That pedal assist is just a gateway drug. It is not something that is used by people who require it -- I don't think there is many people who can't ride a bike but pedal assist somehow enables them to do it -- those people are usually driving cars anyway.

My friends who got e-bikes all had no trouble riding regular bikes but after some time discovered the convenience of it and followed with more powerful models with more durable batteries. They are essentially riding electric scooters now, no health benefits compared to driving a car. And the teens and twentysomethings pretty much only use scooters to get around here -- no longer walking anywhere. If B is two intersections from A, they will look for a scooter to cross the distance while being able to look on their phone.

It is not better for most people. Instead, it robs people of the few occasions they could actually be walking around, as if we had too much of it already.

People seek comfort and large portion of population is either unaware of the benefits, or unable to exercise willpower to decline comfortable scooters lying around on the sidewalks.

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And as to dieting, I should point out that words "diet" and "dieting" have completely different meanings and at least in my mind are entirely separate and independent. So I have no trouble saying you need to pay a lot of attention to your diet and at the same you should completely discard most of dieting advice. There is no logical problem at all.

The goal is to fix your life habits around your food (aka "diet") and start eating healthy food, in a healthy way on a daily basis vs going for interventions aimed at quickly bringing down your weight (aka "dieting") when your weight starts causing you physical or mental discomfort, with no or a halfhearted plan for any long term followup.

Remember, weight is only an indicator. By the time your weight is up, you have already disregulated, damaged a lot of things in your body. Our bodies can take a surprising amount of metabolic damage before our weight starts going up -- that's why young people seem to be relatively healthy while having very unhealthy habits. Just like with cigarettes and lung cancer, you have to do it for long enough time before you get sick. So you are 20-something and you feel fine, then sometime in your 30s or 40s, without change in your habits your weight starts steady climb up. The way to understand it is you were eating shit food all your life, but it took until 30s or 40s before your body got damaged enough for this to start visible, long term decline in health.

Interventions, aka "dieting" does not work. Because it can bring down the weight (and most of the time it even can't do that). But the weight is only an indicator, bringing down the weight does not magically fix your body yet. It takes sustained effort over long time to undo most of the damage and couple of months of dieting is not going to do it.

The only way your dieting can bring you any results is if it a part of a sustained effort to change your life habits. It is a necessary step to get better -- but most popular advice does only consider one goal -- weight loss. There is no plan for what to do afterwards. There is no plan what to do with your cravings for the food you liked. There is no plan how to deal with our self sabotage.