Ashy Bines sells a slightly infamous diet… program? Basically she sells a generic eating plan for $69 and you get to chat via social media with Ashy and others. Its a transparent con pitched specifically at the neurosis of silly women who like throwing money at a self-inflicted problem they have no intention of addressing properly. Its a BIG market!
The Ashy Bines diet I’ve seen is, in my opinion, no worse than you would expect for $69. Which is to say, its digital toilet paper.
The generic diet I’ve seen is full of spelling, grammatical and factual errors. Concept wise, it is generic ‘fitness’ industry garbage that’s been bastardised with some bad ‘bro science’. Basically its the same old regurgitated low-calorie, high veg blah blah. There is nothing new or original about it.
The Dieticians Association of Australia (DAA) has recently ranked Ashy’s diet(s) as one of the 3 worst in the country. Here is a local article explaining:
in essence the DAA has said: Ashy’s diet is not the same as the average person habitually eats and therefore you run the risk of not being average if you follow it.
The most important aspect of this article is it highlights how the champions of mediocrity (including the DAA) deliberately choose language to say something quite different to the message they know people receive.
- Firstly, the definition of the word ‘diet’ sews the seeds of misunderstanding and contradiction. The Oxford English Dictionary offers 2 definitions:
1: the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats
2: a special course of food to which a person restricts themselves
Straight away we can see that people can be talking at cross purposes when talking about ‘diet’. The ‘mediocrity machine’ (ie ‘health’ profession) expects people to continue eating as people eat. They champion the ‘habitual’ definition of ‘diet’ and how closely any ‘diet’ resembles the ‘norm’. Their stated objective is for everybody to be ‘average’ by every measure. The rest of us want a ‘special course of food’ to be as unlike the average person as possible! - Now the Title: “Ashy Bines’ Clean Eating Guidelines risky” (emphasis mine). I’ve written about ‘risk’ here. ‘Risk’ has connotations of danger without benefit. But it doesnt MEAN danger or that Ashy’s guidelines are without benefit. It actually means nothing at all. ‘Risk’ is present whenever you do or consume anything. Ashy’s diet could be the most miraculously beneficial innovation ever and it would still have ‘risk’. Risk is a word deliberately chosen to scare people from something that has no actual specific danger!
- “The DAA calls on people to seek out individually tailored advice rather than follow fad diets.” – I couldnt agree more!
- “The real positive I see from it is it does focus on whole foods and a move away from processed foods,” – Great advice.
- “Where it goes too far, is saying you can only have one piece of fruit a day, you shouldn’t eat carbs after morning tea, all of those things are very prescriptive.” – The word ‘prescribe’ is defined as: “recommend as something beneficial” or “state authoritatively that [an action] should be carried out”. And one would think that when purchasing a ‘diet’ that it would “recommend as something beneficial” a list of foods, and it would “state authoritatively than an action should be carried out” with those foods! Being prescriptive is only a problem because it’s not the normal habitual diet. A prescriptive diet is essential for achieving anything better than mediocrity. A prescribed diet is also essential to a diet being assessable and then adjusted for maximum effect.
- “They are not for the general population” – So what? Since when did the ‘general population’ look good in a bikini or have a bikini body? Of course recommendations for a bikini body are not for the ‘general population’. But, again, this is really about the definition of the word ‘diet’ (see the first point above)
- “It’s just not manageable forever, and that is the key,” – again, this is about the definition of the word ‘diet’. The DAA is talking about a habitual diet. Ashy is selling a “special course of food”. And a diet required to cause rapid and substantial change to an organism that adapts for homeostasis must be, by definition, unmaintainable! It must be measurably different from the homeostatic diet. From a better-than-average body composition perspective, a diet required to achieve a level of body composition is not the same as the diet to maintain that level.
- “A lifestyle doesn’t have an end point, a diet does.” – And here they contradict themselves and discuss the second definition of ‘diet’.
So in essence the DAA has said: Ashy’s diet is not the same as the average person habitually eats and therefore you run the risk of not being average if you follow it.
So what?
There is so much abuse of language by both Ashy and the DAA in regards to this topic. Ashy is promising bodies beyond ‘fit’ (see my blog on what fitness is) by abusing ‘fitness’ concepts of eating less and exercising more. The DAA’s role is to promote eating for ‘health’ which literally means eating what average people eat to be as mediocre as possible. Its a cesspool of miscommunication.
