This Will Keep You Fat

Описание: We’ve covered popular misconceptions about obesity (https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewp...) , and found that people placing moral judgments on food (http://ç) choices are slimmer and healthier. But during a recent subscriber chat (https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewp...) , someone argued I’d only demonstrated that food moralizers are slimmer while failing to prove that pleasure itself was a primary driver of obesity — isn’t it just an innocent byproduct? So I’ll take another crack at it and clarify what I mean.


Many factors (https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewp...) contribute to obesity, but if I could choose only one principle to help those struggling with serious weight issues, it would be this: minimize food pleasure while maximizing nutrition, food water content, and intra-meal monotony (The first leads to the others).


People like to hem and haw. They say you can maximize pleasure while losing weight. Entire cookbooks and the diet industry itself is built on the premise of something for nothing. I think the mindset is an enabler of our obesity status quo, and that “you never have to give up pleasure” is a siren drawing people to the rocks. If you’re continuously failing to lose weight or keep it off, you probably have — at some level — a problem with pleasure, though we could quibble about definitions. If you want to stay fat, keep seeking pleasure above other concerns. If you want to shift course, consider this powerful doctrine.


Anyone can lose weight by reducing calories, but for many, it’s a white-knuckle battle that ends in regain. But if we replace food pleasure with another sort of satisfaction (https://andrewperlot.substack.com/p/t...) , something incredible happens.


Removing food pleasure often causes unintentional, effortless weight loss without restriction. It’s like an uncontrollable force drawing people to overeat suddenly lets go. Years of struggle disappear in days. Let’s look at some studies exploring this.


Slop = Slim?


The “food” must have been disgusting.


The researchers hooked a tube up to a fridge-sized appliance and told study subjects to push a button when they were hungry. Each push dispensed a mouthful of tasteless pale goop into their mouths.


The formula was designed to do only one thing — meet their nutritional and energy needs while stripping away everything tempting them to do more.


It was bland and textureless and designed to convey no taste pleasure.


It wasn’t stimulatory and offered no distraction from depression, anxiety, or boredom.


No meal, “ceremony,” or camaraderie drove them to eat more than satiety demanded.


It was monotonous, so the well-studied phenomenon of food variety increasing calorie consumption would be absent.


It was just boring food dispensed via tube.


When normal-weight people were put on this regimen — with no instructions about maximizing or minimizing intake — they impressively maintained their body weight by averaging 3,000 calories a day. Their hungry drive was accurate.


But when they put obese people on the glop, something amazing happened — they spontaneously shed weight without trying. One obese man started off at 400 pounds and drank only 275 calories a day while reporting no hunger. When the machine was switched off and he had to pour the glop from a pitcher into a cup to drink, his calorie intake increased slightly, but not enough to stop his rapid weight loss


Later, he was sent home with a supply of formula and ordered to keep drinking, and after 252 days, he lost 200 pounds without experiencing hunger.


It’s almost like our bodies have a homeostatic mechanism capable of detecting unhealthy obesity and dialing down food drive to remedy the problem, but pleasure and other psychological factors override the signal.


Trouble In A Bland Paradise


Years later, the researchers returned to the topic to see if they could find out more.


They altered the nutrition of the glop partway through the study period to double its calorie concentration. The lean subjects somehow unconsciously cut their consumption in half to compensate and kept their weight unchanged.


But the obese adults’ bodies appeared unable to detect the change, and ate the same amount of glop, though they still lost weight. But obese children consumed large quantities of the formula — too much.


This study introduces some mixed signals. Perhaps the obese subjects had a physiological miscalibration of their satiety drive. Perhaps we should still see this as their bodies continuing to course correct. But what of the kids? The researchers concluded:


“Lean young adul...