Eat, Fast, and Live Longer?

Dr Michael Mosley, a television presenter and author who popularised intermittent fasting and the 5:2 diet, has died at the age of 67. And I think there is a lot we can learn from his untimely passing. 

Who Was Michael Mosley?

I want to start by saying that I am not happy that Michael Mosley is dead. I know this may sound obvious to most, but I don’t want anyone reading this to think that I am somehow rejoicing or feeling smug about his passing. That being said, death is a part of life and everybody dies. His death is no more or less important than anyone else’s.

So let’s begin by talking about Michael Moseley the man. He was private school educated. He went to Oxford University to study philosophy, politics, and economics. Then he decided he wanted to study medicine. While he was still in medical school, he decided that he didn’t want to be a doctor, so whilst he completed his degree, he actually never practiced.

The television broadcaster

Instead, he joined the BBC and worked as a TV presenter and broadcaster.  Many of us know him because he is widely credited with popularizing intermittent fasting, in particular the 5:2 diet. He did a documentary for BBC Horizon called “Eat, Fast, and Live Longer,” where he convinced many of us that IF was the key to longevity. 

Dr Mosley told us that if you did the 5:2 diet, your cholesterol levels would come down, your blood sugar levels would come down, your blood pressure would come down, and you would live longer. In 2013, soon after his documentary, he published a book called “The Fast Diet”. This was hugely successful and cemented him as an “expert” in nutrition and weight science from that moment forward.

He was hardly qualified

Now, Michael Mosley had a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University. He also had a medical degree where he would have had very little, if any, training in nutrition. In fact, according to his Wikipedia profile, he planned to go into psychiatry. So, he was by no means an expert, but he did retain his title which no doubt added a lot of credibility. Many people were under the very misguided impression that he was actually a medical doctor.

Five years later, he published his book “The Fast 800 diet”. In this book, he combined intermittent fasting with starvation (aka very low-calorie diets). It’s in the title: “The Fast 800: How to Combine Rapid Weight Loss and Intermittent Fasting for Long-Term Health”. According to Michael Moseley, the new key to longevity was to intermittently fast and starve yourself.

Promoter of crash diets

Following this book, he hosted a television program called “Lose a Stone in 21 Days.” For those who don’t know, a stone is 14 pounds. A number of experts expressed concerns about the promotion of crash dieting.

He also did a program called “Who Made Britain Fat?” By this point in time, I must confess that I was no longer paying any attention to Michael Mosley. I had escaped diet culture, so thankfully I didn’t bother to watch that one. But the title alone was stigmatising enough.

Who Made Britain Fat?

Who made Britain fat? Well, that’s a very interesting question. I would argue that Dr Mosley had a role to play in that. Allow me to explain…

As we all know, when you commence a period of restriction, you start losing weight almost straight away. And that’s usually in the form of lean mass—water, muscle, etc. It takes about five times the calorie deficit to lose fat mass compared to lean mass, so your body will lose lean mass first. That’s just physiology.

And then you hit a plateau, when you run out of lean mass to lose and you start working on losing the fat mass. Eventually, you hit what we call the nadir – the maximum level of weight loss possible for this particular weight cycle.

What goes down must come up

That’s it. You’re not losing any more – a variety of factors including your metabolic rate, hormones, gut health, and genetics have made sure of it.

And what happens after that? You start restoring weight. And you continue restoring the weight you lost until you hit your baseline and, more often than not, beyond. In other words, you end up restoring more weight than you lost in the first place. We call this weight cycling.

So who made Britain fat? Well, the weight loss industry has had a large role to play. One of the main reasons why the nation is getting “fatter” is because we keep going on diets.

Who’s telling the truth?

Michael Moseley tried to convince the world that intermittent fasting would help you live a long, healthy life. And at 67 years old, he died from natural causes. I wouldn’t call that a long life. I wouldn’t call it a short life either, but it’s definitely less than the average life expectancy for a cisgender heterosexual white wealthy man

Weight science is bad science. When I say bad science, I mean the methods of research, data collection, and interpretation are all flawed. This bad science has existed for well over a century, and we’re all pretty conditioned to believe what we’re been told.

We’ve built an entire narrative on foundations made of misinformation, and now there’s a huge skyscraper sitting on those foundations.

Money, Power, and Influence

There’s also a lot money involved. The entire weight loss industry, including pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, and weight management programs, makes money from selling thinness as a means of controlling our health and longevity. In fact, Michael Mosley made a lot of money from selling weight loss.

Then there’s the mainstream media. We’ve seen its power and influence in the reporting of events such as those happening in Palestine. We know that their portrayal is grossly misleading, and we can’t trust the media when the money, power, and influence are firmly on one side of the story. The other side will never get a fair chance.

Living Long or Living Well?

Thinking about Dr. Michael Mosley, who passed away at a young age despite claiming his diet could help people live long, got me thinking about, well… living long. Society tells us we need to focus on longevity, but not necessarily on living well. But if you’re not living well, chances are you won’t live long.

Happiness, enjoyment, pleasure, rest, and exploration are crucial for good health and longevity. But how many of you have been told by your doctors, “If you want to see your children grow up or live to see your grandchildren, you need to lose weight”?  

[FYI, if you don’t have children then you don’t have anything to live for so doctors don’t bother with you 🙄 /sarcasm]

Pursuing weight loss is miserable and increases stress levels. Focusing on your weight and body shape has negative effects on your mental, emotional and social wellbeing. Spending money on diets impacts your financial wellbeing.

In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to choose between living long and living well. But we don’t live in that world.

The P Word (productivity)

Remember that there’s a difference between living well and being productive. The ruling class want you to earn money, pay tax so they don’t have to, and buy their stuff. They want you to make sure that the rich get richer, even though the poor are getting poorer.

We’re taught that we have to work hard to earn respect. Work hard to prove our worth, our value, and to be accepted by society. Or perhaps a better way of describing it is to work hard in order not to be rejected by society.

I used to really struggle with the idea that people assume that I’m lazy because I’m Fat. And then one day, I asked myself, “What’s so bad about being lazy?”  Why is lazy such a dirty word?

Because it means you’re not productive and you’re not working hard enough to earn respect and your place in society. So says colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. And the weight loss industry capitalizes off this.

You’re not in control

I’m about to tell you something that you’re not going to like. It turns out we really don’t get to control our health in any meaningful way. Everything we’ve been told is actually just a fantasy to keep us in line, to get us to be productive, and to work hard so that the rich can keep getting richer.

Because no matter what you eat, no matter how much exercise you do, no matter how much rest you get, you have zero control over whether you develop a medical condition or a disability. And you have zero control over when you’re going to die.

So next time your doctor says to you, “Unless you lose weight/try this diet, you’re not going to live very long,” I suggest you turn that around and say, “Tell that to Michael Mosley.”

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