This month I achieved my lowest body mass in 24 years: 120 pounds down from my peak. It took 3½ years to reach this milestone. It's permanent because I know how to keep it that way and thrive. My ultimate goal of a normal body profile is within reach, today less than 30 pounds; mere vanity pounds by some standards, though not by my standards. By the time I'm done, I will have halved my peak body mass.
But, apparently, I am an outlier; one among the single digit percent of overweight and obese people who achieve long term weight loss. The real thinking among "researchers", according to a recent CBC News report, is that long-term weight loss is impossible.
If you listen closely you will notice that obesity specialists are quietly adjusting the message through a subtle change in language.
These days they're talking about weight maintenance or "weight management" rather than "weight loss."
It's a shift in emphasis that reflects the emerging reality. Just last week the headlines announced the world is fatter than it has ever been, with 2.1 billion people now overweight or obese, based on an analysis published in the online issue of the British medical journal The Lancet.
Researchers are divided about why weight gain seems to be irreversible, probably a combination of biological and social forces. "The fundamental reason . . . is that we are very efficient biological machines. We evolved not to lose weight. We evolved to keep on as much weight as we possibly can."
That last paragraph should peg your bogosity meter; the reporter should have known she was getting punked.
I put "researchers" in quotes for a reason; most nutritional researchers are paid, directly or indirectly by Food Inc. Why do you think they are blaming biology instead of considering whether the crap sold as food in our world might be to blame? Isn't it interesting that obesity always rises as undeveloped countries become more "developed," as in exploited by Food Inc?
What I've discovered along my journey is that our obesity epidemic is the result of toxic elements in our industrial food supply, aided and abetted by a medical establishment wherein the treatment of the obese amounts to a business plan and patient outcomes are an accidental byproduct of an otherwise commercial activity. That the scientific thinking on obesity has apparently evolved to the point of giving up, is all the evidence you need of how, in nutritional science, Food Inc. has thoroughly suborned Medicine across international boundaries.
There, I said it.
Like a proverbial canary in a coal mine, obesity exposes the dark underbelly of contemporary "first world" society. It is intractable precisely because both major players in this particular entertainment—and food in our society too often is sold as entertainment rather than nutrition—work so hard to preserve the status quo. The food industry does it intentionally, with malice aforethought. The medical establishment does it in contemptuous disregard for the well-being of its customers. Both function like parasites indifferent to whether or not they kill their host.
This is the introductory portion of a diary published in three parts. The second part is "I Am a Former Fatty: How Medicine Kept Me Fat." The last part, specially dedicated to my fellow victims of obesity, is "I Am a Former Fatty: The Diet."
Me in 2010
Me in 2014
I was a victim of the obesity epidemic. Like so many others, I spent decades failing at diets—you know the drill: lose 20 pounds in six weeks; gain 30 pounds over the next six months—unable to forestall the ever increasing body mass. At my peak I had nothing but questions:
- Why does low-fat dieting always fail in the end?
- If I avoid sugar and dietary fat, why am I getting fatter!?
- Is the human body (or maybe, my body?) so dysfunctional that a "normal" diet is untenable and results in long term weight gain unless I engage in vigorous aerobic exercise daily?
This last question made me reevaluate something I had observed: my grandparents lived long lives (9 decades +) with normal body masses. They were all eggheads whose response to the sort of vigorous exercise usually prescribed would have run along the lines of "well, we're not going to do anything about that." This disconnect finally hit home.
The other part of my epiphany was the realization that if I and everyone else with this problem can diet but cannot keep the weight off, then there is something seriously wrong with our shared conception of a safe and appropriate diet.
Back in 2011 I abandoned the last of the industrial food in my diet and engaged in a process to finally understand what causes weight gain and what facilitates weight loss. Looking at the way my grandparents ate (I lived with them while I was in college), it was clear they did not consume anything more industrial than butter and bread. Bread was a minor—not major—player in their diet; butter was their most used cooking fat. They used refined sugars in moderation, never serving an over-sweet desert. Their proteins were varied and balanced with fibrous vegetables, but always with a great traditional (it contains fat!) sauce. They ate potatoes in moderation, and never fried. To my knowledge, pasta and noodles and things made from refined corn were rare and in small quantities in their diet. Most importantly, everything they ate was made from scratch in their kitchen—part of the classic farm-to-table cycle that Americans are just now getting back to.
As I engaged in my little experiment I soon realized that there is only one way to reliably gain weight in the absence of an identifiable disease: consume too many of the wrong kinds of carbohydrates. Worse, "too many" was a much smaller quantity than I expected. Conversely, severely limiting the hybridized and refined carbohydrates in my diet, reliably facilitates gradual weight loss. The process that ensued when I changed my diet was so different from other "dieting" experiences that I think it deserves a special name: body mass restoration.
Sorry, but dietary fat (at least to the extent I consume it) failed to move the needle of the scale in either direction; another catechism bit the dust.
What I learned is that to stop gaining and start your body on the road to natural restoration of normal body mass, all you have to do is purge the bad carbohydrates from your diet.
Not all carbohydrates. The keys are hybridization and whether or not the carbohydrate has been separated from its companion fiber. To the extent possible, I've adopted foods that are high fiber in place of more common items. For example, I have substituted oats, which come with lots of fiber, for wheat flour that used to be in my diet. I have killer oatmeal muffin—made from scratch every week—that starts my day.
Potatoes have been hybridized over the centuries to contain more starch; they are a potent source of carbohydrates that will move the bathroom scale. I mostly stay away. Rice seems least problematic of the common carbohydrate staples, but that is not saying much because its carbohydrate to fiber ratio is poor.
Most importantly, with few exceptions I avoid industrial food and its load of hidden carbohydrates and other toxins.
It's no more complicated than that. My missing body mass is the direct result of applying these principles day after day for 3½ years.
So if its so damned easy, why is it so damned hard?
Let's dispose of our most obvious malefactor, the food industry, aka Food Inc. A portion of our food supply is toxic. The toxic elements are intentionally used to create industrial food. One of the hallmarks of industrial food is its price; as the most inexpensive food out there, it is the only possible staple food for the poor. Are you still confused as to why obesity is "linked" to poverty?
This food toxicity can be ameliorated by forcibly boosting your metabolism (through vigorous exercise) and fully consuming whatever is in your system. Don't wax poetic to me about the virtues of exercise here: managing an unnecessary toxicity is not smart health management. And if you are poor and working two physical jobs, how is it that your obesity gets the better of you anyway? Unlike anything else we eat, these food elements can always overwhelm your system if you consume just enough to cross the line. It would be a mistake to assume that obesity the only way this toxicity manifests. Joint problems, asthma and any of a number of other conditions close the exercise route for many. My point about smart health management stands.
Refined sugar is public enemy #1, and is in nearly everything produced by Food Inc. But that's not the only toxin in the food supply, and this is where people are getting confused. Refined wheat and corn are everywhere and are, in my experience, just as toxic as sugar, which is why one can be obese yet consume little sugar. In 2013 there was an excellent op-ed in The New York Times about hybridization of common staples and its nutritional effects. The staples of industrial food production, isolated, purified and deployed because of their chemistry, are murdering us.
That the problems presented by industrial food are not fully understood seems evident from the thoughtless acceptance and promotion of its consumption across society; or perhaps the denial reflex just won't let go. That Food Inc does it knowingly to create addictive responses to the garbage they market as food is now out in the open. The New York Times Magazine did an astonishing piece on Food Inc. They know quite well they're poisoning us. They don't care. That we allow it as a society, insofar as it amounts to selling toxic substances as ersatz food, is a mystery.
If it ended there, well we could just blame the free market and assert that everyone has a choice (thus neatly shifting the ultimate blame for the problem).
But it does not end there on the planet Earth in the 21st Century CE. It is not enough to vend the poisons; Food Inc has to manipulate the science, and develop a codependency with Medicine, so that nobody can know that they are being poisoned.
If you care to, follow me to part two where I will focus on that aspect of the obesity experience.