Why We Get Fat
The key obstacle to weight loss is the same as any form of self-improvement: Motivation. Most people know what they need to do in order to lose weight. I don't disagree with this, but sometimes motivation is more enabled by a society or cultural milieu and sometimes it's less enabled. In our society, the default is towards simple sugars in everything from ubiquitous soda to donuts in the break room to sandwiches to white rice in restaurants to high-fructose corn syrup in damn near everything. The larger the cultural inertia, the harder the change. Ask vegetarians: in the U.S., meat-eating is…
I would have agreed with you completely before this summer. I had done weight watchers and lost weight, but as soon as I stopped tracking my diet (and restricting my calories), my weight drifted right back to where I started. Gary Taubes has a whole section in Why We Get Fat on how you can't keep weight off by temporarily restricting calories. This summer I've been reading a lot of books [1] on a low carb, moderate protein, high fat diet. It is called a LCHF or Keto diet. I now think that insulin resistance has a lot more to do with weight than I realized. I've lost 30 pounds this summer…
If you haven't read either of Taubes's books, please do. I highly recommend Why We Get Fat[1]. It's a spectacular piece of scientific journalism. If that's too much for you, try one of his talks on the same topic[2]. When I first encountered the idea that we do not get fat from eating too much and that calories weren't responsible, I thought it ludicrous—the body can't disobey the laws of physics! Thermodynamics! But after seriously thinking about the idea, I realized Taubes was providing a far more complete understanding of metabolism. The human body doesn't run on calories, it runs on…
This actually makes a ton of sense and is what people on the sidelines of the insulin debate have been screaming since Gary Taubes starting publishing his work about dietary sugar. Unfortunately it's given people a very non-nuanced view of the science. The problem is not dietary sugar, it is blood sugar levels, which are elevated by many things (including protein and fat), but more than anything by excess calories. The problem is not peak blood sugar levels, it is average blood sugar levels. Edit: to quickly reply to your TLDR edit: > Thus, protein- and fat-rich foods may induce…
I think this thinking is tempting and reasonable, but it misses the role of hormones. As an example, women gain weight during menopause because of hormones, not because they eat more.[1] So thinking of the body and losing weight as being purely calories in/out misses some important factors; namely, the hormone response to different kinds of foods. It's uncontroversial that the body responds to carbohydrates with insulin, and also that insulin tends to provoke fat to store more of the available energy vs. it being available to muscles, brain, etc. Putting that together into "Don't eat too…
I've read both Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat. There is significant overlap, and it is most notable in the less technical areas, where he lays out the arguments against the conventional wisdom. That said (and I say this as a very technical reader), there were aspects of Good Calories, Bad Calories that went over my head because of their presentation and placement in the (very long) book. Why We Get Fat's treatment of LPL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipoprotein_lipase) and HSL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormone-sensitive_lipase), in particular, were described more clearly…
> The only issue with sugars are the null effect on satiety and promotion of binge eating. > sugars make it easy to overeat Those are issues, for sure! And great reasons why when dieting, a good foundation is exclusion of carbs. But that's only scratching the surface. Let me give you another downside. Eating sugar causes arterial inflammation. When your arteries inflame, your body packs it with oxidized LDL which can lead to heart problems and strokes due to constriction in your arteries. Guess what causes arterial inflammation? There's more as well. We need to brush our teeth…
I'm always very fascinated by people's rationale and I enjoy reading these threads. Thank you for posting. My own journey took me in the opposite direction: I eat nothing but meat and other animal-derived products such as cheese and eggs (but not milk). I have made this decision after reading The Fat of the Land by Vilhjalmur Stefansson [1] and Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes [2]. I consciously decided the most important dietary principle, for me, is to never trigger a strong insulin response. I have been zero carb (and therefore zero fiber) for about a year now. I have since then thrown…
I recently quit taking statins. My decision was motivated by reading two books: "Why We Get Fat" by Gary Taubes https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Fat-About/dp/0307474259/ and "The Big Fat Surprise" by Nina Teicholz https://www.amazon.com/Big-Fat-Surprise-Butter-Healthy/dp/14... Finding that statins would lengthen my lifespan by at most ~30 days or less really chapped my ass (i.e.,irritated me), given that so much time and effort went into prescribing/ordering/buying/taking/monitoring statins on a regular schedule, along with their attendant blood tests (Total cholesterol, LDL, HDL,…
It amazes me that this article still pushes the agenda that "fat makes us fat." If there's one thing that hasn't proven out at all, it's that fat makes us fat! The NY Times has even run other articles saying as much: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/opinion/sunday/what-really... (by Gary Taubes, whose book "Why We Get Fat" is a must-read.) The problem with "low-fat" processed food in particular is that the fat is often replaced with sugar to add taste, but sugars and other high-carb grains are more problematic than fat consumption. Hence skyrocketing obesity. Eating a low-carb diet and…