Tag: life advice

DISCLAIMER: This is not medical advice. It is philosophical!

People today try to lose weight.

To do that, various diet schemes are employed to no avail.

Because as in everything, if what you do is not based on solid philosophical foundations it is doomed to fail. This applies to higher aspects of intellectual work (e.g. law formulation) but also to the most practical issues. If you do not know why you are truly doing something, there is no way you will be doing it for a long time…

So why should you go on a diet?

First of all, because you are fat! (empiricism)

Secondly, because you should avoid earthly pleasures at all cost. Your life is not your own. There is more to being than just sitting down and eating a good meal. (Christianity, idealism, almost any anti-meterialistic philosophical school of thought)

Thirdly, even if you were just a set of lifeless matter as materialism states, you should try to maximize your lifespan until you reach your full potential (teleology, Aristotle). And your full potential can be anything (you define it anyway) except being ultra-fat and full of spaghetti. If that was the case, then we would have been designed to constantly eat, something which is obviously not the case (theory of evolution).

Last but not least, try to show empathy. This is serious now. There are children today which starve to death. Literally. Having discussions about whether we should have a second plate of ravioli or not is simply not acceptable in such a world. Over-consumption could be more connected to deaths in Africa than you can ever start to imagine. Remember, the greatest philosophy is the one which is connected to real life, away from useless theories and abstractions. And we should never forget our philosophy.

In an ideal scenario, the money not used in creating those useless second meals you (and me) eat, would be used for the greater good and eventually save the life of a really hungry person. (i.e. not a person who feels that he has to eat something more between the main course and the desert)

The answers you seek are not in food, as they are not in any other closed set of axioms (Gödel).

You can find some answers though in the following simple set of axioms:

1. Eat only one plate per eating session. (monism)
2. Don’t fill in that plate completely. (incompleteness theorem)
3. From time to time, don’t eat anything. (irrationalism)
4. From time to time, ignore the first three rules. (relativism) After all, over-zealousness in abiding to rules can be a factor which leads to obesity.

Now off you go.

But hey!

Leave that second plate down…

And maybe, just maybe, this plate will make the world a better place…