Flashback Megan: Dieting

Here's a blast from the past: Megan tells us dieting works, at least for superior body types like hers.

Lose! Weight! Fast!

More diet advice from CalPundit.

The Jane Galt diet plan is similarly simple: cut the sweets back to once a week (and that includes cakes masquerading as muffins and cookies pretending to be granola/energy bars), and have some green vegetable matter at every meal. Eat the greens first. Stop eating as soon as your stomach feels full, which will probably be well before you stop being hungry. And if you really want to turbocharge it, why, give up meat, of course. But don't go on some stupid diet, because you'll just gain it all back, and more besides. The most important diet advice ever is this: don't go on any diet plan that you can't live with for the rest of your life.

On the other hand, as one of my friends once said, I hit the Pick 6 in the genetic lottery on that front. I've been overweight once in my life since adolescence, and that was when I was at the WTC site eating sugar absolutely non-stop. The weight came off as soon as I cut out the sugar. So what the hell do I know?

It's amazing how money removes all doubt.

McArdle knows that if she continue to preach for no government intervention in business and especially health care she'll keep her job. What an idiotic Kabuki dance. McArdle must declare that people can't lose weight because the government is trying to encourage the obese to lose weight and McArdle is currently being paid to discourage any government involvement in health care that would benefit people instead of corporations. So she dredges up a law professor's book on dieting as proof that people can't lose weight, a patently absurd declaration, conflating bad fad diets with proper nutrition and exercise to make her point.

Since most people (around 60%) are authoritarian, they have an extremely difficult time imagining that our 'elite" often are stupid, say stupid things, or don't believe what they say. I see it all the time--someone quotes McArdle expressing disbelief that someone so learned and intelligent could make such simple mistakes, as if such acts were an aberration instead of the norm. They can't believe that incompetent person could rise to power or even importance, even after the last eight years of Brownies and Rumsfelds and Bushes. And it doesn't help that The Atlantic twists the arms of its writers to praise each other. I seriously doubt Sullivan even read her health care article before recommending it. Although since Sullivan is another example of the Peter Principle in action, I shouldn't take anything for granted.

Since a great deal of the business writing on The Atlantic is now being done by other people, I wonder if McArdle is the equivalent of the blond anchors on tv, there to be the public face only, while the people with ability do the actual work. It would explain why The Atlantic ignores her frequent and professionally humiliating mistakes.