And the rest, as they say, is portion control history.

Recently, I decided to see if I can break this habit and start eating real food. For one thing, I am using whole milk now which I had really never eaten. It turns out a shake made with whole chocolate milk and a banana and some ice is just as rich as one made with whey protein and more satisfying. It takes just the same amount of time to make and is the same amount of calories – just more fat and less protein.

I replaced the frozen dinner lunches with sandwiches or leftovers – maybe its a few minutes in the morning more but not much. And it’s just as easy to pick up bread, meat, lettuce, and cheese as a stack of frozen dinners.

I like to cook so it’s more about finding the time on the weekend to do a proper grocery shopping to make nice meals. I try to do a crock pot dinner once a week and my kid loves coming home to the smell of a meal cooking and hasn’t asked for something processed instead. Usually there’s leftovers we can reheat another night, so I only have to plan about three meals a week.

I decided not to be totally crazy about it and if I do occasionally have a frozen pizza, I think overall if I have increased the real food in my diet and lowered the amount of processed foods, I’ve won.

Anyway, the point is, I think that it doesn’t take that much extra planning if you stick with simple meals. Every meal doesn’t have to be a gourmet masterpiece. I also find that not regulating the fat content so strictly opens up a lot of possibilities for home cooking I’d previously cut out, and I am more satisfied and less driven to eat sweets.

And when you know only insulin everything must be because of bad insulin regulation.

Please. There are so many hormones in the body why focus on one only.

One neighbor is undergoing detox, she used to have arthritic pains. Now she is not feeling those pains. But is it because her whole body is paining or is it really because the detox cured it.
This is in the land of the detox err India.

I’m glad you brought this up because this is something that people frequently misunderstand about this line of research.  The article does not imply that obese people got that way by being lazier than lean people.  If you took 100 people and raised them under conditions that favor obesity– a sedentary lifestyle and poor diet– some would become obese and some would not.  Each person has a different inborn susceptibility to developing obesity in the context of a fattening environment.  Therefore, being obese in and of itself does not imply that a person is lazier than average, or eats worse than average, although that could still be true in some instances.  Like any other physical state, obesity is a state that reflects the interaction between genes and environment. 

I agree that leanness is not necessarily the same as health.  However, elevated fat mass is the dominant risk factor for type II diabetes, and contributes to other health risks as well.  Also, regardless of the health risks, some people would simply like to lose body fat, or just try to understand why our generation carries more fat than those before it.  Those people should have access to good quality information.

No, not everyone who doesn’t eat healthy food is poor, and not every poor family lives on processed foods- but overall, it’s where the trend is.

I’d love it if we subsidized produce instead of King Corn, which sweetens and bulks up all the processed crap available.

Since there’s a chemical basis for all this, it seems like it could be determined experimentally (just like GCI) and used as a basis for dieting.

I don’t know if it’s related to the “set point” idea, but I have noticed weight levels that are hard to get through.  The 182 area for me was a huge struggle when I lost weight six years ago, and it acted as a ceiling when the weight started to creep back on last year.

I think the big question here is: Why did the slope of the obesity line increase dramatically starting in 1978 or so?  What changed?  Why did we as a nation start getting fatter at a much faster rate?  If you extrapolate the obesity rate using the slop it was increasing from 1960-1978 only 18% would be obese today – almost half the rate of today.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/feb/15/consider-lard?INTCMP=SRCH

Slowly, I think people are getting it, or maybe there’s always been a small group of real food eaters, which has been passed on.  This group is much bigger in Europe. 

While you may be right that the article doesn’t necessarily apply to your particular case I think it’s rather silly to dismiss the article in general because it doesn’t explicitly discuss outlier cases like your own.

I don’t think I’m an outlier and I’m certainly not dismissing the article.  I agree with just about everything in it.

I was specifically and solely criticizing that it ended by pointing to a need for more self-discipline.

I’ll go further.  This passage

Together, reward and hedonic circuitry in the brain determine in large part how often you seek food, what foods you select, and how much you eat at a sitting.

Reward and hedonic systems, if stimulated in the right way…can increase food intake and body fatness. …

…the connection goes both ways. Reward and hedonic systems also influence energy homeostasis systems, such that excessively rewarding/palatable food can increase food intake and the level of body fat that’s ‘defended’ by the brain. …

Addiction is what happens when the reward system is over-stimulated by drugs, sex, food or other high-reward stimuli. In susceptible people … foods are quite literally addictive, …

is beyond perfect in how it describes how I got to where I am.

If TMI irritates you, skip the next paragraph.

I was a sickly child.  I had pneumonia multiple times and my parents were resigned to the notion that I was unlikely to survive to see my 5th birthday.  However, I did survive.  I was so skinny you could touch my hip bones with the tip of a finger and count my ribs from across the room.  But every time I took a mouthful of food and managed to keep it down, I took a step toward survival.  Every pound I gained was a signal I was going to live.  Every ounce I added prompted my parents to joy; it meant their son was going to live.  For good reasons and with the best of intentions, I was celebrated for finally getting to where I could shop in the “husky” section of Sears.  My parents loved seeing me get “husky” because it meant I wasn’t dead; even a brain-dead pre-pubescent jerk like me could pick up on that.

I understand very well that the reward and hedonic systems can be over-stimulated.  (I think the article stumbles when it fails to make clear that such stimulation can be, as in my case, emotional in nature.  Not a biggie.)  The author did a fine job of explaining the mechanisms that produced in me, quite early in life, a state of energy homeostasis systems that cause my body to defend high levels of fat.  It wasn’t long until I crossed over into total addiction.

The ONLY objection I had to the article was the notion that being disciplined enough to do all your cooking at home would probably be enough to enable at least some (the wording seemed to me to imply most) fat people to regain a healthy body weight.

I think that’s wishful thinking.  I think people who are as far gone as I’ve been or who are as far gone as I am now and have been for as long as me need something more.  We need a way to disrupt the hedonic/reward cycle, to throw a monkey wrench into the addiction mechanism.  (The article would have been insanely great if it had discussed some of the things we can do along those lines.)  I believe I’ve stumbled, purely by chance, across a drug that does that, at least for now.  I’m doing my best to capitalize on the opportunity and have initially experienced excellent success without the need for any more self-discipline than I had before.

I’ve dropped 20% of my weight in the past eight months

Pro-tip: When you get that crushing chest pain and you think you’re about to die, it’s gallstones. Nobody mentions that side effect of rapid weight loss.

Fat gained/lost = Calories in – Calories burned

This simple equation is generally considered true enough — if you look at people whose weight stays the same over a long period of time, and track how many calories they’re eating on average over that time, you can generally assume that they must be burning as many calories as they eat, on average over time.

The nonlinearity comes in the “Calories burned” term. Calories burned = Basal metabolic rate + Calories burned in exercise/activity.

It’s well-known that the number of calories you burn while exercising depends on how much you weigh. There is also decent evidence that your basal metabolic rate has some dependence on how many calories you habitually consume (i.e. starvation will slow your metabolism). Sex, age, muscle mass (which probably correlates with how many calories you habitually burn while exercising) are also parameters.

So you’ve got a mapping equation. How much fat you gain now depends not only on how many calories you eat and burn now, but also in some way on how many calories you’ve eaten and burned in the past.

It really becomes more of a nonlinear dynamics problem in that sense.

For more: http://kateharding.net/faq/but-dont-you-realize-fat-is-unhealthy/