Diet Book Busts Myths About Weight and Genetics

In response to an earlier experiment that suggested becoming obese would change one's body chemistry forever, making the body think obesity was its natural state, Dr. Ethan Sims of the University of Vermont found some prisoners who agreed to get fat for science, according to an article in the New York Times. That was in 1967. He wanted them to gain 20-25 percent of their body weight. These were guys who had been thin or at a reasonable weight their entire lives. Some of them had to eat as much as 10,000 calories a day to gain that much weight. Once they had gained the weight, however, their metabolisms increased and they lost the excess weight with no problem.

Of course, this article is severely oversimplified. But the gist of these findings seems to be that the eating and nutrition habits we develop as children sort of "set" our metabolisms for when we are older. The body of an overweight child thinks its natural state is to be overweight and the body of a thin child thinks its natural state is to be thin. That doesn't mean that an obese child can't turn out to be a thin adult, but it does suggest that the individual will have to accomplish that deliberately. That means a program of controlled starvation.

The Times didn't have much to say about the role played by genetics.

There is something interesting, however, that is mentioned in the additional website included here, and that is that human beings are not meant to have that "full feeling" all the time. We are not meant to eat nearly as much food as we-even we as thinner people-consume. Research has shown that people and animals alike who eat very little tend to be much healthier than those who consume more, even without great weight gain.

Before our species had this great surplus of food, we were foragers. Can you imagine what it would be like to live day by day off of what berries and plants you could find to eat? You would be in a constant state of semi-hunger. Yet that is exactly the state that is natural for us. Some people choose to mimic that state by staying away from heavy meals and instead nibbling all day on fruits and vegetables. For them, life is just one long snack session. It might not be such a bad way to live. ###