I woke up one morning to an email from my aunt with the subject line “Are You OK?” and the message “I hate that they are doing this to you. I’m here if you want to talk.” A similarly supportive and outraged email from my brother was further down in my inbox. I was wide awake now. What was this mysterious “they” doing, and why were my relatives so concerned about me? Clicking on the links in their emails sent me to a handful of blogs and news articles all referring to an irresponsible scientist who was recommending that people diet to the lowest weight they could achieve without dying.
As a psychologist who has spent nearly 25 years urging people not to diet, I was disgusted that anyone would recommend such an extreme goal. According to the articles, the person recommending this nonsense was University of Minnesota professor of psychology Traci Mann. Which was surprising, because I am University of Minnesota professor of psychology Traci Mann. And I would never suggest such a thing. Why were all these articles saying that I did? After poking around a bit, I had my answer: I did say those things. Repeatedly.
The offending article that started the cascade of hostility was a Q&A I had done for Goop.com. Yep, that Goop: Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle website, infamous for selling obscenely expensive luxury items and dispensing questionable health and diet advice. I participated in the Q&A for Goop specifically because I wanted to reach that audience of extreme dieters with my message to stop dieting and focus on health instead.
I figured my words on the page were my best defense. Until my own words became the problem.
But this was not a case of Goop misquoting me. In fact, I had been so concerned about them misquoting me that I had only agreed to do the Q&A if I could provide written responses to their questions and approve the final version. It was also not the case that I had chosen my words carelessly, inadvertently saying the opposite of what I meant. I used three words that I routinely used in talks, and that I had thought about for a long time before selecting for frequent repetition in my book on dieting. I thought they helped simplify a complex idea.
I was horrified that morning to realize that my three carefully chosen words could be mistaken for terrible diet advice if you plucked them out of the sentences they were in. I urged people to strive for their “leanest livable weight.” It looked like I was recommending that people diet until their weight was so low they could just barely cling to life. Did I mean that? Absolutely not. If anything, I meant close to the opposite. I was trying to recommend a sensible middle ground between the overly broad recommendation for practically everybody to go on calorie-restricting weight-loss diets and the overly lax suggestion that everyone should entirely ignore their weight and eat anything they wanted, in any quantity, at any time.
The middle ground I try to stake out is based on the idea that everyone has a set range of weights that their body will defend through multiple biomechanisms, including, among others, changes to metabolism and levels of satiety hormones. If your weight goes too far below that set range, those mechanisms kick in, and successfully maintaining that weight therefore requires an increasingly restrictive diet, vigilant monitoring of every bite, and a single-minded focus on that one goal. Most dieters find that their quality of life takes a severe hit when they try to live this way, and most regain the lost weight (often with additional weight on top of it) over time anyway, making the whole miserable experience counterproductive.
My recommendation was (and is) that people aim to stay within their set weight range, but since it is hard to prevent people from striving for thinness in our fat shaming culture, I conceded that they might aim for the lower end within that range. For most people, this weight is still heavier than what they consider to be their ideal weight, but I urged people to try to find a way to be okay with it. We’ve got to get rid of weight stigma and body image concerns, and I do research aiming to move us in that direction, but in the meantime, I suggest that by eating relatively sensibly, and by engaging in recommended amounts of physical activity, people could maintain the weight at the low end of their set range. I called that weight the leanest livable weight, by which I meant you would not have to sacrifice your quality of life to maintain it. What I most definitely did not mean is a weight at which you would die if you lost another pound.
I have received a considerable amount of criticism for daring to suggest that obese people could be healthy at their current weight and didn’t necessarily have to diet. So I was shocked that morning to read that Goop’s readers accused me of the opposite—of telling people to strive to be as thin as life could support. Their complaints spread to wellness blogs, Twitter streams, and ultimately to a legitimate scholar at a prestigious university who continually fanned the flames in public lectures, academic conferences, and comments in several far-reaching newspapers. My own three words were being used to attack me as irresponsible, accusing me of giving dangerous ideas to young girls who were susceptible to eating disorders.
As stressful as it is to get the communication right, what’s the point of working to discover something new if I am just going to keep it to myself?
As scientists, we have to be able to defend our conclusions. It’s part of the job, starting with oral exams in our graduate training, in which we endure tough questioning from faculty. Responding to lengthy critiques of our manuscripts is a normal and time-consuming stage in the publication process. But defending our conclusions in the public arena is a different beast, and while some people may relish it, I have always dreaded it. For the most part, I’ve avoided it. I figured my words on the page were my best defense. Until my own words became the problem.
It was agonizing to be accused of being part of the problem I’ve worked so long to fix, and knowing it was at least partly my own fault made it even worse. To hide away in my comfort zone and not speak up would leave the wrong views out there, uncontested. So I did fight back—by correcting those willfully misconstruing my words, but more importantly by changing what I said. Instead of those three problematic words (which will always and forever be in my book, on pages ix, 31, 90, 169, and twice on 188), I explain that consistently engaging in healthy behavior will make you healthier, even if it doesn’t make you thinner, and that health should be the main goal.
As stressful as it is to get the communication right, what’s the point of working to discover something new if I am just going to keep it to myself? And as humiliating as this whole experience was, it was helpful to see and correct the disconnection between what I was trying to say about dieting and what others were hearing. If that means more people can use the science to improve their lives rather than to harm themselves, then I might thank the Goop readers for a moment of insight and clarity, rather than cursing them for causing me embarrassment.
This article first appeared in Behavioral Scientist’s award-winning print edition, Brain Meets World.
