Understanding weight loss beyond simply restricting calories, blaming macronutrients, focusing on individual’s willpower and stigmatizing obesity.
The worldwide prevalence of obesity nearly tripled between 1975 and 2016. In 2019, an estimated 38.2 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese. These trends threaten our health and our wellbeing. They increase the risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer, and take away our ability to do activities we like the most. If this trend continues, children of today could be the first generation in two centuries to live less healthy and shorter lives than their parents. How can we take back control over our weight and our health? Solutions to the obesity epidemic have focused on balancing calories and on finding the optimal proportion of fats, carbs and protein intake to support weight loss.
OBESITY IS A COMPLEX BODY DISEASE, ONE THAT INVOLVES OUR BRAIN, GUT, HORMONES AND EMOTIONS.
However, these solutions at best lead to short-term success. Over the last 3 decades, scientists have made an impressive progress in understanding the roots of obesity. The discovery answers long- standing fundamental questions: how much of obesity is due to lack of willpower, how much is genetic and how much is due to our environment.
Currently, most weight loss plans focus on willpower and dietary restrictions, and there is a correspondingly pervasive and strong culture of weight stigma that comes with it. Those plans fail to take into account the complexity of decision-making in weight loss, or how our genes, hormones, our mind and emotions respond to our environment to make us susceptible to becoming overweight.
They overlook the critical fact that many of our food decisions are made before they reach our awareness, and are greatly influenced by emotions. Understanding how and why our bodies fight back against weight loss, and finding ways to overcome these responses, can help us come up with more comprehensive strategies for sustainable weight loss.
The take-home is that managing your weight loss as a balancing act between calories-in versus calories-out is simply outdated.
Reference:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/
World Health Organization
https://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/obesity/en/
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