Have a nice day!

I think there might be minor (or major) cases of addiction, or eating disorder re: the holiday and diet-breaking case. It’s obviously true that drinking a lot a couple days a year, at Thanksgiving and X-Mas, won’t give you a drinking problem, or constitute one. But it’s not good advice to an alcoholic to say: aw, you can drink just on holidays. That’s the thing about addiction. You can just never do it. (Maybe.) This is a variant on Ray’s point, above, except it might really be more chemical. Having that one drink – eating that one sweet thing – just triggers a kind of biochemical craziness.

In general, if you have discipline problems, letting yourself make exceptions ‘sometimes’ might be bad advice, however reasonable, because it’s vague, hence a poor focus point. But then the sensible thing would probably to have a firm and somewhat arbitrary rule. I am allowed to have ice cream twice a month. Or whatever.

Well, no. Gyms would rather you signed up for membership and then disappeared, or just came in once a month, because you don’t pay per session, you pay annual membership. A lot of classes are the same – you sign up for ten and you pay up front, you don’t pay per class.
And people selling diet plans aren’t often selling food they produce, they’re selling a set of instructions – ‘points’, or ‘no carbs’, or something along those lines.

Even more, I’d at least speculate that the same people who are good at consistent exercising are good at consistent dieting.

This only leaves the question why people are very concerned about holiday-overeating. I think the reason for that is mainly that food is such a big issue on Thanksgiving that it’s just bound to be on people’s mind.

Exercise is an activity, and the only way to make money from other people exercising is to figure out how to get them to pay you for doing that activity. That means that you have to be an instructor/leader, or you have to rent facilities. Either way, the key to riches is for your customer to repeat the behaviour. This lends itself to selling it as a short activity repeated often… if you can get your customer base into your gym or into your class every other day for half an hour, you’re way better off than if they come in once a month for four hours when the guilt strikes.

However, with dieting, you’re not making money by participating/facilitating the activity of eating; you’re making money by selling them something (diet food), and the best way to make money is to make sure they buy all their food from you. This leads to a completely different marketing approach oriented towards maximizing their purchases of what you have to sell them… and the tried-and-true method for selling people stuff they don’t need is to appeal to fear and base instincts. So, the marketing for exercise is oriented towards the activity, while the marketing for diet is oriented about the stuff you eat, not the activity of eating.

Forty years on into the marketing revolution that started in the late sixties, with a couple of classes on nutrition in high school vs. the non-stop marketing barrage about “eat this! It’s better! Honest!” and “if it’s good for you, eat more!” while not ever discussing that the best way to eat well is to eat good basic food and not too much of it (‘cause “not too much” will cut sales of what you’re flogging), and most people have almost no conception of how to eat healthily (which has a lot more to do with how you prepare it and how much of it you eat at any given time rather than any specific properties of any specific product you mash down your gullet).

Needless to say, this leads to all kinds of whacked out behaviour around food.

I think you’d be better off asking them what they think than me what I think they think, unless you’re just trying to find out if I think they think the way you think they think, which is only really a relation over the two(2) of us although none the worse for that, except as a way of studying what they think in cases where they are neither of us, at which I doubt it is any good at all.

Because they tend to think of ‘exercise’ as something discrete, like, say, ‘reading’, and not something that you can work into your normal day. It’s not exercise unless you put on silly clothes and cause yourself pain.

Rephrase your aobservation as the idea that people seem more inclined to moralize diet than exercise. And moralism brings with it very unrealistically rigid and categorical thinking, the sort of categorical thinking that people would never indulge in over anything at all practical, anything they actually did on a regular basis.

The point about overeating on Thanksgiving is that it is seen as sinful behavior, the violation of some sort of code of conduct, an dnot in any very practical light. Now, people who are casual and not very serious about exercise might also look upon missing a planned exercise session in the same light, as some moral failing, but people who actually exercises regularly have to have come to some more reasonable accommodation with reality, or they wouldn’t actually exercise regularly. In your examples, you contrast regular exercisers with dieters, and I can assure you as a physician, that no one is regular, practical or serious about dieting, or at least those that are have long since lost the need to worry about their weight, and I don’t hear from them. You probably don’t either. The difference in attitudes will seem less striking if you compare apples to apples, wishful thinking exercise with wishful thinking dieting. I think what got you turned around was that wishful thinkers make up only part of the universe of exercisers, but all of the dieting universe.

Which is one of the many reasons that New Classical economics works as poorly as it does (though I fear saying so makes me a Category 4 Commenter).

I’m not so sure this is exactly right. I think people do think something like this, but that it works for that bad. That is, they think that only doing a lot of exercise will matter (not 8 hours a day, but that they’d really need to do a lot- several hours a day most days, say- to make much of a difference. They realize that they can’t or won’t do that, so they think they might as well do nothing at all. (Also, my understanding is that there’s some evidence that for many people, small amounts of exercise largely leads to being somewhat hungrier, and that this in turn leads to eating more, often enough more than the calories burned in the exercise, leading them to actually gain weight. The general point, of course, about eating somewhat better every or most days is perfectly right, though. As is the point about thanksgiving. As Seneca said, one should do everything in moderation, even over-indulgence. )