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Forget The Myth To Weight Loss Beyond Diet And Exercise

Jun 3rd 2011 at 8:13 AM


Moving Less at Work

weight gain can be explained by declining physical activity during the workday." So many manufacturing jobs have been lost since 1960 that many jobs hardly involve physical activity.

This is important, interesting work, but its probable public impact will be to reinforce misleading single point explanations of why American leads the world in weightiness

And that's wrong.

I believe that diet and exercise alone won't save us. Hundreds of millions of books on Forget The Myths To Loss Weight and exercise have been sold, countless articles have been written, media and corporate programs proliferate, and yet we're fatter every year.

It's not just what you eat; it's not just about how you eat or when you go to the gym. It's the system, folks -- the simple facts about our basic life functions. Fortunately we can fix things if we gain a more accurate view of how our bodies actually work.

There's a Lot More to Weight

Many factors change eating, moving, and weight, lots of them shifting radically since 1960:

1. Rest -- Dozens of studies show people sleeping fewer than 6.5 hours a night gain weight, which is about the amount of time American working women now claim they get to sleep. Weight-changing insulin resistance quickly ramps up with partial sleep deprivation, and Americans have knocked off 90 minutes of sleep in the past 40 years. With the Travelodge survey in Britain showing 72 percent of people checking their email before they sleep, and others demonstrating people frequently waking to check texts and email, we face many bigger adolescents and adults from rest deprivation alone.

2. Environment -- put people in identical rooms and provide identical meals, and they eat a third more if the room is painted red versus blue, according to some findings.

3. Socialization -- people eat more with friends; they truly eat more feeding in front of a computer monitor or television.

4. Sitting – Many people more than six hours a day experience increased mortality; people who sit that long also gain weight even if physically active (and who doesn't sit six hours per waking day?).

5. Body clocks and sequence -- Health Product Review eating at night causes more weight gain and higher levels of glucose and lipids than eating in the morning.

Next there's the question of what is in food itself -- generally hundreds of substances, many uncharacterized, that change what we eat and ingest. Research has been heavily influenced as Michael Pollan defines it, by "nutritionism" -- studying foods' carbohydrates, proteins and fats and leaving out all the information content of nearly everything else. Which means we're still mostly ignorant about what food may really be doing in the body.

What Our Bodies Really Do

The standard medical model, imbibed by clinicians and public alike, is the human body as machine. The truth is very different -- we're organisms who internally replace ourselves extraordinarily rapidly -- with most of us gone within four weeks. Yes, your teeth and bones last a long time, but internally life is lightspeed fast -- much of the business life of cells resides in proteins and they're gone in hours to days.

The human body regenerates -- remakes itself -- very quickly, and differently with each change.

And because people are a lot younger than they think, people can remake themselves more effectively, giving us a whole new tool in motivating people towards healthiness and weight control.

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