Dieting: Success and Failure (Part 5, Final)

The urgent message that we are all gaining weight has gone out. The biology of eating is well described and the intake of too much food with too many calories leads to weight gain—that much we know. We haggle like fish mongers over which nutrient is causing all the damage. Billions of NIH grant dollars have been spent on the topic. Is the culprit too much carbohydrate, too much protein or too much fat? Without a nickel of NIH money, I’m here to report the culprit is simple: overeating.

We have segregated and compartmentalized what evolved as a hunger driven process into a process of daily routine and ritual not unlike brushing our teeth or walking the dog. Through our collective maturation from hunter-gatherer omnivores to agricultural based diets to an industrial/technology driven society, we have lost the connection with our food chain. We have lost track of what food is and where it comes from, relegating our food choices to a menu of prior taste experiences or an array of foods someone else grows or hunts or gathers for us, and in many cases, cooks for us. In the most liberal sense, we eat what we hunt and gather at the local market. We eat until satisfied based upon taste experiences, adaptation to a meal size, and of course, until the meal is over. In the process of converting a basic survival instinct into a daily routine, the ability to maintain connectivity between our state of hunger and the state of our body—got lost.

In the same sense, eating might be likened to other fundamental drives like sexual activity, thirst, the need to sleep, and the need to be social (a basic instinct of another variety, but still a basic instinct). What if sexual activity were relegated to a daily routine of morning and evening engagement? Day in, day out, rain or shine, headache or no headache, the routine of sex occurs daily at the same time—with few exceptions. The idea strikes us as untenable and the thought of it being regimented to that degree allows sex to lose its reckless verve, subjugated instead to a lower wrung on life’s ladder of important activities. By that description, it would be a daily grind—a daily routine. Using that analogy, has food intake and the concomitant taste and satiety experiences we expect daily been subjugated to a daily grind? Are we marching through the day marking time between meals?

As the final segment of Dieting: Success and Failure I’m ending on an uneasy note. Anyone looking for an easy answer to the grocery store checkout-line magazine header “Lose Belly Fat Easily” will leave unfulfilled. In the real world, losing belly (visceral) fat might seem easy to those reading this blog, but to the average individual, it’s nearly an impossible task. We assume with little curiosity that throughout life we can navigate effectively through a gauntlet of fine foods possessing indescribable flavors and tastes, and remain capable of picking and choosing the time and place we consume those foods. Of course, the counter to that quixotic proposal, and sitting at the opposite end of the self-control scale, is the notion that we have little to no control over any of it.

The painful truth is modern medicine is good at solving specific clinical issues and problems related to disease states like angina due to cardiovascular disease or helping diabetics manage hyperglycemia, but when someone wants to lose weight, Barnes and Noble is a better resource than The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Sadly, if you ask twenty experts in the field of nutrition how to solve a behavioral problem such as overeating, the responses (if they come) will be as varied as the available mass marketed foods.