Just talking to Bridge about the effort required to maintain her weight is exhausting. I find her story inspiring, but it also makes me wonder whether I have what it takes to be thin. I have tried on several occasions (and as recently as a couple weeks ago) to keep a daily diary of my eating and exercise habits, but it’s easy to let it slide. I can’t quite imagine how I would ever make time to weigh and measure food when some days it’s all I can do to get dinner on the table between finishing my work and carting my daughter to dance class or volleyball practice. And while I enjoy exercising for 30- or 40-minute stretches, I also learned from six months of marathon training that devoting one to two hours a day to exercise takes an impossible toll on my family life.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-fat-trap.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1325217928-b7yep3wriQbZ8W2ru2w8/A&pagewanted=print
This is a telling clip from a long article about why fat loss is hard. The author comes off as sincere and likable. She is also disciplined and skilled at telling the story of the conventional wisdom of weight loss. In short, that theory is:
-Fat makes you fat, so eat low fat complex carbs and enough whole grain to keep cement running through a 100 foot hose. Also, eat enough fruits and vegetables to employ half the world's population of immigrants in fruit/veggie farming, unless you can jam down a few more pieces of fruit in addition
-Most people gain the equivalent of 50-100 kcal per day of fat daily, so just exercise moderately every day to burn that extra amount of kcal
-We are in a toxic food environment which is riddled with food marketing and social temptations making it all but hopeless for most folks to manage their weight. Medical interventions (drugs, surgery) are the only hope we have
These folks would also say something like, "sure, carb restriction is effective and safe in the short term, but because folks don't stay on low carb diets, they don't work." As Gary Taubes says, that's like saying "sure, quitting cigarettes works but as soon as you start smoking again, you just get sick again."
Although there are many telling elements, the element best highlighted by the article is how lost a science can get when it starts with no guiding framework. Nutritional science should be a sub set of biology. Nothing in the field of biology makes any sense outside of the context of the evolutionary model. If you insert nutritional science into the context of biology, nearly all of the cognitive dissonance of nutritional science can be viewed as part of a logical whole. Instead, the field seems dead set on trying to solve a large complex puzzle (human nutrition) by peering through the equivalent of a straw. Or, put another way, the evolutionary model gives a scientist a conceptual alternative to the reductionist and minimally helpful concept of caloric balance as the driving factor in health and obesity. It is not the case that caloric balance is evident by fat gain or loss - but it is also not the cause of fat gain or loss. This last fact, by the way, is well illustrated in the references the author cites. Strangely (to me) though, she never thinks to question why human who were never fat as hunter gathers are inexplicably unable to live now without becoming obese.
This article is fertile with material for future posts as the author does a faithful job of highlighting most if not all of the "calorie is a calorie" confusion that has led so many to despair.
(Minor edits 4 Jan 2012, 2152)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-fat-trap.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1325217928-b7yep3wriQbZ8W2ru2w8/A&pagewanted=print
This is a telling clip from a long article about why fat loss is hard. The author comes off as sincere and likable. She is also disciplined and skilled at telling the story of the conventional wisdom of weight loss. In short, that theory is:
-Fat makes you fat, so eat low fat complex carbs and enough whole grain to keep cement running through a 100 foot hose. Also, eat enough fruits and vegetables to employ half the world's population of immigrants in fruit/veggie farming, unless you can jam down a few more pieces of fruit in addition
-Most people gain the equivalent of 50-100 kcal per day of fat daily, so just exercise moderately every day to burn that extra amount of kcal
-We are in a toxic food environment which is riddled with food marketing and social temptations making it all but hopeless for most folks to manage their weight. Medical interventions (drugs, surgery) are the only hope we have
These folks would also say something like, "sure, carb restriction is effective and safe in the short term, but because folks don't stay on low carb diets, they don't work." As Gary Taubes says, that's like saying "sure, quitting cigarettes works but as soon as you start smoking again, you just get sick again."
Although there are many telling elements, the element best highlighted by the article is how lost a science can get when it starts with no guiding framework. Nutritional science should be a sub set of biology. Nothing in the field of biology makes any sense outside of the context of the evolutionary model. If you insert nutritional science into the context of biology, nearly all of the cognitive dissonance of nutritional science can be viewed as part of a logical whole. Instead, the field seems dead set on trying to solve a large complex puzzle (human nutrition) by peering through the equivalent of a straw. Or, put another way, the evolutionary model gives a scientist a conceptual alternative to the reductionist and minimally helpful concept of caloric balance as the driving factor in health and obesity. It is not the case that caloric balance is evident by fat gain or loss - but it is also not the cause of fat gain or loss. This last fact, by the way, is well illustrated in the references the author cites. Strangely (to me) though, she never thinks to question why human who were never fat as hunter gathers are inexplicably unable to live now without becoming obese.
This article is fertile with material for future posts as the author does a faithful job of highlighting most if not all of the "calorie is a calorie" confusion that has led so many to despair.
(Minor edits 4 Jan 2012, 2152)
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