Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Ain't Heavy

In line at the supermarket checkout, I saw a magazine ad which encouraged me to "Lose weight with the pros!"

At first, this sounds like a sensible idea. After I thought about it for a moment, though, I realized it implied the existence of weight-loss professionals. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. A professional weight-loser should be better than a normal person at losing weight. So are they skinny people? Skinny people, arguably, are terrible at losing weight; they aren't usually losing any at all. They don't need to. But if fat people are good at it, they become skinny people.

So then I thought, maybe a professional weight-loser goes in cycles; they lose weight, and then regain it in order to lose it again. Otherwise, you couldn't really sustain a career once some amount of weight was lost. But that doesn't really work either. If you measured their weight at the wrong intervals, you could show weight stasis or even net gain, and for me that hardly qualifies as professional weight loss. Weight loss would have to be continuous, albeit allowing for small short-term gains or losses (when food is consumed, when one gets a haircut, etc). The trouble, it seems, is that it's impossible to lose weight indefinitely.

Or is it? What if one's weight loss followed an asymptotic curve? Net weight loss could increase indefinitely but never beyond a certain point. But then you have someone who, while losing weight continuously, gets progressively worse at it. That doesn't seem to fit the bill for a professional, either.

The other possibility is that they lose weight more and more rapidly until they vanish. This means they'd have to start very very slowly, or else that they'd be in for very short careers. I don't really think that's a very likely scenario, but I do sometimes wonder what would happen if we stopped feeding Shalini for a day or so.

Anyway, that's as far as I got before it was my turn to pay.

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