Obesity is caused by eating too many calories compared to what your body is burning.
That I believe we can all agree on.
No, we can’t. Obesity is caused by eating too many calories compared to what your body is burning or excreting.
That’s why (for example) the difference between fiber and simple carbs matters.
More to the point, there’s also evidence that one reason skinny people are skinny might be that they have less efficient gut microbiota: they’re not burning more calories, they’re excreting more.
I think we still can agree. It just would require that me saying the word “eating” be changed to the word absorbing, and I’m fine with that adaptation.
I still strongly believe that if obese people were given healthy nutritious diets that were available and convenient and financially affordable, obesity would decrease.
I do not think that that single thing by itself would completely solve the obesity crisis in the western world, but I think that it would do a lot to remediate it.
The problem is not just money, although money is a large portion of the problem, it is also the fact that the world that we live in is currently not equipped to provide healthy and nutritious food to every person on the planet.
Even in today’s world we have people who go hungry. People who cannot afford a pack of ramen noodles or do not have access to ramen because they live in a food desert or they simply do not have the money needed to purchase a 25 cent pack of calories.
However, for the people who are obese and who do not wish to be obese anymore I believe their primary objective should be to find low calorie, high nutrient density foods and eat those first before eating anything else.
Good examples are bananas, berries, avocado, broccoli, brussel sprouts, and potatoes.
If you are a breakfast eater I believe that you should eat a banana and then wait 15 to 30 minutes before eating the rest of your breakfast.
For lunch I think you should eat brussel sprouts or broccoli or a baked potato with maybe a little butter or a little salt but a full serving of this vegetable and then wait 30 minutes before eating your burgers or sandwiches or whatever else you’re eating for lunch.
(And ideally you should make the baked potato the day before and stick it in the fridge and then reheat it because that changes the starch structures to be a type of starch that feeds your gut microbiome more than a normal baked potato would)
And then you should repeat this process for dinner.
I’m telling obese people to eat more food in order to lose weight.
And I believe that will work for multiple reasons.
One, the 30-minute gap gives your hormones, ghrelin and insulin, time to react to the food that you have eaten and to begin processing it and to send signals to your brain that you have eaten and that everything is okay.
Two, eating non-processed or lightly processed foods that you prepared yourself is going to be more nutritionally dense on a per calorie basis than any food that is already prepared and prepackaged and ready for you to eat.
Three, giving your body the opportunity to absorb nutrition when it is hungry before flooding it with calories will give your body time to absorb the nutrients that it needs before it has to start spending energy processing the huge amount of calories that you have eaten.
Further, picking a vegetable or a low sugar fruit or berry as your kickstarter for every meal will also help ensure that you get more fiber in your diet, and will help your body eliminate more unprocessed calories that you have consumed.
Finally, the last portion of this diet plan is to listen to your body and to stop eating when you feel satisfied.
That is the tricky part for many people who like me have a compulsion to eat all of the food in front of them and will feel bad for leaving two bites of a hamburger behind.
But it is much easier to retrain yourself to allow yourself to leave food on the plate when you are actually satisfied and full then it is for you to engage in a year-long slog of denial and feeling hungry or eating strange diets that trick your body into not feeling hungry under any circumstance.
No, we can’t. Obesity is caused by eating too many calories compared to what your body is burning or excreting.
That’s why (for example) the difference between fiber and simple carbs matters.
More to the point, there’s also evidence that one reason skinny people are skinny might be that they have less efficient gut microbiota: they’re not burning more calories, they’re excreting more.
I think we still can agree. It just would require that me saying the word “eating” be changed to the word absorbing, and I’m fine with that adaptation.
I still strongly believe that if obese people were given healthy nutritious diets that were available and convenient and financially affordable, obesity would decrease.
I do not think that that single thing by itself would completely solve the obesity crisis in the western world, but I think that it would do a lot to remediate it.
The problem is not just money, although money is a large portion of the problem, it is also the fact that the world that we live in is currently not equipped to provide healthy and nutritious food to every person on the planet.
Even in today’s world we have people who go hungry. People who cannot afford a pack of ramen noodles or do not have access to ramen because they live in a food desert or they simply do not have the money needed to purchase a 25 cent pack of calories.
However, for the people who are obese and who do not wish to be obese anymore I believe their primary objective should be to find low calorie, high nutrient density foods and eat those first before eating anything else.
Good examples are bananas, berries, avocado, broccoli, brussel sprouts, and potatoes.
If you are a breakfast eater I believe that you should eat a banana and then wait 15 to 30 minutes before eating the rest of your breakfast.
For lunch I think you should eat brussel sprouts or broccoli or a baked potato with maybe a little butter or a little salt but a full serving of this vegetable and then wait 30 minutes before eating your burgers or sandwiches or whatever else you’re eating for lunch.
(And ideally you should make the baked potato the day before and stick it in the fridge and then reheat it because that changes the starch structures to be a type of starch that feeds your gut microbiome more than a normal baked potato would)
And then you should repeat this process for dinner.
I’m telling obese people to eat more food in order to lose weight.
And I believe that will work for multiple reasons.
One, the 30-minute gap gives your hormones, ghrelin and insulin, time to react to the food that you have eaten and to begin processing it and to send signals to your brain that you have eaten and that everything is okay.
Two, eating non-processed or lightly processed foods that you prepared yourself is going to be more nutritionally dense on a per calorie basis than any food that is already prepared and prepackaged and ready for you to eat.
Three, giving your body the opportunity to absorb nutrition when it is hungry before flooding it with calories will give your body time to absorb the nutrients that it needs before it has to start spending energy processing the huge amount of calories that you have eaten.
Further, picking a vegetable or a low sugar fruit or berry as your kickstarter for every meal will also help ensure that you get more fiber in your diet, and will help your body eliminate more unprocessed calories that you have consumed.
Finally, the last portion of this diet plan is to listen to your body and to stop eating when you feel satisfied.
That is the tricky part for many people who like me have a compulsion to eat all of the food in front of them and will feel bad for leaving two bites of a hamburger behind.
But it is much easier to retrain yourself to allow yourself to leave food on the plate when you are actually satisfied and full then it is for you to engage in a year-long slog of denial and feeling hungry or eating strange diets that trick your body into not feeling hungry under any circumstance.