much weight is appropriate for you to carry, without your input, and it will alter your metabolism so that however much you eat, that weight will remain stable. Thus, to lose weight, you need to cut so many calories that the actual process of being alive consumes more than you have. While you’re doing this you better not be doing anything else, because you’re dumb, your emotions are not regulated properly, your reaction time is off, you’re weak, you’re tired, and you’re gonna get sick.
Oh, and after you do this, your body will more or less permanently downshift your metabolism for higher conservation because you’ve just convinced it that starvation is still a thing that can happen to it.
Exercise cannot make you lose weight, really, but it can convert the fat to muscle, which makes you healthier. It’s much better to be fat but muscular than to be thin and dieting.
