Why do we get fat? The most popular view at the moment is that we eat too much and consume too little! But why do some people gain weight even when they don’t eat or drink cold water? Why do some people diet and then gain weight repeatedly?
Gary Taubes, an American medical science writer and three-time winner of the National Academy of Sciences Author Award, spent ten years writing a book. Taubes spent ten years writing a book – “Why We Get Fat”, which explains in detail the truth about obesity and effective ways to lose weight. The book immediately shocked the medical community, thousands of weight loss centers and research institutions updated their weight loss programs, and the U.S. government decided to redefine new standards for healthy weight loss. What does the book say?
Dieting is Largely Ineffective For Weight Loss
Dieting is the easiest way for people to think about losing weight. As a result, there have been many experiments and studies on dieting for weight loss around the world, but without exception, they have all failed.
In the early 1990s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to investigate key factors affecting women’s health, randomly selecting 20,000 people, the vast majority of whom were overweight, and encouraging them to eat 360 fewer calories a day, 20% less than the standard recommended by the Department of Health, researchers said.
As a result, after eight years, these people had lost an average of 1kg, while their waist circumference had increased (which is a measure of abdominal fat). This suggests that if these women did lose weight through dieting, it was muscle, not fat, that was lost.
500g or one pound of fat is about 3,500 calories, and if they ate 350 calories less per day, then they should have lost 1kg in three weeks, or at least 16kg in a year! But the truth is disappointing.
There are many more rigorous experiments than the NIH, and without exception, the best results are also modest weight loss in the short term, but most of the weight loss comes back after a year.
Exercise Doesn’t Work For Weight Loss
There is certainly a lot of benefit to regular physical activity, there is no doubt about that. But specifically, is physical activity effective for weight loss? I am sorry to say that the answer is no.
The common belief that exercise can lead to weight loss is based on phenomena observed in life and assumptions made in research. For example, thin people are more likely to exercise than fat people. The leading runners in marathons also all look thin. But this phenomenon does not tell us that once these marathon runners stop running, will they still be so thin. Also, if fat people kept running marathons, would they be as slim as Olympic runners?
The truth is that almost all serious scientific studies and experiments cannot give a clear relationship between exercise and weight loss.
People who are convinced that exercise can lead to weight loss have a formula in mind because high-intensity exercise burns more calories, and they can lose weight. However, people forget one basic fact: the instinct to awaken the appetite. It is human instinct to eat more to make up for the extra consumption. Exercise can burn calories, but it can also awaken your appetite!
What happens if you don’t eat after you consume? Then you can lose weight, but it’s hard to tell if you’re losing fat or muscle, which seems to come back to the proposition of dieting to lose weight.
How Do People Get Fat?
In the 1970s, a scholar at the University of Massachusetts experimented on mice. He removed the mice’s ovaries, and then the mice began to gobble them up and soon gained weight. Then this scholar did a very meaningful second experiment on mice, and the results were surprising; the mice were still fat, but the mice were completely squat and only moved a few steps when they needed to eat.
The researchers noted that these animals were not eating more to get fat, but the opposite, because fat people eat more. Gluttony and laziness are the consequences of malfunctioning adipose tissue regulation, which has nothing to do with human willpower or other virtues.
There is something called lipoprotein lipase, or LPL for short, which attaches to different cells and whose function is to pull passing fat into different cells, where it is burned after it enters the muscle and stored in adipose tissue, adding weight.
Estrogen happens to have the effect of limiting the ability of LPL to pull fat. When estrogen’s restriction on LPL disappears, LPL goes crazy and pulls fat into adipose tissue, so it becomes fatter and fatter. And the other tissues don’t get the necessary calories because they are robbed of fat, so the rats want to eat again just after they finish.
From this experiment, we can see that dieting doesn’t work for the rat, and forcing it to exercise doesn’t work either, or it will die for you. The only way is to give them back their estrogen.
Two Facts About Obesity
- The fatness, thinness, height, and shortness of animals are related to heredity. Hippos and pandas are born fat, and lions and tigers eat as much meat as they can to lose weight.
- Under normal circumstances, the reason why a person is fat is that the body’s fat regulation is out of order. And has nothing to do with the ability to eat, or laziness. A thin doctor can not understand the pain of an obese person dieting, and a long-term fitness coach can not understand the anxiety of an obese person.
Where Does Fat Come From? Where Does It Go?
Why does the body need to store fat? How is it stored? Explaining this question requires a lot of terminologies; simply put, adipose tissue is like your wallet. You take in extra calories, which is the equivalent of putting money in your wallet first, and once you need it, such as when you exercise, diet, or are stuck on a desert island, the body takes the calories out of the wallet and uses them for fuel. What you don’t use up, you put back in, and what you don’t have enough of, you eat and drink to replenish. Under normal circumstances, all the fat that flows out during the day is burned up.
So, how do you control the flow of fat in and out? In the mouse example above, we know that hormones are regulating the inflow and outflow of fat. There are dozens of hormones, of which only insulin dominates one activity.
For what it eats, the body’s first choice of fuel is sugar, followed by fat. Normally, the body secretes insulin when eating, and it processes sugar first while storing fat and rushing to process sugar so that it does not become too high and harmful to the body. After eating and processing blood sugar, insulin decreases and the body asks to burn fat.
First, the more insulin there is, the more LPL on fat, and we know from the example of mice that this LPL works to pull fat into adipose tissue. Also, when there is no room for fat, insulin can make new fat tissue, which means that to make room for fat, fat takes up a lot of space and the body becomes fatter and fatter.
So, why do insulin levels increase? Above we have caught the culprit of obesity: sugar. That’s right, it’s it! More sugar requires more insulin to control blood sugar levels, and more insulin causes calories to just swell in and out of the big fat warehouse. The result is that you become obese and sedentary. Not to mention eating, just before you start eating, insulin starts to be secreted at the mere thought of eating a high-sugar food.
In addition, there is a gap between how muscle tissue and fat tissue feel about insulin, with fat tissue being more sensitive and more likely to feel the command from insulin to stay still. As we age, this gap may increase and muscle tissue becomes more sluggish, which is why some people are thin when they are young but gain weight as they get older.
What Should We Do?
Of course, not all people get fat from eating sugar due to individual differences such as genetics. However, those who do gain weight have nothing to say; it is sugar that makes them fat. In addition, not all foods containing sugar make people fat.
Those that do affect blood sugar and insulin, such as bread, pancakes, pasta processed with refined flour, liquid sugar (beer, juice sodas), and starchy foods (potatoes, rice, cereals), all of which rapidly raise blood sugar and insulin levels.
And although green leafy vegetables also contain sugar, it is in the form of dietary fiber, which is not easily digested and does not easily enter the bloodstream, so blood sugar does not rise as easily.
What about fruits? While the sugar in fruit is easier to digest than in vegetables, it is also easily diluted by water and the concentration of sugar is not as high as that of starches. The only concern is the fructose in fruit, which is a fattening substance. There are many benefits to eating fruit, but if you are someone who tends to put on weight, be careful.
The worst is sucrose, and then fructose syrup, which is the source of sugar in most soft drinks, such as soda, fruit juices, and fruit-flavored yogurt. What about alcohol? Alcohol is a little different from other foods in that it is primarily digested in the liver where it acts to increase fatty liver and of course produces fat in other areas.
Can I eat meat? Yes, you can eat it. Meat does not have a high glycemic index. It has long been believed that eating meat grows meat, so much so that many people believe in vegetarianism. However, this is not true; in the animal kingdom, vegetarians such as hippos and elephants are fat, but meat eaters are thin.
For a long time, regardless of prejudices against meat, nutritionists have never denied that meat contains all essential amino acids, all essential fatty acids, and 12 of the 13 vitamins, and is a concentrated source of vitamins A and E and a major source of vitamins B12 and D.
Being Vigilant About High GI Foods Like Sugar is The First Step to Losing Weight
Why do we get fat? The answer is: sugar is the culprit of obesity. Sugar, rice, pasta, and other high GI foods make us fat, not make us eat meat and grow, or eat more and move less. And many times, giving up sugar and other high-GI foods means giving up a lot of food, but that’s fair because you’ll get a healthy reward.
