Obesity Doesn’t Just Happen To Us

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To paraphrase the wonderful dearly departed comedian Phyllis Diller after her near-death experience from a heart attack: Don’t worry about dying, you can’t do anything about it, it just happens to you! From everything I’ve been reading about obesity, it’s the same thing, We can’t do anything about it, it just happens to us.

Now before you feel I have just gone all Alfred E Newman with this “What Me Worry” attitude about it all, think about all the studies on the topic of obesity and where the blame always goes as well as the proposed solutions to it all. All the research relating obesity faults microbes, the environment, the food industry, the food, lack of exercise, and so on. All the solutions involve treating the microbes, changing the environment, working with the food industry to change their practices and their products, changing people’s activity by changing their surroundings, and so on. Nothing and nobody ever wants to address the person because they can’t really do anything about it. Obesity just happens to us!

Let’s take a closer look at the problem

You might think the problem is a lack of exercise; not so. Our fitness industry is beginning to rival the size of the food industry, and people are more active today than ever, yet our obesity has continued to expand. Approximately one in three people on this planet is overweight or obese; in the United States it’s two out of three adults. Furthermore, no country has ever managed to lower its growing obesity rates.

I have been a lifelong supporter of physical activity because it has a number of wonderful health benefits. Unfortunately, weight loss is not one of them. Exercise alone has almost no effect on weight loss, and for what it’s worth, exercise alone may even prevent weight loss. It seems that when people exercise, they stimulate their appetites, and then they eat more than they would have without working out. When you add in our tendency to underestimate how much we eat and overestimate how much we exercise, you have the makings of weight loss failure.

Then there is the notion that physical activity dramatically increases metabolism making the body a calorie burning furnace. No, it’s more like a slow burning candle. Factor in that basal metabolism tends to drop with weight loss, even with daily exercise, and again you are left with weight loss failure.

So what is the problem?

The problem is the number of calories that we are eating and how we are getting them that is making us obese and keeping us there. All the while the food industry keeps advertising and lobbying about the benefits of exercise while they are helpfully selling sports drinks that are basically sugar water, and sugar is one of the main problems when it comes to consuming too much. The World Health Organization now recommends no more than 25 grams of sugar a day, less than six teaspoons. A single 12-ounce can of cola contains 32 grams.

All the messages continue to focus on how exercise is the key to solving the problem, never the real solution of eating less food. There is no economic gain for the food industry in that, and the food industry lives on profits, and passes on a substantial amount of this money to ensure that this will not change. Think about how a few years ago our current administration was into having a garden at the White House. Now it’s all about movement for children.

The real answer to losing weight: Eat less food

When I was studying psychiatry, I had an illuminating discussion with a famous professor of mine about which type of therapy was best. He sidestepped the question, telling me that my focus was on the wrong thing. The goal of therapy is to help the person reach the point where they can enact a change, he explained, and the goal of any type of therapy should be to reach this point. That is where our focus needs to be.

Everything about the obesity epidemic is blaming anything but the person eating too much. We are the point where change happens, not all these other things. Only when we change will it change. Changing everything around us has not and will not work because we still are not seeing the simple reality, we eat too much. We have to eat the correct amount regardless of all the whys that the media, food industry, scientists, and society tell us.

The answer is to have a fixed amount of caloric intake in spite of exercise. Exercise is not permission to freely graze all day and night. You must plan what you will eat and stop when you have eaten that regardless of how you feel if weight loss is your goal. Solving our obesity problem will require changing what and how much we eat, We cannot exercise our way out of overeating.

Previously: Dr. J’s “Three-Word Diet: Eat Less Food,” and Karen Collins on “Exercise is Good, but for Weight Loss Eat Less Food.”

By Dr. J, a maxillofacial surgeon living in Florida. Dr. J has travelled to Haiti to treat indigent patients and has taught as an associate professor at a Florida dental college. In his spare time Dr. J is a dedicated runner as well as a pilot who flies his Piper Cherokee Arrow throughout Florida. He has a black belt in karate. Dr. J has written for CalorieLab since 2007.

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