Bad Information
I found writing with comments inhibiting, so I’m discontinuing them. Substack has a great thing called “Notes.” You can do anything you want there: vent, tell me I’m insane, whatever you like.
This is about bad information, and how it affected three areas of my life: weight control, painting, and writing. Links follow text.
Eat Less, Move However Much You Want To, It Doesn’t Make A Difference
During Covid1, we were told to wear masks by people who knew that mask wearing was useless. They did it for our own good, so we’re told—wearing masks would create a cascade of “good” behavior, such as hand washing and shunning social contact. I trust that most of the people reading this are already reaching for the blood pressure pills, or wish they could, so I won’t waste further words on this.
This kind of “it’s a lie but it’s good for you” permeates the weight loss industry. Cards: I had a weight problem as a kid, sort of licked it as an adult, and now as age creeps up, it’s coming back, so the subject is important to me.
All my life, I believed that the way to lose weight was diet and exercise. I went through periods where the priority was reversed. During the 1980s, which saw the exercise boom, I sincerely believed that exercise was the key to weight loss. The magic key. Enough exercise ignited something mysterious in your metabolism and you’d be able to eat whatever you want… I tried all sorts of regimens but it never happened.
This has been proven to be total bullshit. I rarely say “the science is proven” but I think in this case it has been proven. Exercise is irrelevant to weight loss. If you want to weigh less, eat less.
Dr. Herman Pontzer has studied the Hadza people, one of humanity’s last hunter-gatherer people, for many years. He wanted to nail down the secret of their superb fitness. After surviving a harsh infancy and childhood, the Hadza live to reasonably ripe old ages, and they tend to age as gracefully as can be. They don’t get obese and immobile. As adults, they’re all wonderfully fit.
Obviously, their way of life fosters this, but what metabolic effects does living an active, non-junk food way of life have? He gave them the gold-standard of metabolic ward studies: doubly labeled water, and measured their “REE”— resting energy expenditure. What did he find?
The unexpected. The REE’s of the Hadza did not differ much from those of sedentary Americans. This was so astonishing that he ran the experiment again and the results replicated. He conferred with colleagues who did the same experiments on their subjects (other hunter-gatherers, as well as agricultural people who work long, hard hours) and they replicated this remarkable result:
An active lifestyle is no more calorically expensive that a fat slob lifestyle in the developed world.
So why are they so thin?
They eat less than we do. Yes, they also eat “healthier” food, but at the end of the day, they simply eat less calories. But there’s something more going on. They do move more than we do—what’s going on?
Dr. Pontzer conjectures that when we work hard—”exercise”—the body conserves energy in other places and for very good reason. Our ancestors simply would have died out if the simple “Calories in Calories Out” model applied to them. You don’t use up 360 calories when you run for a half an hour, or whatever.2 Your body conserves that energy, somehow. We don’t know how.
The “calories in” part of the model is valid—but the “calories out” part is tightly constrained by one’s metabolism, the product of millions of years of (you guessed it) evolution.
He does discuss the effects of insane, killing amounts of exercise (not the Hadza, they’re not insane), but even then, the weight loss is minimal.3
Just eat less.
At one point, Dr. Pontzer relates a discussion he had with a colleague who was disturbed by the findings. Paraphrasing, the colleague thought that Pontzer shouldn’t publicize the findings because it would encourage our already lazy, fat population to get even fatter and more lazy.
I admit it: for a nanosecond I agreed with him.
Then I said to myself, “For Christ’s sake! That’s terrible. People deserve the truth. They deserve it in principle and because ultimately the truth sets us free. If you had only known the truth 30 years ago, you wouldn’t done the crazy things you did. You wouldn’t have gone running in the rain with a cold. You wouldn’t have gone running at all. You wouldn’t have broken a wrist exercising on crappy equipment…” and so on. I like to think I would have exercised for all the good reasons. But not for weight loss.
As soon as I accepted what Dr. Pontzer said, a lot of things became clear.
Why do boxers have to restrict their eating when they’re in training for a bout? Why can’t they just eat a slice of cheesecake—isn’t that roadwork and sparring going to “work it off”? Nope.
Why do jockeys, who also have to exercise like fanatics, have to starve to make the weight? (Because it’s the calories, stupid.)
Why did the ballerina Jenifer Ringer gain 45 pounds when she entered the New York City Ballet? The more she gained, the more she exercised. She joined a gym and on top of a strenuous dancer’s schedule, worked out. Answer: she developed a stress-related binge eating disorder. Eventually she got her head together, lost the weight, and became a successful dancer.
Dr. Pontzer isn’t against exercise. He’s in favor of it. But do it for rational reasons, not because it’s going to help you lose weight.
A couple more thoughts about weight loss.
I highly recommend is Conquering Fat Logic, by Nadja Herman. Once obese, desperation compelled her to subject her prior assumptions to the acid test and being German, she took a blowtorch to them.
“Fat Logic” is “the complex grab bag of supposedly medical facts, well-meaning advice, homegrown ideas and fantasies that make losing weight not only difficult, but impossible.”
The Guardian article below goes into some of them but the book develops them much further. She doesn’t hesitate to take on societal norms and points out that we’ve become so habituated so obesity that normal weight has been revised upwards. By the time you finish this book, all of your assumptions about obesity will have been shattered — the only thing she doesn’t take on is exercise, but that’s implied.
The only criticism I have of the book is that she’s Teutonically discreet and doesn’t indulge in histrionics. She tells her story and gets on with it. Being American, I would have liked a little more emotion. A young woman doesn’t get to be over 300 pounds and then lose over half her body weight without some volcanic misery! Tell us, Nadja! Give us some emotion! It’s OK!
One last point. I reject the concept of cheating in weight loss. Bariatric surgery is a perfectly valid medical procedure, a desperate last step that’s saved lives. Sure, I’d prefer we have a society that doesn’t need this but we do so let’s get over it. There are many forms of useless surgery. Bariatric surgery isn’t one of them.
I also think there’s nothing wrong with taking a medication that helps you control your appetite. The only problem I have with it is that there will be side effects, as there are with all medications. But if a patient is fully informed and OK with that, go for it. My preference is to train your brain to eat less. But if you need help, get help. Articles like this one in Unherd are snobby shit.
But even if these apprehensions prove unfounded, the capacity of Ozempic to make weight loss not just effective but thoughtless is why it will almost certainly continue to occupy an important place in the medical consciousness, but a fraught place in our moral one.
Oh, fuck off. This is an already thin woman with a lifetime of zealous vanity (she’s a former “bodybuilder” — I can’t think of a stupider name for a trash sport that actually breaks bodies down and is dependent itself on drugs) lecturing people about weight.
Imagine: instead of sweating through gruelling workouts at the gym, the only effort you have to make is a weekly jab with a slender needle.
Look honey: you didn’t get a competition-ready body only by sweating through “gruelling workouts at the gym.” You took drugs. You drove yourself nuts, too.
No one is saying that taking a pill will give you a gorgeous body. These people just want to be able to fit into a normal seat on an airline. Nor do you have a gorgeous body. You once had a body that was a monument to sterile vanity and insane, commercially-dictated standards, which was good for nothing but preening in front of a judge who was probably paid off by the promoters. It’s not the body of a ballerina, whose purpose is to create beauty.
And you lecture us about morality?
I take an Aleve when I get a tension headache. Back in the day, I’d say to myself, “Face your problems. Lighten up.” Now, I say to myself, “I can’t solve these problems,” and I take an Aleve. I used to feel guilty about resorting to a pill. Now I don’t. I take the Aleve.
I occasionally have lower back pain due mostly to stress. I used to tell myself the same as above, “Face your problems. Lighten up.” Now I take a cyclobenzaprine to relax my muscles. I also try to face my problems and lighten up. I will also try to get my fucking core in shape. OK, Kat? But cyclobenzaprine helps.
There’s no cheating in wellness. Use whatever weapons you got.
But first, we need the truth, honestly told. I would have accepted an anti-Ozempic article by Nadja Herman, or Jen Ringer, but not a former “body builder” (i.e. body abuser) who never had a weight problem.
Loose Painting
I’m a very amateur painter. I gave it up to write a book and now I’m back to it.
I want to paint loosely, spontaneously, with big juicy brushstrokes.
Many people want to do this. There are websites and YouTube videos devoted to teaching people how to “paint loosely.”
I read them all. They all tell you to get a big brush. That’s always the first piece of advice.
I resolved to do a small painting a day and trust the process. No judgements. Let’s see what happens after thirty days.
So I got a big brush and my results were horrific. They weren’t good first efforts. I’m not being harsh on myself. They were just awful. They were ugly and I was unhappy painting them. Actually, I wasn’t painting, I was pushing around gobs of paint with a big brush. The more I pushed and wiped the worse the results were.
Luckily for me, I’m impatient and I gave up on my experiment three days in. But I didn’t give up.
I netsurfed and found Paul Foxton’s website4 . Here he debunks the myth of “loose” painting:
It’s the very economy of loose painting that makes it so hard to do well. If you’re going to show a collar or the back of a hand (the portrait of Jan Six, for instance) with a few brief strokes, you can’t afford to have anything out of place:
You need to be able to draw well. Everything needs to be in the right place. If it isn’t, it won’t work.
You need to have a really good grasp of values. Whether intuitively developed over many years or deliberately practiced, if this grasp of values isn’t there, the painting simply will not work
You need a very good sense of colour, both how to paint it accurately and how to manipulate it for effect
If you don’t have all of these, what you’ll end up with – and I’m sorry to say this – is more mess than loose.
Frankly, unless you can already work “tight” and do it well, you can’t work loose. Loosening up comes naturally after you’ve achieved enough enough control to do it well.
I thought about it and… of course, Paul was right. The ridiculousness of the “paint loosely” advice—just buy a big brush and you’ll be painting like John Singer Sargent in no time!—hit me.
Obvious? Only when someone points it out, and only when you’re willing to accept the truth after failure. I wanted so badly to paint loosely. So I just believed.
When I stopped trying to paint loosely, I began to enjoy the process. I wasn’t aimlessly pushing around paint anymore. I was focusing—and I started to have fun.
It’s all about information. And being willing to receive it.
The last example is writing.
When I started writing a novel, I had no idea what to do. There’s no end of writing advice online. I won’t bother to cite any of it; it’s all crap. I realized it was crap while I read it but I admit that two bits of information hampered my flow: don’t use adverbs, and the famous/infamous “show, don’t tell.”
The first is so stupid it hardly bears refutation. I think it’s peculiarly American, and although I am proud user of American vernacular, and I think Americans ought to use only Americanisms, that’s a dumb one. The Brits, on the other hand, go a bit overboard with adverbs. “Eyewateringly”? Seriously?
The second is a bit more complicated because, as Joshua Henkin acknowledges, there’s a grain of truth in it. But the concept is so misused that this grain of truth is actually far more harmful than the easily dismissible one about adverbs, and I wish I’d run across it before I’d written ninety-thousand words:
Why “Show, Don’t Tell” Is the Great Lie of Writing Workshops
A story is not a movie is not a TV show, and I can’t tell you the number of student stories I read where I see a camera panning. Movies are a perfectly good art from, and they’re better at doing some things than novels are—at showing the texture of things, for instance. But novels are better at other things. …To put it more succinctly, fiction can give us thought: It can tell. And where would Proust be if he couldn’t tell? Or Woolf, or Fitzgerald? Or William Trevor or Alice Munro or George Saunders or Lorrie Moore?
I’m reading Stoner5 now. I’m still near the beginning but I’m struck by how much “tell” there is in John Williams’ justly praised writing. In fact, it’s mostly tell. If a student in a writing workshop submitted Stoner, it would be returned with a stern, “Show Don’t Tell” written in black Sharpie.
Henkin:
Similarly, in the first workshop I ever took as a student of writing, when someone wrote “An incredible feeling of happiness washed over her,” the teacher said, “First of all, get rid of the ‘washed over’ cliché, and second of all, if in the course of an entire novel you can evoke an incredible feeling of happiness, then that’s a major accomplishment.”
But—that’s how John Williams writes. I can’t recall offhand whether he uses “washed over” specifically, but I did notice that he used another writing workshop no-no: the phrase, “he felt.” Horrors! (To Show Don’t Tellers, a writer is supposed to show the character’s feelings, not tell the reader.)
“She was nervous” is, I suppose, telling, whereas “She bit her fingernail” is, I suppose, showing. But is there any meaningful distinction between the two? Neither of them is a particularly good sentence, though if I had to choose I’d probably go with “She was nervous,” since “She bit her fingernail” is such a generic gesture of anxiety it seems lazy on the writer’s part—insufficiently imagined.
Obsessing about “show don’t tell” will destroy your creativity.
The sentence “John was a handsome man” is not a handsome sentence, and though a writer is welcome to use it, she shouldn’t think it will do much work for her…
It depends what comes before “John was a handsome man” and what comes after. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this—too much time.
In “show don’t tell-world” you’d replace “John was a handsome man” with scenes of people reacting to John’s gorgeousness, or perhaps John catching his reflection in a mirror (which might be fine, as an aside) but then you’d get all caught up in describing these scene and at some point you are going to have to let on that they’re reacting to John’s handsomeness (or he is) not that he looks like The Elephant Man. It all depends on the idea you’re trying to convey. What’s going on here? What’s the action, who are the characters?
In other words, you’re going to have to tell and getting all obsessed and self-conscious about it is a killer.
“Mary was a shrew” is pretty bad, but introducing Mary screaming doesn’t, sorry, tell us anything. Maybe she’s screaming for a good reason. Tell us.
In other words, the writer is getting imprisoned in a thicket of second-guessing, instead of writing.
Besides, the distinction between showing and telling breaks down in the end.
Yes.
Just write your story. All good writing is a combination of show and tell, so skillfully woven together that you can’t distinguish between the two.
In the last few years, Stoner has been rediscovered and reissued, to rave reviews (oops, sorry for the cliché). Writing instructors everywhere are gnashing their teeth. Also a cliché.
Links:
Running and Calories (runner beware)
Ozempic Is Cheating - No It’s Not You Snotty Piece of Shit
How To Loosen Up Your Painting And Why You Shouldn’t Do It
Why “Show, Don’t Tell” Is the Great Lie of Writing Workshops
Which seems never-ending…..
Dr. P thinks that all of these stats are junk. But even if they weren’t, they still wouldn’t mean what Asics and Medical Today say they mean.
He doesn’t go into the whole vexed issue of losing body fat as opposed to weight, that’s a whole different kettle of low-carb fish, although he does dispose of low-carb dieting myths.
I actually knew who this guy was from years ago and rediscovered him.
Not that kind of stoner! It’s a quiet, melancholy book about a mid-century American life that reminds me of Sinclair Lewis.