Taubes: In Weight Loss Advice, The Ridiculous Assumption That Hunger Is Not An Issue
I spend my whole day eating fat -- bacon fat, kale cooked in bacon fat, an omelet with cheese and pate, coffee made with half 'n' half; and steak, sausage, cheese, and green beans swimming in butter. Oh, also, a tablespoon of coconut oil warmed in half 'n' half a few times a day, whenever my brain feels like it's on fire from intense activity.
I have never felt better.
And I'm never hungry the way I would get when I ate low-fat/high-carb -- a hunger that made me feel like I could stop and devour a road sign (and anyone unlucky enough to be standing next to it at the time).
On the subject of hunger's effect on diet maintenance, Gary Taubes has an op-ed in The New York Times that describes a study, taking place toward the end of World War Ii, that placed men on a starvation diet:
For 24 weeks, these men were semi-starved, fed not quite 1,600 calories a day of foods chosen to represent the fare of European famine areas: "whole-wheat bread, potatoes, cereals and considerable amounts of turnips and cabbage" with "token amounts" of meat and dairy.As diets go, it was what nutritionists today would consider a low-calorie, and very low-fat diet, with only 17 percent of calories coming from fat.
There were horrible physical effects -- and psychological ones. Two men had breakdowns. And then, when they were allowed to eat normally, they consumed "prodigious" amounts of food...eating themselves into "post-starvation obesity," in the researchers' words.
That humans or any other organism will lose weight if starved sufficiently has never been news. The trick, if such a thing exists, is finding a way to do it without hunger so weight loss can be sustained indefinitely. A selling point for carbohydrate-restricted diets has always been that you can eat to satiety; counting calories is unnecessary, so long as carbohydrates are mostly avoided.But this advice raises a pair of obvious questions, or at least it should: If people on low-carb diets eat less (the conventional explanation for any loss of fat that ensues), why aren't they hungry? Where's the semi-starvation neurosis? And if they don't eat less, why do they lose weight? It implies a mechanism of weight loss other than caloric deprivation and suggests that the carbohydrates and fats consumed make a difference.
Questions like these about the relationship between calories, macronutrients and hunger have haunted nutrition and obesity research since the late 1940s. But rarely are they asked. We believe so implicitly in the rationale of eat less, move more, that we (at least those of us who are lean) will implicitly fault the obese for their failures to sustain a calorie-restricted regimen, without ever apparently asking ourselves whether we could sustain it either. I have a colleague who spent his research career studying hunger. Asking people to eat less, he says, is like asking them to breathe less. It sounds reasonable, so long as you don't expect them to keep it up for long.
Much of the obesity research for the past century has focused on elucidating behavioral techniques that could induce the obese to eat less, tolerate hunger better, and so, by this logic, lose weight. The obesity epidemic suggests that it has failed.
For those who believe that hunger is somehow all in the mind, rather than a powerful biological response to caloric deprivation, it is tempting to wish on them the fate that the goddess Ceres bestowed on King Erysichthon of Thessaly in Greek mythology. She "devised a punishment to rouse men's pity... to torment him with baleful Hunger." Erysichthon then eats himself out of castle and kingdom and ultimately dies by feeding, "little by little, on his own body."
Amazon link to books by Gary Taubes.
By the way, I suspect there are a number of people who are suffering from mood issues who could shift that by not going hungry all the time on what the government told us was a healthy diet.
It sure is hard to convince people of this - my overweight sisters, brothers-in-law, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, friends - even after I did it and lost 60 pounds right in front of them.
Ken R at August 30, 2015 7:21 PM
I'm going to try again. Four years ago I did low-carb through my gym (low carb has hit Japan), but it was essentially no-carb, including any kind of dairy, a no-carb diet devised by a Japanese physician for treatment of diabetics. I lost some water weight at first, then my body temp dropped and I was cold all the time, and I started gaining in increments. I think now that the meat-cheese-almond and not much else plan was too few calories daily. The Eades' 30-day plan has yogurt, some fruit, it seems much more reasonable than what I tried before.
I was also going through menopause at the time and my hormone balance was already messed up, that could be part of it. I'm ready to try again, this time with the plan in the book.
crella at September 1, 2015 4:31 PM
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