The Philosophy of Weight Gain
The line between how many potato chips we can eat, and not get fat, is fuzzy.
You may think gaining weight has little to do with philosophy, and more to do with factors like calories in-calories out, bad habits, processed food, and whatnot. Those factors do matter when explaining weight gain; there’s no denying that. Someone who eats copious amounts of processed food, with lots of sugar, is no doubt a candidate for weight gain; whereas, people who tend to eat more whole foods, higher in good fats and proteins, will likely have a healthier weight. Of course, there are exceptions, but, by and large, eating better helps manage weight. However, if you think there’s nothing philosophical about gaining weight, you’re wrong.
You may, no doubt, wonder how philosophy could relate to weight gain. Perhaps here I have in mind something like that one’s worldview has an impact on how much, and the kinds of foods, one eats. That’s not quite what I have in mind, though it isn’t wrong to think that. I rather want to focus on something more subtle about gaining weight: the fact that, for many folks, it seems that their weight gain sneaks up on them.
Before we can understand this often subtle aspect of weight gain, however, we need to understand how sorites paradoxes work.
The Nature of Sorites Paradoxes
Like many philosophical concepts, the term ‘sorites paradox’ sounds more complicated than it really is. The word ‘sorites’ derives from the Greek word for ‘heap’. Start with a heap of sand. Taking only one grain of sand from a heap won’t destroy the heap—a heap of sand, minus a grain, is still a heap. However, if we continue to take a single grain of sand, over and over, we will eventually destroy the heap of sand. It looks like, then, that a single grain of sand neither creates nor destroys a heap. We can formulate a sorites paradox, involving heaps of sand, as follows:
(A)Â A pile of a billion individual grains of sand together constitutes a heap;
(B)  A single grain of sand isn’t a heap;
(C) Taking or adding a single grain of sand won’t destroy/create a heap.
This is a paradox in that each individual statement – (A) through (C) – looks like it must be true, but the statements, taken together, cannot be true; there will come a point, in taking a single grain of sand, over and over, where the statements contradict each other. Suppose we begin with a billion individual grains of sand in a pile. And then we take a single grain of sand from the heap. According to (C), it won’t destroy the heap of sand (obviously). However, if we take an individual grain of sand, over and over enough, we will be left with a single grain of sand. But (B) says that a single grain of sand doesn’t make a heap; however, (C) says that just taking a single grain of sand won’t destroy the heap of sand. So, we are then to conclude , after take a grain of sand over and over and over, the single grain of sand left both counts as a heap and doesn’t count as a heap. That can’t be right! Something has gone wrong, but it isn’t clear what.
Sorites Paradoxes and Potato Chips
In 1983, a Lay’s potato chip commercial famously claimed their chips were so good that ‘no one can eat just eat one’. And many people since then have agreed with them; it is hard for many folks to simply have just a handful of chips and stop. Herein we find a sorites paradox applied to junk food. While one potato chip won’t make you fat, if you eat enough of them too quickly, without expending enough calories, you likely will get fat. Just as one grain of sand doesn’t make a heap, or one strand of hair doesn’t mean someone isn’t bald, a single potato chip by itself won’t expand your waistline. We can formulate this as a potato chip sorites paradox:
(D)Â Eating tens of thousands of potato chips will make someone fat;
(E) A single potato chip won’t make someone fat;
(F)  Eating/not eating a single potato chip won’t make the difference between fat/fit.
Suppose Jonathan, who is at ideal weight, eats a single potato chip. He won’t get fat. However, if he eats a single potato chip, over and over, we can see that he will, barring other factors, gain weight—we must assume here that he eats them so fast he cannot, say, burn off the calories. Notice that on (F), eating a single potato chip won’t make the difference between someone being fat or fit. So on (F), even if Jonathan were to eat a single chip, over and over, he wouldn’t be fat, no matter how many he ate; however, on (D), if he ate tens of thousands of potato chips, quickly enough, he’d get fat. So, if he ate enough potato chips, one at a time, in a short period, he would be both fat and fit. That can’t be. This paradox applies to junk food generally: one candy bar isn’t enough to make us fat, but likely thousands of them, over a short time, will make us fat.
Where Is the Line?
The structure of sorites paradoxes is designed, in part, to highlight the ambiguity with the terms we use. The term ‘heap’ is ambiguous in that we can point to a heap of sand on the beach, but it is hard to draw a line as to when something that was a heap, ceases to be one anymore. How many grains of sand exactly must we remove from heap for it to cease counting as a heap? It isn’t clear—it is rather fuzzy, actually. How many hair follicles must Jonathan lose before he’s bald? This is fuzzy too. We know that there is a point, in each case, where some sand is no longer a heap, or Jonathan is bald, after losing enough hair, but we cannot just draw a definite line as to where that is. There aren’t an exact number of grains of sand or hair follicles we could point to here.
The issue of weight gain is similar: there is no exact line we can draw between how many potato chips that would be enough to make us fat. We know that if we too many potato chips, over too short a period of time, we will get fat—but that number is fuzzy. And so, humans, as the creatures we are, can be tempted to try to eat as many potato chips as we can before getting fat—insert your favorite kind of junk food here if you don’t like potato chips. You think to yourself, ‘one more handful of potato chips won’t make me fat.’ And you’re probably be right: plus or minus a handful of potato chips likely won’t make the difference. But this line of reasoning is dangerous, in that, if you continue to employ this thinking, you will, eventually, get fat. It will sneak up on you.
The philosopher, Chrisoula Andreou, noticed that sorites paradoxes, like the one’s we applied to potato chips, even apply to smokers. As she nicely explains:
Consider a smoker who wants to avoid poor health, enjoys smoking, and believes that if she never kicks the habit, she will end up in poor health. She might correctly believe that if she is going to quit, she is better off quitting after the next cigarette rather than right away. For she will greatly enjoy having another cigarette and having another cigarette cannot take her from a state of decent health to a state of poor health. Yet if she keeps smoking cigarette after cigarette, she will, let us suppose, end up in poor health.
The smoker is in the grip of a sorites paradox. She may (rightly) reason one cigarette is insufficient to cause her poor health—it may increase her chance of addiction, leading to her smoking more, but it is the cigarettes in aggregate that would cause poor health, not one cigarette all by itself. And if she enjoys smoking cigarettes, she may reason that just another cigarette won’t cause her poor health either, and so forth and so. At some point, though, as we know, smoking cigarettes will cause her poor health. The problem is the border, separating the cigarettes that won’t harm her health from those that will, is a fuzzy one.
The same fuzziness applies to junk food and getting fat: one potato chip, cookie, or scope of ice cream won’t make us fat. Since many of us enjoy junk food, and the line between fit and fat, with respect to consuming yet another item of junk food, is fuzzy, we can easily fall into the trap of reasoning that we can afford to have ‘just one more’ chip, cookie, or ice cream scope—or, in the case of the smoker, just one more cigarette. And it can just sneak up on you.
What Can Be Done?
Since the line between eating some potato chips and cookies, while staying thin, and eating some potato chips and cookies and getting fat, is fuzzy, we often have to resort to drawing an arbitrary line between an acceptable number of chips and cookies, and an unacceptable number. The line is arbitrary in that there isn’t a particular reason to have that many chips and cookies, as opposed to a few more or a few less. We may, in the case of smoking, decide not to start smoking since we may enjoy it too much to stop before it harms our health. Or, we may, designate a period day of splurging, where we can eat junk food, but stick to wholesome foods for the rest of the time. This is why arbitrary lines aren’t, contrary to what many believe, always unjustified or irrational—sometimes, we must draw an arbitrary line to avert bad outcomes, like poor health.
My journey with weigh gain and loss inspired me to write this column. My particular approach to losing weight was to rely on what, at the time, wasn’t very popular, but has since become very popular: intermittent fasting. Roughly, this is an approach to weight loss and management where one only eats at certain times—say, only from noon to 8 p.m.—to allow your body to use stored fat as energy. (This is but one example of how to use intermittent fasting; one of the upsides of the method is its versatility). This is an example of an arbitrary limit on when, instead of what, one eats to achieve a result.
The author circa January 2016:
The author, circa May 2019, after defending his dissertation:
Sorites paradoxes are worth considering, even when we reach for the potato chip bag.
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