19 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Does Slimming World make sense?
Yeah, I have a close relative who's done slimming world on and off. The whole "free food"/"syn" thing kinda makes sense, from what I've seen? The free foods are generally low calorie, filling foods like vegetables and carbs like bread or pasta are limited.
I'm not going to bat for the system, but it's not entirely nonsense. It simplifies the wide array of food properties (nutrition, calories, bulk, satiety...) into a discrete set of categories. It's much simpler to say "you can have one slice of white bread a day" than "white bread has x calories in it out of your y daily calories, mostly simple carbs, few vitamins or minerals and not much fat or protein, go figure out how this works into your diet".
Comment by Ybuzz at 27/01/2025 at 14:49 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
That's the problem with these things is that they make sense on a surface level, but don't help in a way that's sustainable or healthy for your relationship with food.
It's why most people who try any kind of diet regime simply gain back any weight they have lost, if they manage to lose any at all.
And it makes it appear that the problem is THEM, because 'its so simple to just limit yourself to one slice of white bread per day' rather than acknowledging that actually anything where you restrict one thing without also learning skills around having a varied and fulfilling diet is going to make you CRAVE that one thing you can't have, or leave you at a loss as to how to feed yourself in a way that isn't literally "one of these per day, one of these per day, two of those per day".
The absolute best thing people can do really is learn to cook, which allows them to understand nutrition and also to create things that taste good and AREN'T diet food - but that involves time a lot of people don't have, and it's incredibly daunting to learn that level of cooking skill and leave a lot of familiarity behind.
It's not just about being able to boil an egg and know how many scoops of ice cream you're allowed a week, it's about knowing how to create meals without relying on things you've built your whole knowledge of food around - a bit like when people fail at going vegetarian because they can only make the dishes they know with expensive meat substitutes that just make them miss meat.
Diets often have a paradoxical effect of making people bored of the 'healthy' foods and excited for the 'cheat' foods - learning to actually cook can make you *excited to eat nutritious foods* and mean that you can enjoy your old favourites sometimes without having to rely on them all the time, so they don't become this forbidden thing.