Prognosis: Misconception

This may or may not be a good podcast, however the vocal fry is intolerable. I can’t take the speaker seriously

This is a topic close to my heart and I am grateful to Emily for covering it. I am giving it 5 stars because there is so much stigma related to the subject, and bringing awareness to it is the first step. Defining a human’s identity by their weight or what they eat is ingrained in our culture, and this leads to mental and physical illness. I suspect that some of interviewees in this podcast were suffering from disordered eating and/or eating disorders, given how much food or the lack thereof consumed their lives. Putting food in a lock box may be effective, but it is a difficult way to live. There are so many undiagnosed eating disorders because they are often mistaken with “healthy eating”. Eating disorders can be deadly, and they are affecting even elementary school children. As a culture, we need to change the way we speak about food and weight for the next generation. Emily, please do a follow up series on eating disorders! I have a story to share about Weight Watchers. I am the former founder and owner of a wellness center dedicated to helping people with body image issues, disordered eating and eating disorders. I also teach yoga for recovery from eating disorders, and at my wellness center I taught a free community class. One evening, a woman came to class and told me that she had just come from Weight Watchers. She said that she had injured herself while running and had put on 10 pounds. I looked at her in shock because she was extremely thin. She told me how she has struggled with an eating disorder for many years. I could not believe that Weight Watchers would accept her into their program…AND they said that if she lost the 10 pounds and kept it off for a certain time period she could have a lifetime membership. She said it was cheaper than a nutritionist. She came to my class that one night and never came back. This woman was a school nurse at one of our local high schools.

If you are looking for a podcast to help guide and empower you to improve your health and body composition, then this is NOT the podcast for you. If you want someone to tell you why your half-hearted attempts at weight loss are failing and that you should just accept it, then this is the perfect podcast. Now let me be clear. There is no doubt that their are lots of toxic aspects to diet and beauty culture, and that the expectations are wildly unrealistic and of suspect origin. However there is also no disputing that there are countless markers of health that will worsen in conjunction with far gain, and will improve with reduction of fat tissue. This podcast uses half truths and cherry picked anecdotes to convince the listener that nothing will work, which is empirically false. The authors have ZERO hands on experience in then health and fitness world, and they ignore that there are healthy strategies for improving one’s health. If they were to at least end the episode with some tidbit about how the listener can empower themselves to get healthier in the context of the various social and physical complexities, then this podcast could be useful. But they don’t. It only seeks to disempower self improvements and feed the victim hood mentality that is so pervasive in todays world.

Re: the series on weight loss: This podcast should be given as raw tape to a fresman class in audio editing. The repeated reiteration of the same material, minute after minute is unneccesary. Get to the point, tell the story, and move on. You do not have to repeat yourself like the listeners are kindergarten children. And you cite TikTok as a source. Really? And nowhere in a podcast, especially from Bloomberg, which I highly regard, should the reporter say "I think" or "my experience" or anything to do with herself. Stick with "reporting the facts." This could have been a single episode, 10 minutes long and still conveyed the same content. We did not need six hours of her repeating herself. It appears Netflix, and the stretching of a story into multiple episodes, with relentless repitition, has influenced the production of this podcast.