#jonathan bailor

Big food, big fitness, and big pharma want us to stay slim the way big tobacco wants us to stop smoking.

Also, common sense tells us that if exercising less is the cause of our collective weight issues, we must be collectively exercising less. Are we? Not even close. The idea of aerobic exercise did not even exist in the mainstream until the 1968 publication of Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper’s book Aerobics. Pauline Entin, PhD, associate dean for academic affairs at Northern Arizona University, explains the common view before then: “In the 1930s and ’40s . . . high volume endurance training was thought to be bad for the heart. Through the ’50s and even ’60s, exercise was not thought to be useful . . . and endurance exercise was thought to be harmful to women.” During that same period the percentage of obese Americans was dramatically lower than today. Nowadays, Americans do more intentional “exercise” than people anywhere else in the world and make up the sixth-heaviest population in the world. How could doing too little of something that we did even less of before the problem existed cause the problem?

Eating less does not force us to burn body fat. It forces us to burn fewer calories. That is why dieters walk around tired and crabby all day. Their bodies and brains have slowed down.

Researchers at the University of Washington cite the role of a complex control system in the brain that adjusts the calories our body takes in and expends, both immediately and over the long term, to achieve homeostasis and keep our “body energy status”— our weight— stable over time. Similarly to the way the body automatically regulates insulin and blood glucose until that system is overwhelmed and breaks down (leading to type 2 diabetes ), the body automatically regulates body fat until it is overwhelmed and breaks down (leading to overweight and obesity ). Another way to think of it: Much as we exhale more when we inhale more, or we urinate more when we drink more, we also burn more when we eat more and burn less when we eat less— automatically. Breaths in and breaths out, water in and water out, and calories in and calories out are matters of established human biology, not mythical metabolic math. This “burn more when we eat more” behavior explains how we’ve gained dramatically less than what would be predicted by calorie math. The “burn less when we eat less” behavior explains why studies show traditional calorie-counting approaches failing 95.4 percent of the time— and often provoking even greater rebound weight gain. When we put these two biologic behaviors together , we can see why every weight-loss study ever conducted shows that when people are given a surplus or shortage of calories, they never gain or lose the mathematically anticipated amount of fat. The body just doesn’t work that way.

In June 2011, Barry Popkin and Kiyah Duffey, doctors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, made a startling discovery. They discovered that the number of calories consumed per person per day increased by a jaw-dropping 570 calories between 1977 and 2006. At first glance, it appeared that they definitively demonstrated what many assumed to be the cause of our obesity, diabetes, and heart disease epidemics: we are eating too much. However, a second glance at their data reveals an even more startling discovery. If the average person is consuming 570 more calories than necessary per day and if the calorie-counting math we hear about daily is accurate, then the average person should have gained 476 pounds since 2006. * Is it possible that instead of asking, “Why are we getting fatter ?” we should be asking, “Why don’t all of us weigh six hundred plus pounds?” What could possibly explain the huge disconnect between the quantity of calories we’re eating and the quantity of fat we’re gaining?