In Victorian England, weight-loss trends like the dangerous tapeworm diet were popular. While modern fad diets can seem less extreme, they often promise similarly fast results. However, these quick fixes can have similarly harmful consequences:

Not so fast

To illustrate the difference between gradual and extreme dieting, the video bids us consider two identical twins, Sam and Felix:

• Sam adopts a gradual approach, slowly reducing calorie intake and exercising regularly. This causes his body to burn glycogen stores before transitioning to fat as an energy source. Regular exercise helps Sam maintain muscle mass, which boosts his metabolism and supports sustained weight loss.
• Felix drastically cuts calories, forcing his body into starvation mode. He quickly depletes glycogen stores, loses muscle mass, and burns fewer calories, making long-term weight loss more difficult. Although Felix might initially lose water weight, this is temporary and unsustainable.

You cannot “just lose it quickly now, and then worry about healthiness once the weight’s gone”, because you will lose health much more quickly than you will lose fat, and that will sabotage, rather than help, your fat loss journey.

Healthy weight loss requires gradual, balanced changes in diet and exercise tailored to individual needs. Extreme diets, whether through calorie restriction or things like elimination of carbs or fats, are unsustainable and shock the body. It’s important to prioritize long-term health over societal pressures for quick weight loss and focus on developing a sustainable, healthy lifestyle.

In short, the quickest way to lose weight and keep it off (without dying), is to lose it slowly.

For more on all of this, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like to read:

How To Lose Weight (Healthily)

Take care!

Dr. Margaret Rutherford shares her insights from 30 years of professional experience:

There’s only one way to know

In this video, Dr. Rutherford discusses several (presumably pseudonymized) cases of people who came to her therapy office seeming to have their lives very much together when they very much didn’t, including the woman who came in with symptoms of mild anxiety, and then tried to kill herself, and the man who was outwardly an overachiever while consumed with feelings of guilt and shame.

She discusses how even the most skilled mental health professionals will tend to miss hidden depression, as they focus on visible symptoms from the DSM criteria, which may not reflect the patient’s reality, especially for those hiding their struggles.

So, the crux becomes: why do people hide their struggles? One does not go to the emergency room with a broken limb and then say to the doctor “I’m fine thank you; how are you?” so why do people do that when it comes to mental health issues?

The reality is that the shame of revealing feelings like shame itself, fear, and self-loathing keeps people silent, and in particular, research (Schneiderman et al.) shows that emotional pain plays a central role in suicide, and (per Blatt et al.) perfectionism can drastically alter the presentation of depression, making it even harder to diagnose through standard criteria than it already was.

As for what can be done about it? Dr. Rutherford advocates for a cultural shift where talking about emotional pain, including suicidal thoughts, is seen as normal and not shameful. That people need to feel safe expressing these feelings, to prevent tragic outcomes. Instead of judging or dismissing someone with suicidal thoughts, she encourages a compassionate and accepting approach to open up dialogue and understanding.

In short, that everyone can contribute to a culture that views transparency and vulnerability as strengths, helping reduce the stigma around mental health struggles.

And that’s the only way we’ll ever be able to recognize perfectly hidden depression—if people no longer feel that they have to hide it.

For more on all of this, here’s Dr. Rutherford herself:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like to read:

• The Mental Health First Aid (That You’ll Hopefully Never Need) ← This is about managing depression, in yourself or others
• How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To) ← This is about managing suicidality, in yourself or others

Take care!

The School of Life’s Alain de Botton makes the argument that—if we pay attention, if we keep track—there’s an understory to why we pick up our phones:

It’s not about information

Yes, our phones (or rather, the apps therein) are designed to addict us, to draw us back, to keep us scrolling and never let us go. We indeed seek out information like our ancestors once sought out berries; searching, encouraged by a small discovery, looking for more. The neurochemistry is similar.

But when we look at the “when” of picking up our phones, de Botton says, it tells a different story:

We pick them up not to find out what’s going on with the world, but rather specifically to not find out what’s going with ourselves. We pick them up to white out some anxiety we don’t want to examine, a line of thought we don’t want to go down, memories we don’t want to consider, futures we do not want to have to worry about.

And of course, phones do have a great educational potential, are an immensely powerful tool for accessing knowledge of many kinds—if only we can remain truly conscious while using them, and not take them as the new “opiate of the masses”.

De Botton bids us, when next we pick up our phone. ask a brave question:

“If I weren’t allowed to consult my phone right now, what might I need to think about?”

As for where from there? There’s more in the video:

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Further reading

Making Social Media Work For Your Mental Health

Take care!