My Weight Loss and When Calling Out “Scientism” is a Copout

Science vs Scientism

Storytime!

I used to struggle with my weight. No matter what I did, nothing seemed to really work. I looked at how fit people ate and tried to do the same. 5 meals/day. Didn’t work? No problem. Let’s make it 6 meals/day. After all, eating frequently boosts your metabolism, right? Just make sure it’s “clean”. I was carrying 4 containers of chicken, brown rice, and broccoli with me to work every day. When the chicken got too boring, I switched to tilapia. Make sure you pick the organic stuff and stay away from processed foods.

Also, add in some cardio. Let’s start with every second day. Didn’t work? No problem. Make it 6 days a week. Nothing? Not as much as I expected. How about adding it 2 times/day for some of those days. Ah, now you’re starting to see something. By the way, did you get that fat burner? And make sure you take a good multivitamin.

This was my saga for years. You can see how it’s not sustainable over the long term. It would work for a while and I eventually would fall off. My weight fluctuated between 210 lbs and 238 lbs throughout this time. As the years progressed, the 210 lbs became more difficult to attain and the 238 lbs weight was getting easier to stay at. In fact, for a while it was 235 lbs then it slowly started to creep up.

My solution: optical illusion!

First, make sure you train your chest and upper back enough to get that thickness. The further your chest sticks out past your belly, the smaller your belly will look, and the wider your back, the smaller the waste. Also, when your thighs are really big, you’ll buy pants with a waist size a bit too big for your waist so it can get past those thighs you squatted so much to have. You can now feel good about yourself because you have to use a belt for your “small” waist.

Looking back at all of this, and actually writing it out shows how ridiculous it is. Especially when you realize that the problem wasn’t with my metabolism or my body type or my training. I was dismissive of the one thing that worked and had I actually done it, my life would’ve been a lot easier.

When I started grad school I remember sitting in the lunchroom with other students and our supervisor having a conversation about working out and diets. I mentioned how weight has always been a problem for me. His response was simple, but as I applied it, it was so powerful:

“You’re a scientist now. Measure it!”

I’ve always heard the equation constantly repeated by diet coaches but never really appreciated it as it should be:

“Fat loss is not rocket science: calories in < calories out.”

What I had to do was start to track what I was putting into my body and compare that with what I was burning off. So, I downloaded MyFitnessPal and started to scan and enter everything, no matter how insignificant it seemed. Whether it was a full lunch or just a handful of almonds, I didn’t care. It was all getting counted. One can argue I went a bit too crazy with it, but I didn’t want to leave any room for guesswork.

After a couple of weeks, I noticed a pattern: even when I was trying to lose weight, I was still eating around 300–500 calories more than I was burning, including on those days when I was doing cardio in the morning AND in the evening. How was I doing it? By adding that extra half a cup of beans to the meal here, that extra banana there, those random handfuls of almonds I kept picking up every time I went into the kitchen, that spoon of peanut butter that was so heaping it may as well be called a ladle of peanut butter. There were days when I was a little under in my calories in than what I was out. But overall, I was doing more to stay the same, and whatever little progress I accomplished, I patted myself on the back for “figuring out what worked for me”.

Now that I got this reality check, I became more deliberate. I planned out my meals ahead of time. Kept track of the total calories I was consuming in the day and how much I was burning. Not only did I start to lose weight with ease I couldn’t imagine having, but I was also able to control the pace I was losing that weight. I could now decide if I wanted to lose 0.5 lbs, 1 lb, or 2 lbs, and plan my week to do exactly that, and I did exactly that. I took my time to go down because part of this is a metabolic adjustment for my body, which after years of being heavy was used to carrying around 230+ lbs of weight. My goal was to get to 190 lbs and stay there. I knew if I were to do this overnight, the change in lifestyle and physiology would be too drastic to be sustainable. So I took my time with it, which was around a year and a half.

This journey started around 5 years ago, and while I don’t use the app as diligently as I had at the beginning, after having plugged in so many meals and foods into it, and keeping track of what I was burning and consuming, I developed a good sense to recognize how my body will react on the scale to certain foods, and what my daily intake should be around based on the level of activity I’m doing. When I do notice my clothes all of a sudden getting tighter, that’s never a surprise. I know I’ve been reverting to old grazing habits and will pull that app up again and start to track. A week later, results!

The question of scientism has always fascinated me. It’s related to a rich subject in philosophy of science, aptly termed the demarcation problem: how do we distinguish between science and non-science, or between science and pseudoscience. Scientism refers to the reduction of all epistemology, i.e. all knowledge, to that which can be scientifically validated through the scientific method. Outside of the area of philosophy of science, this term is well-used, and dare I say well-abused, in religious circles just the same as Kuhn’s work is also abused.

Notwithstanding the complexity of the subject, the distinction between science and scientism ultimately boils down to the nature of the question being asked and the claims being made. Are we being presented with a claim about something in nature where something is being done and a tangible result of that thing being done is claimed to happen? For instance, if I were to claim that all you need if you came down with COVID-19 is a high infusion of Vitamin C and you’ll be better, what would I need to do to verify this claim?

There are two ways to do this:

1. Share a couple of random blog posts and some YouTube videos where this claim is being repeated by a couple of individuals who say they’ve done it with some of their patients and it worked; OR
2. Breakdown this question into testable hypotheses where you can then search for detailed attempts at seeing whether this treatment works. For example:

a. Divide your patient population into groups: presymptomatic, mild, moderate, and severe. You’ll need to define the inclusion criteria for each group

b. Set different Vitamin C infusion protocols that are to be applied for each patient population

c. Control for any confounding variables

d. Determine what outcomes constitute an improvement of the condition

e. Blind your experimenters

f. Clear the ethics board where you need to justify why you’re giving a placebo to the severe patients if there happens to be some effective treatment available other than Vitamin C

What’s outlined in the second option is a really simple and straightforward setup. The question for you between the two approaches is: which one would you place your confidence in when it comes to making clinical recommendations? Note that both of them are addressing the same claim. What reaction should we have if the second approach concluded that there was no difference in outcomes between the patients who got the infusion and those who didn’t and they all got equally sick, those who recovered took the same amount of time, and the death rate was the same between them? Better yet, what if the second approach showed that giving the infusion to the presymptomatic and mild patients resulted in less of them progressing to moderate or severe, and therefore, they had an overall reduced death rate? How would that influence the way you tell people about the efficacy of Vitamin C infusion to treat COVID-19?

The second approach is science. It’s an assessment of an empirically-testable proposition to evaluate whether it’s true or false. Demanding that one provide evidence other than blog posts or YouTube videos for the claim that a Vitamin C infusion of any rate is an effective treatment for COVID-19 is not scientism. In fact, casting a charge of scientism when the inadequacy of the first approach is pointed out is the mark of blind ideological commitment, where it doesn’t matter what anyone says or shows because the argument for the claim has the following structure:

1. Vitamin C is a natural remedy
2. SARS-CoV2 is just another natural coronavirus
3. Natural remedies will always work against natural pathogens
4. Therefore, Vitamin C works

Where it gets interesting is if the third premise is shown not to be true in this case. Now, the strategy shifts and the argument is transformed into another one altogether:

1. Natural remedies will always work against natural pathogens
2. Vitamin C infusion didn’t work against SARS-CoV2
3. Therefore, SARS-CoV2 is not a natural coronavirus

With this new argument, we also have another empirically-testable claim where we have two way to go about it:

1. Share a couple of blog posts and some YouTube videos where psychiatrists, no-longer practicing in the ED physicians, nurses, journalists, and pretty much anyone else and their dog but definitely no virologists tell us that this coronavirus was manmade; OR
2. Look up peer-reviewed and methodologically-clear scientific publications that have been validated by a number of independent labs where the origin of the coronavirus causing COVID-19 is investigated and assessed using multiple approaches that eventually concluded it was most likely the result of a naturally-occurring emergence that fits in with all the other coronaviruses

The second approach is science. Demanding that one provides evidence for the first claim other than blog posts and YouTube videos is not scientism, and casting this charge against those demanding such evidence is also a mark of blind ideological commitment, where it doesn’t matter what anyone says or shows. What all of this demonstrates is that it’s far more often the case than not that casting a charge of scientism in the context of empirical claims becomes the last refuge of the evidence-impoverished and fallaciously argued.

This is also when the conversation shifts and takes a new path: vaccinations, Big Pharma cashing in, viruses released from labs, Bill Gates and his alleged diabolical plans for population control, etc., where intersections are either identified or concocted, and entire fields of expertise are dismissed because they base their work on theories the claimant makes a strawman off in order to negate them. It’s the rabbit hole where we all forget about our attempts to validate the original claims, go around in convoluted circles, to finally come back to those claims once again but be too dizzy to ask the relevant questions we sought to answer at the beginning. But at least we now have the optical illusion of being “critical skeptics”.

Puff puff pass!

Mohamed Ghilan earned a Ph.D. in Neuroscience in 2015 and is currently a 4th-year medical student. He is the founder of Al-Andalus Academy, an online learning platform delivering traditional Islamic teachings and an online book club where non-fiction books are explored and discussed through an Islamic lens during live webinars.

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