Mindful eating is the best way to lose weight

The argument

Mindful eating is the practice of eating food slowly, savoring your meal and eating it with heightened awareness. Proponents of this position contrast that with dieting in terms of what each asks of a person: whereas diets make people focus on the limits of what they can eat, mindful eating simply encourages people to stop when they're full. The mechanism is physiological rather than a matter of willpower. Our bodies sense fullness slowly, so by eating more slowly, we end up eating less — the signal arrives while there is still food on the plate rather than after it has been cleared. Less food results in a lowered caloric intake. As a result, mindful eating produces weight loss by the same route a calorie-restricted diet does, without anyone having to count anything. Experts state that this practice is "highly likely" to result in weight loss without forcing persons to adhere to any specific dietary rules. The second half of the argument concerns what happens afterwards, which is where proponents say conventional diets fail. Because this practice can be so easily applied without altering one's diet, people are more likely to stick to it: nothing is forbidden, no foods have to be replaced, and there is no point at which the regime formally ends and ordinary eating resumes. Diets result in short-term weight loss that tends to be regained, precisely because they are experienced as a temporary departure from how a person normally eats, whereas a practice like mindful eating results in permanent weight loss because it changes the ordinary manner of eating itself. Judged by the outcome that actually matters — weight kept off rather than weight lost — this makes mindful eating a better way to lose weight than any traditional diet, while still working through the same lowering of calorie intake that diets pursue directly.

Context

With skyrocketing obesity rates in America and the world as a whole, people are becoming desperate to find a diet that works. Buddhist monks have practiced mindful eating for centuries, but the practice only recently became popular in America.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Mindful eating does not necessarily result in lowered caloric intake. Although it may make people eat more slowly, they could be savoring rich, calorically dense foods, thus producing an increase in calorie intake. Since fullness is a subjective feeling, some people may continue to overeat. Eating mindfully is a good practice, but it’s not a diet. Diets are essential for weight loss because without them people have no structure to guide them in reducing their caloric intake. Mindful eating can accompany a traditional diet, or be a way to maintain weight loss, but it is unlikely to produce weight loss when practiced by itself.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] This is a definition rather than a premise, and it carries the argument's central difficulty. Stopping when full depends on interoceptive signals that are unreliable in precisely the population the advice is aimed at, and that are affected by sleep, stress, medication and the palatability and energy density of the food. [Rejecting P2] The mechanism is plausible but the size of the effect is the question, and none is given. Eating rate does influence intake in short experimental studies, yet trials of mindfulness-based eating programmes report modest and inconsistent weight change, with several finding effects on binge eating and on the relationship with food but no significant weight loss. "Highly likely" is attributed to unnamed experts. [Rejecting P3] The adherence claim is the strongest part of the case and the least evidenced. Weight regain after dieting is well documented, but no comparable long-term follow-up is offered for this practice, and "permanent" is a claim no weight-loss intervention has established. The counter identifies the gap directly: attention to fullness without any attention to what is eaten is compatible with a rise in intake when the food is energy-dense.

Framing