Hey team, Coach Will here.
I grew up in a science-obsessed home. My father is a pioneer of artificial intelligence, and spent his career as a professor of computer science.
My mother worked in biomedical engineering for a couple decades before switching course and embarking on a second career as an elementary and middle-school science teacher.
As a child of these scientists, the concept of experimentation and inquiry for me was akin to religion in other households: a foundational set of beliefs that shaped how I made sense of the world.
I had trouble (and still do) believing things that I have not proven for myself with a certain degree of certainty, but the only source of belief superior to rigorous personal inquiry was scientific truth. That is, the stuff that had been hypothesized, tested, and concluded based on a body of controlled experiments.
Science offers me ground to stand on, stability in a world that more and more tends to obscure the very idea of facts as real.
And while science doesn't explain everything--there's still more about the universe that we don't know than we do--it provides a solid backstop as we all continue to try and make sense of our world.
It can't be legitimately denied, or forgotten, or ignored. It may not make sense, or give the full picture, but is never just a figment of imagination.
Which is why we (Hannah and I) have been diligent about building The Fitness Alchemists around the established facts offered by science. While the "cutting-edge" anec-data is enough for other coaches, we decided early on that we were only comfortable training humans with tools based on the realities of the scientific literature.
But while a part of what we do is actual, physical movement that we have grounded in science, another huge part of fitness coaching lies in the abstract realm of goals, motivation, and mindset.
And one of the most common goals people have coming into fitness (not just our program) is weight-loss.
So I started to get curious about the science around weight-loss.
What I found left me dumbfounded.
There is no clinical evidence supporting any method for long-term weight loss.
No intervention--and there have been dozens of studies exploring this exact question--shows a way of losing weight and maintaining that lower weight long-term for all but a tiny percentage of people. (Almost every diet or exercise intervention causes temporary weight-loss).
But you know what the science does show? That stigmatizing weight and body size is literally bad for our mental and physical health. Again, this is supported by several studies.
There's plenty more science, too, that undermines most popular, "common-sense" thinking about body size, much more than I can get into here.
Now, I have wrestled with this science because, again, as I coach I am confronted almost daily with the desires of some of my students (as well as potential clients and society at large) to lose weight. And one thing I'm sure of is that I care deeply about helping my students.
But how could there be such a gulf between the seemingly-rational goals of so many people (weight-loss) and the reality of the science?
As I dug deeper, I found a perspective that helped me make sense of this dynamic: we are all (consciously or not) at the mercy of something called diet culture.
This was a new term for me, and it might be for you, so I'll define it. Diet culture* is the system of beliefs that:
Worships thinness and equates it with health and moral virtue;
Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status;
Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others;
Oppresses people who don't match up with its supposed picture of "health,"
This is an issue that, considering my profession, I feel strongly about addressing publicly, starting now.
And be ready: the more I learn, the more I will be talking about it, if only because those around me should know clearly where I stand.
And as always for me, it starts with the science, which indicates: diet culture is an insidious, undermining reality of modern life, and needs to be dismantled.
What do you think?
To finding your gold,
Coach Will
*definition from Christy Harrison's website, which I strongly recommend as a starting point for learning about this issue