Sunday, March 26, 2006

Fat Profits

For every newage disorder, there's sure to be a Newage Therapy®™ to counteract it. Take the advertising media fixation with thin people as beautiful people, and the gullible public's acceptance of that particular trope.

Dr Carol Asada has created Conscious Eating™, and previously DIETLESS® to counteract eating disorders. You can tell it's newage because of the key code word "conscious". EoR has seen few people eating when they're unconscious. There's also the reliance on feelings and emotions (coincidentally, the same things the advertising gurus employ):
In the 10 years of doing groups in Southern California and Seattle, Washington, and training and supervising the Conscious Eating therapists I discovered another key ingredient for lasting change, your heart.

and assertions such as
We are the experts of our own bodies. We have the responsibility of taking care of our bodies.

Which, presumably, is why you have to pay a therapist to solve the problem on behalf of your "expert" body. Then there's the postmodernist fallacy of the "everything is true" ilk:
There is no such thing as good food or bad food. Food only has value in terms of how it makes you feel physically. Only you can determine whether a food is good or bad based on how it makes your body feel.

There are other warning signs:

If you want to undertake this therapy, it is a 3 phase program, where each phase is "about" 20 weeks, at $US50 per session. Or "about" $US3000 (Guidebooks for each phase separate charge). Shelling out that sort of money would do wonders to reduce weight, what with financial stress, and less money available to purchase food. Oh, and there's the compulsory prerequisite workshop at $US400. Incidentally, EoR hopes the full title of this workshop is not "How to Stop Eating in Response to Everything" but, rather, "How to Stop Eating in Response to Everything except Hunger".
Conscious Eating™ is a process not a goal. A process has no end, it is made up of many little steps and many little changes.

And many little cumulative charges. Presumably with no end.

Has this therapy been independently validated in any sort of studies? Why bother, when you have testimonials?

2 comments:

  1. This is great. Thank you for outing the frauds at this establishment known as Dietless.

    I know the owner personally, because she is a deadbeat, does not pay her bills on time and is an utter mess personally.

    The inventor of this "conscious eating" movement, the one who's so focused on thin people? She weighs more than 300 pounds herself. Take a look at the photos on the site and add 100 pounds. So much for practising what you preach, eh?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Welcome back. EoR had thought you'd abandoned him.

    ReplyDelete

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