Lifestyle Habits : You Decide

"Obesity is unique in that some doctors and much of society feel comfortable moralizing about it."
"Lifestyle has the ability to both treat and prevent a ton of medical problems, but the only one we seem to moralize about is obesity."
Yoni Freedhoff, co-founder, Bariatric Medical Institute, Ottawa

"It's clearly absolute nonsense to think that the current obesity crisis has been caused by a deficit of willpower."
"For that to be true, willpower would have had to have collapsed in every continent of the globe simultaneously across men, women, people of all ages. It's really bizarre that we still want to view that as the main cause of obesity rather than looking for environmental causes, but people just cling onto these ways of thinking."
"We're living in a world in which we're being sold a huge surfeit of calories every day. So you can easily become overweight or obese just simply by choosing among the affordable foods that are available to you."
"We should be so much more critical of the people selling us the food, and so much less critical of ourselves. It makes me upset to think about how many people, especially women, internalize this huge sense of guilt around food and a sense we should be doing better, and we're lacking in willpower when actually the choices we're being offered are crazy. Completely crazy, inhuman levels of choice."
"I just wish we would stop beating ourselves up so much and stop believing there has to be one absolute true answer. Because food isn't really like that. As omnivores, we've always eaten a range of foods; we've muddled along, we've adapted to environments. That middle ground gets lost."
Bee Wilson, author, The Way We Eat Now

"As insulin goes up, the body stores body fat. That's the job of insulin, to tell our body to store body fat. If insulin does not go up, then your body will use it in other ways. It won't store the body fat."
"If you eat 100 calories of cookies versus 100 calories of avocado, the minute you put it in your mouth, the hormonal response is completely and utterly different."
"If you eat cookies, insulin goes up and  your body stores body fat. If you eat avocado, insulin does not go  up. Your body tends to burn body fat because it still needs energy to run the liver and so on."
"All diets work in the short term. But we've been ignoring the long-term problem of insulin resistance. [The solution is to establish the balance between feeding and fasting]; We get so bogged down in carbs and fat and protein that we lose sight of the really important thing. And that's where I wanted to refocus people; 'Hey, we need to look at this meal timing question because it's a question of what to eat and a question of when to eat."
Jason Fung, nephrologist, Toronto author, The Obesity Code

Teenagers, according to Psychology Today, who think of themselves as overweight are so burdened with the vision of themselves as unattractive, unreflective of the ideal body shape, they are likelier than other teens to attempt suicide and to suffer depression. This, aside from the fact that we are killing ourselves, slowly but surely; shortening our lifespans, exposing ourselves to greater likelihood of acquiring life-sapping chronic diseases, by our lifestyle choices; above all by the kinds of food we energize our bodies with.

A major study published recently in The Lancet medical journal points out that poor diets kill 11 million people globally every year, more people dying of that cause than those who die as a result of tobacco use and second-hand smoke. Food security is viewed as having an impact even in developed countries such as Canada as well as elsewhere, while generally speaking most people live with a plethora of food choices. Rates of overweight and obesity have tripled since the mid-1970s.

Obesity is linked to increased risk of many disease, including some cancers, heart disease, high blood pressure, and Type 2 diabetes -- which itself can lead to the previously-named conditions. We are faced with a situation where omnipresent food advertising and the ready availability of calorie-dense, nutrition-absent food rules society. Never has that old adage, "everything in moderation" been more critical to healthy outcomes than at the present time. "Eat less, move more", seems like a simple formula for attaining and maintaining better health, but it seems to fall on deaf ears.

When combined with healthy eating, regular physical activity will help you lose weight and stay at a healthy weight.

In a survey of over 1,500 American adults, three-quarters of the respondents reported their belief that the best treatment for obesity is summoning the self-discipline to go on a diet. Scientific evidence appears, confoundingly, to reject that belief, citing the fact that most grocery supermarkets offer up to 40,000 different food products. Even visiting one of the ubiquitous convenience stores exposes consumers to a wide array of convenience food products, foods whose wholesome quality has been processed and adulterated.

So yes, we should be critical of the manufacturers of this ersatz food. And we should tune out the advertisements that we and our children are exposed to constantly. We should indulge from time to time in a bit of introspection, gauging the food choices we select and going a little further to imagine how healthy those choices are, and what, in the final analysis they do over time to our bodies. The thing of it is, most people can't bother, because they're busy, distracted, time is short, and truth to tell the very thought of preparing whole foods to form a nutritious meal is unappealing.

In this social climate it isn't only the food processing manufacturers that can be held responsible for appealing to peoples' willingness to buy pre-prepared meals heavy on taste-good but lethal amounts of salt, fat and sugar, but those on the other end of the spectrum whose existence is dependent on the desperation of people to lose the extra weight they gain from improvident food choices, who offer a dizzying array of fad diets. Consumers accustom themselves to buying food geared to put on weight, and when they become overweight and obese look for quick solutions to lose that weight.



And along come diets like keto, paleo, carnivore, pegan and fodmap, among the many others that proliferate and promise solutions. Weight loss is celebrated, and soon afterward what melted off returns. Simply because most people after losing weight, lose the diet and return to their 'normal' food consumption habits. A professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota in 2013 updated an exhaustive review  of diets, along with a two-year follow-up. Professor Traci Mann found that while people lost weight in the first nine to 12 months, the following two to five years saw them regain it all with the exception of one kilogram (2.1 lb.).

As for a non-dieter group used for comparison, they gained an average of 544 grams (1.2 lb.) over the same period. In her article published in the American Psychological Association, Professor Mann summarized the situation such that "the dieters  had little benefit to show for their efforts, and the non-dieters did not seem harmed by their lack of effort." This, in an era where advocates of good health succeeded in having all prepackaged food labels reflect calories related to the constituents of the food enclosed in those packages.

Instead of curtailing eating habits contributing to increased rates of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and other diseases, national health organizations such as the Canadian Diabetes Association, Heart and Stroke Foundation continue to support calorie counting. According to Dr. Fung, caloric reduction does not reflect a realistic option for weight loss: "It's my opinion that this doesn't work. Look at the obesity epidemic. The only thing (doctors) ever said was 'calories in, calories out'."

Dr. Fung champions another regimen; meal timing. Fasting routinely. In that at one time in the not so distant past people were accustomed to eating breakfast, then fasting, eating nothing else until the evening meal. Breakfast at 8 a.m., dinner at 6 p.m.; ergo a 14-hour fast. 

"There are a handful of trendy, reputable, diets people follow and see positive results on, including keto, Paleo, Whole30, and intermittent fasting. Now, a recent study published in the journal Obesity found that intermittent fasting is an effective way for women who are overweight and obese to drop excess weight. Technically, IF is not a diet that instructs you on what to eat, but rather an eating plan that tells you when to eat, and it involves committing to a cycle of eating and fasting within a set amount of time. See the difference? This study showed that women not only lost weight, but they improved their overall health as well."       
Cheyenne Buckingham, Eat This, Not That!