The power of positive thinking

Positive thinking, wishful thinking of "The Secret" kind has been thoroughly debunked by those who see it as representing the infraction against good sense that is the common or garden positive thinking model.

Amusing that weight is used as the theme to attack "Secret" blather in the linked article, pretending there's a separation between legitimate and illegitimate ideas about weight loss, playing to the fiction that the former is readily evident in reality.

Creating false hope for the powerless putting too much pressure on them to achieve what is not likely to be possible, often when they are least able to make room for disappointments, is exactly why positive thinking has a bad name in high thinking circles.

Yet, those same people have no problem when similar guff is via the Vegas odds of weight loss dieting "success". Somehow all the punitive faffing around of dieting, which looks absurd compared with normal eating makes it alright, because you're doing something.

The realistic assessment of the probability of a desired outcome affecting a rational persons expectation flies out the window then. That it has failed, demonstrably and repeatedly should remove any doubt that it is at best a long shot. Ignoring its often punishing nature and offshoots of disordering  balanced eating rhythms triggering eating disorders in the susceptible.

Refusing to accept this epitomizes wishful thinking-we are not talking about stopping people from dieting, that's up to them, we are talking about putting it across in its true light of probability of success.

We have the right to indulge magical thinking ourselves, but not to impose it on others, certainly authority should step off that.

Blaming the failure of dieting on "having a negative attitude" rather than its intrinsic dysfunction is the definition of how the extremes of all or nothing thinking replace action that is genuinely positive and sustainable.

That is exactly why many hate the creed of positive thinking, it replaces the practical and possible, with the impractical and highly improbable.

One has to question anyone who haughtily rejects positive thinking as the habit of a unrealistic small mind, yet visits that often through the weight arena and is sometimes even more credulous about it than those who look through this lens in general and at least has a chance to modify their stance through variety of application.

Because its failure is so extreme so pronounced multifarious and evident, dieting cannot progress anywhere. The refusal to accept this reaches a point of delusion, it has to. You cannot advance to a greater sense of realism with it, you either suspend reality or you do not.

More than likely you'll become more demoralised by repeated failures and the physical toll on your nervous system, which includes your mind posited as your own personal failing. And that will be pointed to as your "negative attitude" and of course why you 'failed'.

The next stage is to screw together the courage to stop, against opposition.

Belief in the power of positive dieting, nullifies rejection of all but the wilder shores of positive self delusion that has become an opportunity for a kind of cut rate intellectual snobbery that the "elite" accepts indirectly.

Open embrace of positive thinking is somehow vulgar than a scienterrifically backed version. Suggesting that we all need to find a way to stay in contact with it, including those who disdain it.

Being open and unequivocal about the belief that your attitude to things directly controls outcome makes you a fool, but if its dieting?

Other way around.