Diets & Cults: is there a difference?

I'm a bum.

I was going to post a long, incredibly well-written and irrefutably researched review of Barry Sears' book, Toxic Fat. But I'm going to put that off until next week so I can put this up today.

(Okay, also because I still want to tweak it a bit more. It's not quite right yet.)

I absolutely loved one thing I read in Sears's book. To quote:

"Three things in life are visceral because they are based on belief systems: Religion, politics, and nutrition."

Yep.

Emotions are closely tied in with food

You know how some people get a 'gut feeling'? The gut has such a high concentration of nerve cells that it has been called a second brain. The highest concentration is of course the brain.

No, I don't care what you've heard about some men, it really is in the head brain.

If there's a second brain in the gut, would that explain why people get so emotional about the favorite diet?

Whatever you do, don't disparage the diet

It looks like people develop an emotional attachment to a certain diet, or the philosophy behind it. As an example, take this review that Diet Blog did about Dr. Joel Fuhrman's diet book, Toxic Hunger. It's a pretty straightforward review, but what caught my attention were the comments. People got emotional over whether this diet was, or was not, a good idea.

Putting down a diet plan is a sure fire way to get a ton of comments on your blog. (Ah... the real reason for this post comes out.) The blog Starling Fitness averages a couple of comments on a post; when she wrote a mildly disapproving post about Weight Watchers and the points system, she got 95 comments. People are really into their particular diet.

If this blog were being written by Ms. Crabby, at this point there would be an insightful paragraph or two about why people defend their diet plans like a lioness defending her last cub. Since she ain't here, just imagine that something insightful was said at this point.

Deep, thoughtful moment

Okay, enough already.

Being me, I have to confess that I don't get why this is such an emotional issue. Being healthy is a good thing. Yeah, I got that part. But we're all different, right? So if diet A works for me, and diet B works for Crabby, why should the two of us have a huge argument about which is better?

I think diets are like cults in that people can get really obsessive about them both.

Weight watchers is evil!

It's tempting to disparage a whole lot of diet plans so that the post would get lots and lots of comments. (Weight Watchers is evil! The Zone Diet is followed by Terrorists! Hitler was a vegetarian!) But in all honesty, I don't get it. Why can't we all get along? Or agree to disagree, or something civilized like that?