Response to @Forbes re: weight loss & science

I feel like I’ve said these things before, but, then, I don’t know whether anyone consistently reads what I write, so I guess it is worth repeating.

I read this article:

link to recent Forbes article re weight loss

I tried to comment on it on the Forbes website, but, somehow, the accounts that I had set up wouldn’t work.  I guess I had to agree to receive e-mails from them in order to set up an account, so that -- if I refused to receive e-mails -- their little widget wouldn’t register me?  Not sure.

Specious calorie numbers

First, I do NOT believe these numbers associated with calories per gram of carbs, protein, and fat.  These numbers were arrived at by a primitive system, burning or autoclaving food.  It’s not at all clear to me that that method is bio-equivalent to what is going on with digestion.  In particular, the idea that fat has so many calories per gram strikes me as *very* suspect. 

Fat burns well in air, releasing a lot of heat.  Is that what it does in the body?  That’s not clear to me.  For instance, when I took biology, I learned that fat was used in the digestion of glucose.  It seemed to me more like it was helping the reaction, rather than being digested itself, at least not completely. 

Studies are starting to come out showing that this whole low fat diet craze that our country is coming out of was totally wrong.  There was never any science to back it up.  It was just magical thinking: eating fat makes you fat.  No. It doesn’t.  One recent study said that for best weight loss most adults should have a diet that is over 30% fat. 

Specious comments about associating calories with weight loss

I believe that people are overweight, because they are overeating.  A maintenance level food plan will not keep a person in an overweight condition.  They don’t have to eat below maintenance level to lose weight if they are overweight.  I’ve seen this in OA. 

This is a really important point.  Restrictive diets lead to starve/binge eating behaviors.  These behaviors are a very efficient way of gaining weight. 

During periods of starvation, the body goes into a low metabolism storage state where weight loss is difficult.  People who diet frequently mess up their metabolisms and have less and less effect from diets.

Moreover, if someone binges while in a low metabolism storage state, they put on fat much more efficiently than if they binged while eating in accordance with a maintenance level food plan. 

Dieting is a primary cause of the obesity epidemic.

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This article is just re-hashing approaches that don’t work and which I believe are false.