HealthEvolution

No wonder all these doctors and scientists, researchers and nutritionists can’t really help anyone lose weight.  Don’t get me wrong, there are some of these workers who are exceptional and are really able to create change for their clients, but most of them simply have a fundamental misunderstanding about the real issues fueling weight gain and obesity.  I often have this feeling whenever I’m reading the most current obesity research or findings about some new treatment, so many of the research and new trendy cures are focused on the wrong things - at first glance, you’d think that people are gaining weight because they’re eating too much - so they must have some overwhelming sense of hunger that’s making them behave this way.   So it makes sense (kind of) that if you could stop the hunger, people would eat less, thereby they would lose weight.  This, however, is a theoretical and surface-fix kind of solution.  It does not even begin to take into account the extreme emotional complexity that accompanies weight gain and loss, and most people don’t understand that anyone who’s significantly overweight is not simply eating in response to some overarching sense of hunger.  There’s a lot more to it.  A lot.  Often times, people are feeding themselves food in response to other stimuli - usually emotion-based, and ironically not at all based in physical hunger.  They feel hungry, but it’s not because their physical appetite is telling them to eat more, it’s because their emotional pleasure center wants to be stimulated, satisfied, indulged.  It’s just like any other drug. 

The inspiration for this particular blog comes from an article on Yahoo’s homepage titled, “Scientists try to stop hunger with retooled foods”, in which I learned that researchers are now trying to create foods that slow down the digestive system and create a feeling of fullness to trick the body into eating less.  It’s not the first time we’ve heard about these kinds of treatments for weight loss and most new products, whether in the form of meal replacement shakes, pills, or lap band surgeries all claim to eliminate this physical sense of hunger that they believe must be fueling all this overeating.  The funny part to me is the particular foods that these researchers have chosen to enhance.  Foods like bread, yogurt, nuts.  It’s amazing to me that if marketers and advertisers tell people to eat these new, special, enhanced, appetite-supressing miracle foods, people will eat them and maybe lose a little weight.  The ironic part is that they don’t even need the superfoods in the first place!  If people would stop eating fast food and pizza every day and simply eat more foods like bread, yogurt, and nuts in general (and in essentially any form) they’d lose weight anyway.  It’s all about what you believe, though.  And people tend to believe what they’ve been told.