A Fresh Look at Weight Control and Improved Health

B'SD

29 Iyar, 5775

The month of Iyar is ending, and with it the endearing message of "I am GOD your healer" (remember the April 20th/1 Iyar blogpost that clued you in to that?).

To end off the month on an upbeat note, I want to share a fresh look at weight control and improved health with you. I believe it can help your mind, emotions and body to heal in user-friendly ways. 

A friend of mine prepared the good-sense content. 

Let me know what you think of:

Weight Control Part I.

© Copyright 2007

I sympathize with people who feel that they weigh too much and have trouble controlling their weight.  While such people are often viewed to be lacking in will power, there is more to the problem than willpower.  The main problem is often one of ignorance about how the body works.

One Pound Per Year

Suppose a person gains, on the average, one pound too many each year, between the ages of 10 and 30. It doesn't matter whether the excess is accumulated gradually or in spurts; by the time the person reaches 30, they’re 20 pounds overweight. This is enough to adversely affect their health, let alone their social lives in today's society, especially if the person is single, more so a single woman.

How it Adds Up

Consider how such a weight gainer probably added an average of one pound per year with today’s common eating patterns: They ate roughly 400 pounds of carbohydrates, protein and fat each year, and stored only 1/4 of one percent of it. In fact, they stored an even lower percentage of that because most of the weight in body fat is water. To gain a pound of "body fat," you only have to store a small fraction of a pound of actual fat. The scientifically minded skeptic who believes that if s/he eats 100 grams of chocolate will result in a gain, at most, 100 grams of body fat, is forgetting that s/he will inevitably drink the water needed to complete the extra weight.  A person who becomes 30 pounds overweight in 30 years has most likely overeaten by a mere one part in 1000.

The other side of the coin is that if overweight people ate even one percent less than they burned, they would eventually starve. However, when they eat less they burn less.  The body knows instinctively to be frugal about burning energy when food is scarce, so it is often harder for people to lose weight than to gain weight.

Hunger Chemistry

Hunger and satisfaction are determined by chemicals (e.g., ghrelin and leptin) that many people never learn about. They react with our brains, creating an internal "feedback" monitor that tells you how much you need to eat. Without the feedback, people would never guess to within an accuracy of less than one percent error exactly how much they needed to eat. And, some people will burn off the excess weight automatically. This ensures that they balance intake with expenditure. But this feedback is a genetic roll of the dice, and it is tampered with by stress, boredom, and the simple fact that our ideal weight is not the same as it was when food was scarce, so our evolution did not prepare us ideally for our present situation. Nothing in life is perfect, including this feedback loop.

Simple arithmetic shows that even a tiny mistuning of the hunger feedback loop that enforces the balance between calorie consumption and calorie expenditure has drastic consequences for the individual. Not even a trained musician could easily detect a one part in a thousand mistuning of a musical instrument. The most experienced auto mechanic could do nothing about a car engine that was mistuned by one part in a thousand relative to its optimal performance parameters. And yet a mistuning of an imponderably complex, subtle hunger instinct can ruin an important aspect of a person's life by making them overweight. It doesn't seem fair.

Want to read more about how to tame your time with food? Part 2 is coming soon.

Learn how dining on the right food can help your body to heal. Buy the E-book or print edition of EMPOWER Yourself to Cope with a Medical Challenge. 

Face Your Medical Problems with Dignity. Face Your Future with Optimism.

Fill yourself with foods that support your inner and outer health.