Getting Lean with Critical Thinking
Many people ask how can they lose weight, it is a frequent request in search engines. People want to lose fat, become lean, and hopefully do that without eating less. But can critical thinking help here? I believe it can, because we can apply some methods from critical thinking. First, we should reevaluate the goals: is losing weight the real goal? Probably the main goal should be a healthier life, so a person can improve his own health. In this case if an extra weight is a hindrance, steps to make a person healthier would likely remove this extra weight.
So a person wants to be healthier by changing his eating habits. Now we know the goal and can critically evaluate possible changes in diet. For example, would eating so-called superfoods help? I mean things like blueberries, pomegranate, wheatgrass, chia seeds, hemp seeds, and goji berry. Or you should just use a traditional approach of eating one apple a day?
Actually, you should ask questions like this: is there any evidence that a product has any benefits in comparison with other products? You should have a baseline for comparison, because people can’t only add new products, it would be too much food for a healthy life. Another question is: is it a good evidence? For example, a good evidence should be based on a correctly conducted experiment. If you have a number of academic articles about a specific product and the authors made many experiment, that may be a good evidence.
You can also check the reasons why some product advertised as a healthy one. It may be just a marketing trick, which is often true. Or sometimes it may be based on real studies. Check the sources of information about products. Check the authors who wrote texts about benefits of a particular food. Sources of information like authors and publications have tendency to write or publish more or less similar texts, so you can evaluate how logical and truthful these texts are. After that you can have a baseline regarding a specific information source. Of course you can evaluate specific texts about products you interested in: you can check references, facts in other sources, logic of arguments in text. Sometimes your sources couldn’t fully support your hypothesis, they couldn’t also support an alternative one. In this case you can only make an educated guess or use someone’s guess what hypothesis is more likely be correct one.
P. S. And if you have a question like how to lose weight and become lean I can provide an answer. In its simple form the answer is move more eat less. As our bodies generate energy from food, to change the current balance you need to decrease income or increase outcome.
Published on 2018-12-05
Tag: critical thinking
Short permalink: https://umneem.org/b16/