Obesity — It’s Not Just About Food.
Trying to make sense of weight control through reading and self-experimentation has failed. What’s the missing piece of the jigsaw?
For the past 5 years, I have been trying to figure out how to lose weight and keep it off — I just about manage but it’s a constant battle. I‘ve read all the theories and while a lot have merit none seem to offer a complete solution.
Sure you can try and maintain a calorie deficit and of course, this does work — it has another name though, starvation and there may be longer-term consequences. This strategy also supposes that the body cannot self-regulate for weight which is hard to believe given that Homo Sapiens managed to largely avoid obesity with no help from My Fitness Pal or self-induced famine for a very long time.
““Starvation is an excellent tool for weight loss but a terrible long term strategy.””
So what is overriding the system? Some theories centre around hormonal disruption caused by the abundance of sugar and other refined carbohydrates or the dramatic increase in seed and vegetable oils in our diets. These elements are certainly bad and I avoid them wherever possible but that doesn’t stop me from piling on the pounds.
Others vilify carbohydrates altogether but it’s difficult to single out crops such as rice, oats and potatoes in the lineup of possible offenders given that they have sustained so many people for thousands of years.
The Zoe programme, headed up by Tim Spector, emphasises the uniqueness of everybody’s microbiome and tailors diets to suit which is very interesting but do we really need this level of science to maintain good health? If we do we’re stuffed.
In a previous post, I tried to draw obesity and ended up with a mess of different factors and arrows of causation heading in all directions.
I tried to draw obesity by Jol Clemence
But perhaps that is the point. There have been so many changes to our diets and lifestyles over the past 70 years that it is now impossible to isolate a single cause of the problem — if indeed there is one. The industrialisation of food has trashed our diets but the infiltration of technology into our homes has broken the rhythm of our lives. Our relatively simple routines have been turned upside down.
In another article, I mentioned how all centenarians seemed to eat porridge for breakfast. But maybe I was missing the point — it’s not what they were eating that made them live so long but that they all ate the same thing at the same time every day. They all had set routines — routines and diets that were broadly the same as their parents and their parent’s parents. Their bodies had evolved to optimise for that diet and that routine. They were creatures of habit. Their brains and microbiomes knew what was coming and when.
So are we thinking too much about what we eat rather than how we live when it comes to obesity? Our brains and gut microbiomes have evolved over millions of years to feed on broadly consistent diets with broadly consistent sleep patterns. Beyond starvation, man has rarely had to deal with any sudden, drastic lifestyle changes.
But over the last 70 years, our bodies have had to deal with the ingestion of a ton of new stuff. Not just a much more diverse array of whole foods but an abundance of sugar, refined carbs and vegetable oils. We have also been exposed to chemical fertilisers, too many antibiotics and chronic air pollution.
In addition to this, our sleep patterns have been wrecked — first by artificial lights and then by TVs, computers and gaming consoles. Instead of going to bed when it gets dark we stare at a light and give all our senses an extended and often intensive workout.
And we snack, snack, snack so our digestive system never gets to rest either.
Of course, we need to eat better. Whole foods are surely the right option but this alone may not be enough to reverse the ravages of metabolic disease. Perhaps we need a more holistic approach where lifestyle design is given an equal role. One without the other just doesn’t seem to work.
