Distoibed

The trouble is he's crazy....
The trouble is he's lazy...

We're no good, we're no good!
We're no earthly good,
Like the best of us is no damn good

..................Gee Officer Krupke, West Side Story


Obesity is one of those subjects on which everyone can have an opinion, and on which most can be utterly wrong, because useful answers aren't known. It's not so much that research hasn't been done, it has. It's actually that nobody wants to hear the results. Certain truisms exist, but may do more to obscure reality than illuminate it.

The central truism of obesity, known to Hippocrates, is that if you eat less and exercise more, you will lose weight. Systematic starvation works. If you take normal weight individuals and starve twenty pounds or so off of them, their metabolism slows drastically, they lose much less than the calorie count suggests, their thinking muddles, they can't think of anything else but food, and they display increasing signs of neuroticism.

If you take normal weight individuals, cause them to eat much more than normal, they gain some weight, but have a 50% increase in metabolic rate, and gain far less than the tale of the calories would predict.

Most interestingly, if fat people are starved down to a normal weight, they display all the physiological characteristics of the normal people starved to well below their normal weights.

Study after study has shown that for the overwhelming majority of people, diets don't work, except in the short run.

Most people, including doctors (most of whom seem clueless about the relevant research), prefer to blame obesity on the obese. It's convenient, since thin people have about as much insight into the problem as tall people have to being short. (You really should gain some height - you will feel better and have more friends)

There is little doubt that people are growing fatter, so it would be premature to dismiss environmental factors, but efforts to control such factors almost always fail.

This is a pre-completion book report for Rethinking Thin, by Gina Kolata.

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