Death of the calorie

Least resistance weight loss

The weight-loss industry preys on scientific naivete, often conflating good nutrition with the caloric deficit necessary to lose weight.

The Website Obesity Crisis

This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2015, at the Web Directions conference in Sydney. [53 minute video].

Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong

For decades, the medical community has ignored mountains of evidence to wage a cruel and futile war on fat people, poisoning public perception and ruining millions of lives. It's time for a new paradigm.

Annual Reports | CAA

For archived content, please refer to the National Diet Library's Web Archiving Project (WARP).

Beacon Press: What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

From the creator of Your Fat Friend and co-host of the Maintenance Phase podcast, an explosive indictment of the systemic and cultural bias facing plus-size people.

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

I saw in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement that you have been critical of the “chambermaid” study which purported to show that people were losing weight without changing their diet or exercise. I agree that this study did not show what it claimed.

Anthropic Risk Report: August 2026

I am grateful that Anthropic is producing periodic Risk Reports.

What if Doctors Stopped Prescribing Weight Loss?

Focusing on body size isn’t making people healthier. Some clinicians are trying a different approach

Daniel Christian Wahl: “Bioregional Futures: Reconnecting to Place for Planetary Health” - The Great Simplification

In the past century of abundant energy surplus, humanity’s globalized, large-scale approach to problem-solving

It’s Stanford time, baby: 8-hour time-restricted press releases linked to a 91% higher risk of hype

You and the blog readers might find this interesting: https://newsroom.heart.org/news/8-hour-time-restricted-eating-linked-to-a-91-higher-risk-of-cardiovascular-death.

Safeguarding human health in the Anthropocene epoch: report of The Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on planetary health

Far-reaching changes to the structure and function of the Earth's natural systems represent a growing threat to human health. And yet, global health has mainly improved as these changes have gathered pace. What is the explanation? As a Commission, we are deeply concerned that the explanation is straightforward and sobering: we have been mortgaging the health of future generations to realise economic and development gains in the present. By unsustainably exploiting nature's resources, human civilisation has flourished but now risks substantial health effects from the degradation of nature's life support systems in the future.

ATProto's Application Primacy

The amount of chatter from ATmosphere developers around an “everything app” has me thinking of an article from almost exactly 10 years ago. Back in 2016, Joel Monegro at USV wrote about “fat protocols

Self-Control and Optimal Goals: A Theoretical Analysis

Consumers set goals to achieve a variety of objectives such as losing weight, saving for retirement, and achieving better health. A large body of literature in psychology and consumer behavior shows that goals can help consumers achieve these objectives. However, there is almost no research that examines how we should set optimal goals. The purpose of this paper is to develop a parsimonious framework that examines how goals can help performance and how we should set optimal goals. We use the literature on hyperbolic discounting to model these issues. Our results show that goals can often increase performance but can also sometimes encourage procrastination. We show that some goals are worse than having no goals, even when the goals are achieved and the consumer exerts more effort because of the goal. We also find that the presence of goals can lead to myopic consumers behaving as if they were hyperopic. Our results also show that the most difficult goals should be assigned to consumers with moderate levels of motivation and self-control problems. We also find that it is sometimes optimal to set goals that are never achieved.

Scientists reveal foods to eat now to stave off cognitive decline later

Data on over 3,000 people shows only 8 percent with low-quality diets maintained high cognitive abilities into their 70s, a new study reveals.

Natasha Walter: We’ve gone from climate denial to something worse – climate fatalism

The message in the western media, as global heating becomes undeniable, seems now to be that nothing can be done. That is unacceptable – especially for those in developing countries who are suffering so greatly from the crisis we created