This morning I accidentally came across an article that claims that one secret to to weight loss is to poop. Yes, you read that right. They say dropping a log, feeding the beavers, baking a loaf, dropping the Cosby kids at the pool, honk out a dirt snake, unleash the brown bear, lay down the underwater cable, feed the porcelain stallion a brown bone - to poop, will make you lose weight.
In other news, scientists uncover the long lost art of amputating limbs as a form of losing weight!
How idiot do you have to be to believe this kind of shit? Of course you will lose weight! Using the same sort of reasoning, I have an even better proposal for weight loss: stop eating! Let's see, when we eat some food, we gain whatever that food weighed, right? So if we don't eat it, we won't put on that weight - amazing! Even better, not eating has other advantages. Everybody knows that if you eat less you will lose weight, so if you don't eat at all, just imagine how much weight you can lose - fantastic! How is this not a weight loss trick used everywhere?!
The article is using a fallacy as a marketing trick. Of course we lose weight when we pass stools (am I alone in thinking this term is so "clean" that it's annoying?), but that's not the kind of weight loss that matters. What people want is not even to lose "weight", but to lose fat. If you lose muscle mass, you're also losing weight, so why isn't that promoted as a weight loss method as well? Unfortunately some idiots do that, but that's a story for another time.
Not passing stools has a name: constipation, and it can be a serious problem with dire consequences.
This stuff about cleansing your colon and other such crap (see what I did there?) is just bullshit (and again!). Everybody does their service normally and excretes whatever they have to excrete. If you don't, you have a problem. Unfortunately, just like so many other weight loss "secrets", the basis for this can't be denied: when we poop, we lose weight. Of course we do, but that has nothing to do with proper, durable weight loss, which is what people want.
What matters to people is durable fat loss, and not only can't you dump fat down the toilet, you would also put on weight again as soon as you had your next meal, so how can anyone think this works?
Unfortunately the weight loss industry (even the name is wrong) takes advantage of the lack of critical thinking that most people have and shoves these lies into our collective minds, with idiots propagating them via articles like the one I mentioned. And it's not hard, because there are so many people desperate to lose weight that they will try anything.
Please don't be fooled by this kind of lies. Use your brains, think about things instead of taking them as gospel just because you read them in some magazine or website. Governments, reality shows and prime time sports already do enough damage by spreading disinformation and promoting cerebral apathy; we shouldn't contribute to either.
