A 2020 survey of 2,000 British citizens found that the average adult will try 126 fad diets throughout their life. Even if we were to discount that preposterous number by 90%, the result is still the same; diets are notoriously unsuccessful.
What’s behind such spectacular failure?
Our understanding of dieting (food restriction) is based on a false premise. As Ayn Rand so forcibly stated in her enduring fictional masterpiece Atlas Shrugged;
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises, and you will find one of them is wrong.
Rand’s axiom is especially apropos to dieting – although one would be excused for being highly skeptical that anything can hold true in the appallingly contradictory world of dieting and weight loss. The truth is that “food” is not behind our growing obesity epidemic; instead, it’s quite the opposite.
For over 100 years, we’ve been told that the only way to lose weight is to eat less food and create a caloric deficit. Up until 60 or so years ago, that was true. But then suddenly, in the mid-70s, it became “untrue” in an Orwellian sense. The common assumption that excess weight was caused by overeating food was no longer factual because, since the early 50s, we’ve been steadily transitioning from eating food to eating “non-food” – otherwise known as ultra-processed food (UPF) – highly contrived chemical concoctions.
Short of Eating Poison, It’s Hard to Imagine Eating Anything Worse than the Common Western Diet
Our modern diet of fast food, packaged food and ready-to-eat frozen food has been deliberately stripped of fibre, vitamins, minerals, and nutrients and replaced with unnatural combinations of fat, sugar, salt, and a long list of chemical ingredients; most of which you can’t pronounce and none of which the human body is biologically equipped to consume.
But we can’t stop eating what’s killing us because these chemical contrivances are cheap, hyper-palatable, ultra-convenient, and highly addictive – the perfect recipe for fat profits for the food companies and fat accumulation and obesity for the consumer.
Since most people are now getting more than 60% of their total calories from this nutrient-void garbage, we’re finding ourselves in the absurd paradox of being overfed and undernourished.
The Folly of Dieting
Because of the distinct lack of nutrients, eating a “typical” Western diet inevitably results in malnutrition, leading to many health problems. Still, because this diet is so common, we’ve accepted our declining health as normal. We fail to blame our premature aging on the real culprit … our low-quality diet.
When you go on a diet to lose weight, what happens? You’re body senses starvation. How does it react? The only way it knows how it goes into survival mode. It takes emergency measures, which you won’t even be aware of. It will change your hormones and make you ravenously hungry. It will try to conserve energy by slowing your metabolism, very often permanently. And that’s just for openers. Whenever there’s a battle between mind and metabolism, metabolism will always win.
Think about it, obesity is caused by malnutrition, a result of eating highly processed, nutrient-void food. The “overweight” person goes on a diet, but all that does is further exacerbate the problem of an already malnourished body. Expecting a starved body to freely give up fat - its only source of life - because we want to look good in a bathing suit defies all logic. And we wonder why diets don’t work. The fact is, if they did work (if they were easy) we would never have survived as a species!
The Logical Premise to Lose Weight: We Need to Feed Our Bodies, Not Starve Them!
Roughly 42% of adults try to lose weight at any given time. In 2021, we spent over $126 billion on weight-loss products and services, and obesity increased a further 3%. So why do we keep trying to lose weight through dieting when it’s so obviously futile?
Because we’re so desperate to lose weight, we buy into misinformation, false hope, and the endlessly clever marketing tactics of the weight-loss industry that promises their latest diet or “secret” discovery will finally solve our obesity issues.
But diets won’t work because they’re all based on the false premise that our excess weight results from eating too much food. But the fact is we’re not eating enough food. What we’re eating is empty calories, but because everyone’s eating fast food, packaged foods and ready-to-eat frozen foods, we think that sleep problems, lethargy, joint pain, depression, anxiety, dementia, fatty liver, diabetes, food addiction, obesity, heart disease, and premature aging are normal … it’s not normal!
A Properly Fed Body Will Shed Its Natural Resistance to Fat Loss
When your body is adequately nourished, everything begins to work. You will enjoy the taste of real food and lose your appetite for those hyper-palatable, chemically contrived, artificial flavours. You will enjoy the delicious feeling of satiety after eating a meal of real food. You will no longer eat a large meal of empty calories and feel hungry several hours later. Once your body gets used to nutrition, your satiety hormone (leptin) becomes efficient again – you will automatically stop eating when you’re full. Also, your hunger hormone (ghrelin) will no longer need to be on high alert because an adequately nourished body doesn’t have to be in survival mode.
Your metabolism will stop trying to conserve energy because it can switch its focus from saving energy and survival to tending to your body’s maintenance needs - like building muscle and cellular repair.
So, are you frustrated with dieting? Does gaining weight while eating less seem like an impossible contradiction? Remember, contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises, and you will find one is wrong.
And here’s the great irony of our obesity epidemic; eating food is obesity’s only cure.
