EVERY DIET IS A FAD DIET

Oh boy here we go again.  I’ve been on the nutritional fringe since 2002, because a lot of my early “education” in physical transformation came by way of the GameFAQs martial arts message board.  By 2002, I had already been engaging in regular exercise for over 2 years, and had lost 25lbs through portion reduction (still eating the same foods, just less of them) and had been training in Tae Kwon Do since 1994 while also being a massive video game nerd (among other hobbies), which is how I ended up in this specific corner of the internet.  And for reasons I myself am not particularly sure of, at this specific moment in history, the Atkins diet had gained a resurgence in popularity, and the loudest members of this corner of the internet championed it and ketogenic diets in general.  And exposed to this “radical” idea (in truth, my Grandfather and Grandmother had both already employed the Atkin’s diet a few years earlier and successfully lost a significant amount of weight with it, while my family considered them all nut jobs at the time), I drank up ALL the (low-carb) Koolaid, employed a terribly stupid attempt at it by living off of lunch meat and fast food burgers without the bun, and thus my journey into nutritional fringe was well underway.  And over 20 years later, I still find I prefer low/no-carb diets and tend to look, feel and perform my best in this manner, and I STILL find people chiding me for “falling for a fad diet”, to which I retort that, today: EVERY diet is a fad diet.

It's amazing how you had to be around in the 90s to even understand this

 

How so?  Well let’s examine the initial argument.  Those that deride low/no-carb/paleo/intermittent fasting/carb cycling/etc nutritional approaches tend to prose that the NON-fad approach to nutrition would mean simply counting one’s calories and eating the right amount of macronutrients based on one’s goals (weight gain, weight loss, or weight maintenance).  Some will simply end the conversation there, existing in a camp of “If It Fits Your Macros”, whereas some will further contend that it’s ideal to eat nutritious foods in this pursuit, which tend to be those foods that are NOT hyper-processed, and, instead, exist in a mostly whole/unprocessed state.  Eating in a manner OUTSIDE of this confine is considered a “fad diet”.

 

Ok, so now let’s look at what a fad is, and in doing so I’m going to employ the horrible trope of using the dictionary.  Oxford defines it as “an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, especially one that is short-lived and without basis in the object's qualities; a craze” and Merriam-Webster goes with “a practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal”.  So why are ketogenic diets, paleo diets, intermittent fasting, etc etc “fad diets” while calorie counting and macro tracking are non-fad diets?  Because of their recency in employment?

I have that talent

 

Well hold onto your butts folks: when did we discover the calorie?  In the early 1800s, Nicolas Clement created the definition of the calorie as it related to thermal energy, but it wasn’t until 1887 that Wilbur Atwater used a calorimeter to measure energy in food, and it wasn’t until the late 1890s that he published food composition tables to allow for the measurement of calories in food for public consumption.  When did we first see ketogenic diets employed?  The first documented case was Dr. Russell Wilder in the Mayo Clinic in 1921 YET we had William Banting recommending a low-carb/high-fat nutritional approach in his “Letter on Corpulence” in 1863.  This means that macronutrient restriction, as a form of nutritional intervention, predates calorie counting OR, at most, is only 30 years behind.  And when you factor in that we emerged as Homo Sapiens about 300,000 years ago, we really can’t let 30 years make or break what is and is not a “fad”.

 

But let’s go even FURTHER down that rabbit hole, shall we?  What of those that are claiming to quit being so weird about nutrition and just eat a healthy whole food diet?  Healthy whole foods ARE a fad.  If we’re judging fads as short-lived/followed for a time with exaggerated zeal, the modern food environment is INCREDIBLY faddish.  Because if you’re eating any vegetables TODAY, those things flat out were NOT around for our ancestors to eat.  Almost every vegetable we eat today is derived from Brassica oleracea, a type of wild mustard plant that we, as a species, SELECTIVELY bred in order to create the vegetables we WANTED to eat, vs what nature actually provided us.  Modern fruits are also a total abomination, with bananas that are almost pure sugar and seedless, compared to the heavily seeded bitter monstrosities that our ancestors had access to.  Apples have been engineered to ridiculous proportions, and we have grapes that taste like cotton candy for the love of god.  And don’t think I’m letting the carnivore community off easy here too: modern livestock and farming is abhorrent from a historical-biological perspective, with animals selectively bred to remove all biological defensive advantages and effectively only exist SOLELY as a food source, fed on a diet of bioengineered feeds and shot up with all manner of substances to improve their yield.  And even if you try to hunt, you’re STILL not out of the woods (pun partially intended), because your game meat is most likely getting into our frankencrops and eating that stuff.  I know the deer here get into the sweetcorn and will end up with marbling in their meat: that should NOT exist in nature.

Even Bobby can tell this isn't "natural"

 

And all of this is if you are TRYING to “eat clean, healthy whole foods”.  If you’re eating ANYTHING out of a box, you’re DEFINITELY eating a “fad diet”.  Food processing is a VERY modern advent as far as our nutrition goes, with the very basics of it dating back to dehydrating/salting meat to preserve it but the more contemporary approaches resulting in us having stuff like “blue raspberry pancake syrup” amongst other monstrosities.  Count your calories while eating your Pop-Tarts and explain to me how you’re not eating a “fad diet”.

 

Because we, as humans, have constructed an artificial food environment such that there is NO diet that ISN’T a fad diet.  If you look at any other animal on this planet, NONE of them have to think about how they eat: they just do it.  They know WHAT they’re supposed to eat, and they know how MUCH they’re supposed to eat.  The only fat animals that exist are the ones that we domesticate, and that’s primarily because we feed them the foods that WE made, similar to how we, as humans, have gotten fat and sick eating our own foods.  We, unfortunately, no longer exist in an environment where we can just eat what we’re supposed to eat until we’re done eating it and move on with our lives.  Unfortunately, SOME manner of nutritional intervention is necessary in order to survive this environment we’ve created, and ALL of them are fads.

Meanwhile, Crom laughs at your modern solutions

 

With that being said, it means there’s no shame in following a fad diet: simply follow the one that suits YOU.  EVERY manner of nutritional intervention that exists is a VERY recent form of intervention, for it’s only very recently that we’ve created this impossible environment for us to navigate.  300,000 years ago we arrived on the scene and knew what to eat and how  much of it to eat, but as time went on and we got “smarter”, we stupidly tried to circumvent the system and ended up with quite the Faustian deal.  So if your way of surviving is to try out this new-fangled calorie counting so that you can make sure you don’t eat too much of the weird mutant “food like substance” we have to live off of: go for it.  If your approach is “I’ll eat the animals but not the plants”, that’s cool too: you’ll probably avoid a lot of bad stuff by cutting out so much stuff.  If your approach is “I’ll only eat during THESE times”, you’ll probably eat LESS of that weird stuff, since you’ll be eating less in general.  And when the new fad comes out, give THAT one a go and see how you like it, because it looks like, for the foreseeable future, there really isn’t going to be any other solution readily available to us.