Oh my goodness! I don’t know that I’ve ever seen as much nonsense packed into two sentences as with these:
Only bariatric surgery reliably leads to long-term weight loss. Now scientists hope to duplicate the effects with a pill.
I mean to say, have you ever in your life read something so silly? I’m sure I haven’t, and that’s taking in a lot of territory. I have a New York Times subscription, mainly so I can watch Melissa Clark’s food videos, but I do take a look at their front page fairly regularly, and this little gem was lurking there:
Well, of course I had to read the article, an action that led to my pulling out most of my hair. Here’s a representative sample:
Scientists do a lot of hand-waving about our “obesogenic environment” and point to favorite culprits: the abundance of cheap fast foods and snacks; food companies making products so tasty they are addictive; larger serving sizes; the tendency to graze all day.
Whatever the combination of factors at work, something about the environment is making many people as fat as their genetic makeup permits. Obesity has always been with us, but never has it been so common.
Cue the scary music as you read these words aloud in your best Dracula voice: “Something about the environment is making many people as fat as their genetic makeup permits.” Yes, something! That very “obesogenic environment” mentioned above. The fact that we are constantly, constantly, constantly urged to eat food that we do not need.
The article makes one good point, one that bears repeating and discussing here: that when people lose a lot of weight quickly their bodies think that they’re starving—because they are. I have to be careful here not to exceed my fair-use quotation limit, but I think I can include this last one:
When a very fat person diets down to a normal weight, he or she physiologically comes to resemble a starving person, craving food with an avidity that is hard to imagine.
The above statement is based on an experiment originally carried out 50 years ago and since repeated a number of times, in which a group of obese volunteers checked into the hospital where they were fed a 600-calorie-a-day liquid diet until they each lost around 100 pounds, at which point they were released back into the wild, er, the world. And they gained all the weight back. To which I say,
Who would have ever thought that such a thing could possibly happen?
There is so much to unpack from this one little article that I’m going to write a whole set of posts examining its ideas in detail. I’ll take a look at the genetics of weight in a later article, but for now I want to talk about the mechanics of this experiment. First of all, a 600-calorie-per-day diet is about what you’d get as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, give or take a few hundred calories. Now, here’s the thing: You can’t “tell” your body that you’re not in a concentration camp. Your body has certain exquisitely-designed mechanisms built in that function to keep you alive even when food supplies are low. A main one has to do with your metabolism: how fast you burn energy. Guess what? When you’re starving, your body slows your metabolism down, which is a good thing if you really need to conserve energy because you’re stranded on a mountaintop and a bad thing if you’re just trying to lose weight. Your body will fight you every step of the way if you try to starve it. “Craving food with an avidity that is hard to imagine” tallies exactly with the experiences reported of those in the concentration camps, who would dream of and talk endlessly about all the food they would eat when they were set free, a similar mindset of those on starvation diets who dream of the day when they’ll go back to their regular eating habits.
Let me make a couple of points here, and then I’ll quit for now:
1. Just to be clear, putting people on a 600-calorie-a-day diet is doomed to fail in the long run because you’re activating the body’s defenses against starvation.
2. As far as I can tell from what I’ve read about these weight-loss experiments, the poor volunteers were given no counseling about how to maintain their weight once they left the hospital. On the one hand, counseling wouldn’t have helped them much, since the diet itself set them up for failure. On the other hand, didn’t these so-called scientists ask themselves why these people were so heavy in the first place? Didn’t they consider the idea that maybe it had something to do with their eating habits? And so maybe they needed to be taught new ones?
As I close this post I’d encourage you to think about the people you know who have gone through the very process outlined above, losing a great deal of weight rapidly and then gaining it all back. I’m thinking right now of a woman I worked with in a church office who did this. Even though this happened 40+ years ago, I still remember vividly her utter bewilderment as the weight came back on. “I just don’t understand it,” she’d say. But what was happening was the “it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature” principle. (Some of you, dear readers, belong to the same age group as I do and remember the old Parkay margarine commercials.) She had set herself up for failure from the moment she started starving herself.
So what should you do? Glad you asked. Keep reading these posts to find out!