Obesity

March 12, 2010  |   Posted in Blog, Chronic Illness   |   0 Comments   Tags: diets, obesity

Now that H1N1 is at a nadir, I want to talk with you about the obesity epidemic that is gaining national attention and that is locally apparent.  I’ve recently attended a medical conference on the subject and have been reading about it for some months now.  So I have some suggestions to give about what we as a community and what we as individuals can do to slow, if not reverse, the weight gain that is so clearly evident among us.

Weight gain occurs when caloric consumption exceeds caloric expenditure.  In other words, when we eat more than we burn off we gain weight.  So weight loss occurs when we eat less than we exercise off.  Simple right?

Not really.

Our bodies were designed for a different type of planet than we currently inhabit.  Our ancestors did not have an open unlimited buffet of food.  Nor were there refrigerators.  Imagine yourself as a hunter-gatherer (which unless you were royalty in the dark ages, we were likely to be.)  So we go out and kill a bison.  Great feasting for a few days and then the meat is either gone or spoiled.  So then we have to go hunt again…and it might take days for us to find another bison and certainly it takes a lot of exercise to do so. During that time, our hungry bodies are doing everything we possibly can to hold onto those fat stores we built up during the feast.  So we go from periods of feasting, to periods of famine and back again.  That is physiologically what our bodies have evolved to manage.

But now there isn’t a community famine where we live.  Indeed, we are living in a perpetual time of feasting.  The most likely famine that occurs in our community is if it is self imposed with dieting.  And our bodies don’t like it any more now than when we were out hunting bison…we struggle against food lack with hunger and metabolic shifts that hang onto stored fat.  So even when you stop eating, your body sabotages your weight loss efforts.  And there is a general observation that diets don’t work, because it is an abnormal way to eat and our bodies fight tooth and fat cell.

It’s not genetics.  Our genetic code has not changed in the half century it has taken for us to gain weight.  So it’s environment…but what about the environment matters beyond the fact that we have more food than we need?

No one knows for sure, although there are lots of hypotheses based on what was then versus what is now.  Is it high fructose corn syrup? or processed food? or low-fat high calories? or high-protein low carb? Too many variables to know where to begin.

Let me give you a quick example of how difficult it can be to find a single culprit.  There is a LOT of medical studies indicating that vegetarians are thinner than meat eaters.  Kudos for us vegetarians!  But is it that skinny people choose vegetarian diets or do they become skinny with a vegetarian diet?  And what is a vegetarian diet?  How do you define it?  Is it vegan (without milk, eggs, honey) or ovo-lactarian (with eggs and milk) or pisce-ovo-lactarian (add fish) or…any combination of the above?  And if someone tells the researcher that they are vegetarian, how do you know they are?  (They could be going out and eating a burger on the sly (gasp)).

So there is quite a bit to discuss on this subject.  Much more than one post will allow.  But let me tell you what I think and you can give me feedback.  I’ll be adding quick posts that might give you some pointers.

“Eat food.
Mostly plants.
Not so much.”