Choose To Lose Weight: The 40 Billion Dollar Piece of Advice
It's estimated that Americans spend 40 billion dollars per year on weight loss programs and products.
Here's the advice you get for that 40 billion dollars: If you want to lose weight and keep it off, you must consume fewer calories than you expend.
You do this in two ways: 1.
Find a healthy diet and stick to it for the rest of your life.
2.
Exercise moderately 6 days per week for one hour per day.
This advice was confirmed, for perhaps the millionth time, in a recent story on National Public Radio in which, after a discussion of hormones and their effect on the dieter's body, the researcher being interviewed ended by noting that you have to consume fewer calories than you expend.
Why is it so hard to follow this advice? One reason, of course, is that people want to lose weight but they don't actually want to keep it off.
They want to lose weight for a daughter's wedding or because they think they "should" or because they get angry at themselves, toss out the potato chips in the evening and buy another bag in the morning after they have cooled off.
Or there are may be psychological reasons such as: "Secretly, I don't believe I deserve to be thin.
" "If I'm thin, I'll start attracting members of the opposite sex and I don't know how I'll handle that.
" "My father berated me for being fat and if I get thin, he wins" (even though he has been dead for 20 years).
A provocative explanation I hadn't heard before came from a book by Michael Lewis.
Lewis is the author of "The Blind Side" and "Moneyball," both of which have been made into movies.
His newest book, called "Boomerang," is about the financial crisis in Europe.
During his research, Lewis talked to British neuroscientist Dr.
Peter Whybrow who thinks obesity is a product of our success.
Our brains, Whybrow reminds us, evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment of scarcity.
They were not designed for the environment of extreme abundance in which we now live.
Therefore, Whybrow notes, "We are set up to acquire as much as we can of things we perceive as scarce, particularly sex, safety, and food.
" So when we do encounter abundance, we have trouble suppressing our desires.
Whybrow suggests that we have lost our ability to "self regulate" whether it's the 5 million dollars paid to a Goldman Sachs trader or the offered piece of chocolate cake.
Most provocatively, Whybrow found that if you laid a map of American's personal indebtedness on top of the Center for Disease Control's map of the rates of obesity in the United States, the two maps would overlap.
In other words, "Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for short-term rewards.
" So there you have it.
As someone trying to lose weight and keep it off, you can take your pick of why you don't lose weight permanently.
You can have the "I'm only dieting until my daughter's wedding" explanation.
You can have your psychological explanation.
And you can explain your failure by using Dr.
Whybrow's hypothesis.
But whatever explanation you choose, at the end of the day, if you want to lose weight and keep it off, you will have to choose to consume fewer calories than you expend and you will have to do so through a combination of moderate exercise and healthy eating for the rest of your life.
And just in case you have a reaction to that "for the rest of your life" comment, remember: Everyone is on some kind of diet for the rest of his/her life.
Everyone makes daily choices as to what that diet will be.
You aren't special.
Thinking you are may keep you feeling deprived and unhappy.
All you have to do, really, is choose to lose your weight.
Here's the advice you get for that 40 billion dollars: If you want to lose weight and keep it off, you must consume fewer calories than you expend.
You do this in two ways: 1.
Find a healthy diet and stick to it for the rest of your life.
2.
Exercise moderately 6 days per week for one hour per day.
This advice was confirmed, for perhaps the millionth time, in a recent story on National Public Radio in which, after a discussion of hormones and their effect on the dieter's body, the researcher being interviewed ended by noting that you have to consume fewer calories than you expend.
Why is it so hard to follow this advice? One reason, of course, is that people want to lose weight but they don't actually want to keep it off.
They want to lose weight for a daughter's wedding or because they think they "should" or because they get angry at themselves, toss out the potato chips in the evening and buy another bag in the morning after they have cooled off.
Or there are may be psychological reasons such as: "Secretly, I don't believe I deserve to be thin.
" "If I'm thin, I'll start attracting members of the opposite sex and I don't know how I'll handle that.
" "My father berated me for being fat and if I get thin, he wins" (even though he has been dead for 20 years).
A provocative explanation I hadn't heard before came from a book by Michael Lewis.
Lewis is the author of "The Blind Side" and "Moneyball," both of which have been made into movies.
His newest book, called "Boomerang," is about the financial crisis in Europe.
During his research, Lewis talked to British neuroscientist Dr.
Peter Whybrow who thinks obesity is a product of our success.
Our brains, Whybrow reminds us, evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment of scarcity.
They were not designed for the environment of extreme abundance in which we now live.
Therefore, Whybrow notes, "We are set up to acquire as much as we can of things we perceive as scarce, particularly sex, safety, and food.
" So when we do encounter abundance, we have trouble suppressing our desires.
Whybrow suggests that we have lost our ability to "self regulate" whether it's the 5 million dollars paid to a Goldman Sachs trader or the offered piece of chocolate cake.
Most provocatively, Whybrow found that if you laid a map of American's personal indebtedness on top of the Center for Disease Control's map of the rates of obesity in the United States, the two maps would overlap.
In other words, "Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for short-term rewards.
" So there you have it.
As someone trying to lose weight and keep it off, you can take your pick of why you don't lose weight permanently.
You can have the "I'm only dieting until my daughter's wedding" explanation.
You can have your psychological explanation.
And you can explain your failure by using Dr.
Whybrow's hypothesis.
But whatever explanation you choose, at the end of the day, if you want to lose weight and keep it off, you will have to choose to consume fewer calories than you expend and you will have to do so through a combination of moderate exercise and healthy eating for the rest of your life.
And just in case you have a reaction to that "for the rest of your life" comment, remember: Everyone is on some kind of diet for the rest of his/her life.
Everyone makes daily choices as to what that diet will be.
You aren't special.
Thinking you are may keep you feeling deprived and unhappy.
All you have to do, really, is choose to lose your weight.
Source...