Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a gem of a book: inexpensive, brief, and truly useful. If you spend an afternoon with this book I think you will learn more about what is currently known about the causes of obesity than almost any other armload of books on the subject. And most likely, that means you will know more about how to deal with it as well. The thing that distinguishes the approach in this book is that the author neatly sidesteps most of the usual politics and economics of food, the bizarre fanaticisms of the fitness industry, the various diet cults, and the well-meaning but useless advice usually given out of frustration by physicians. Instead, he simply reviews the current state of the research in obesity and its causes, and offers a simple high-level counter-strategy based on that review. The core findings the author reports are relatively uncontroversial among obesity researchers: 1. Quality and length of life are significantly impacted by metabolic diseases 2. Obesity is a significant driver of metabolic diseases 3. Chronic overconsumption is the primary driver of obesity statistically Then we get to the part that makes a difference: 4. Chronic overconsumption is in turn driven primarily by high reward, high variety availability, disruption of circadian rhythms, and adverse metabolic changes caused by being sedentary. And the remarkable and important implication, supported by the low success rate of calorie restriction and calorie burning focused strategies: 5. The things we do to lose weight in the short run by far most often make things worse in the long run: we forcibly restrict intake, we systematically restrict particular macronutrients, we take on unsustainable calorie burning regimens and in general we rely on strategies that go against our biology and force us to constantly rely on our limited willpower. I think all of this is entirely plausible and is a reasonable explanation for why we tend to fail with diets in general in the long run. If you are in accord with the argument so far, the obvious question is what other sort of strategy would work in the long run. There are two seemingly reasonable answers: (1) finding some way to make one of the short term effective strategies work better in the long run, and (2) finding a strategy that somehow avoids the things about the effective short term strategies that makes them unsustainable. In other words, why do all of the strategies we use become unsustainable over time? Do we: (1) fail at our motivation and start cheating or giving up? Or (2) is there something intrinsically unsustainable about the strategies we are using? The first answer seems to be the one that is most obvious and most commonly assumed. We need to find behavioral methods or motivational tricks to keep us on track forever. The author focuses more on the second answer, he suggests that in general we have accepted a "Sloth and Gluttony" model of the causes of obesity, and as a result have focused almost entirely on "starve and burn" strategies, and these simply don't work. The causes of obesity override our natural, intuitive weight regulation and appetite mechanisms and then the solutions we try continue to try to override those rather than working with them. That focus makes sense of the remarkable success of "mindfulness" strategies for weight regulation. So the reason "starve and burn" doesn't work is that the human body has elaborate mechanisms for regulating our intake and activity based on our biological needs, and these tend to win out in the long run over any efforts we make to forcibly override them. The stimulus causes of obesity are sidestepping and exploiting our natural weight regulation mechanisms by using reward and variety to override our natural appetite mechanisms. This is exacerbated by problems that our modern lifestyle creates with our sleep, our psychological stress levels, and the engineering of foods that differ in important ways from the ones we co-evolved with. So according to this way of thinking, the way to regulate our weight in the long run is simply to eat foods that come mostly from plants and animals, without the elaborate flavor engineering and relatively less optimal oils that characterize most of the modern supermarket fare, to eat simply rather than exposing ourselves to elaborate tempting buffets all the time, and to move as much as possible as enjoyably as possible. Rather than forcing ourselves to starve and exercise. It may sound a little like a "romantic noble savage" approach to weight control, but it is far more specific and well thought out than that. It overlaps quite a bit with the ancestral health strategies like "Paleo" and relies on the same general principles at a high level, but it is a lot more flexible than most interpretations of that. It draws more on research and less on attempts to capture a particular version of pleistocene lifestyle. It is essentially the best of what makes the Paleo strategy work, but without the arbitrary aspects that often sneak in based on idiosyncratic anthropological data. To the degree that any strategy replaces engineered foods with whole foods while still giving us enough protein, and prevents us from being sedentary and lets us get good sleep, it should promote healthy weight regulation. That is, regardless of whether it is low or high in carbs or low or high in fats. There are no toxic foods or superfoods in this strategy, there are only more or less simple, optimal, natural sources of nutrition that are better simply because they have more micronutrients, are far less "supernormal" rewarding stimuli, and provide what we crave without making us as compulsive about eating them. Also the shift from exercise to enjoyable activity is not just a reframing but a meaningful difference in the kinds of habits we would change. Avoiding sitting all day is a far more important and potentially far more sustainable strategy for activity than trying to keep up an intense schedule of gym workouts, and in the long run, probably even more effective for weight regulation. I think we have yet to see good empirical data specifically comparing this strategy directly to others, and such a thing may well not be practical, but it seems to me to make a lot of sense. The author draws from research and interpretations of research that I find credible and I think summarizes it very well and his suggestions are about as good as anything I've ever seen. In general, the degree to which we can prepare our own simple, whole food meals and stay active is the degree to which we can regulate our weight in the long run.