Yes, exactly. Epigenetics. If you've got the genes tucked away to become obese under certain conditions and those conditions show up, they'll trigger those genes to express themselves and you'll become obese whereas under other non-triggering conditions you might not have. Today's high carbohydrate low fat sugar and chemical-laced environment seems to be a pretty potent trigger. I've been reflecting lately on how far removed from a natural human environment those of us in first world nations are. Strange highly processed edible things we call "food" instead of stuff that was recently living unmodified out in nature, artificial light sources plus blue light from devices that mess with our circadian rhythm, lack of natural sunlight because we're stuck indoors all day at work or school or fear the sun and slather on chemical-filled sunscreens, all sorts of other odd chemicals in our personal care/cleaning products, the buildings we live in, etc. Really strange foreign environment for human beings to be living compared with the natural environment out there that humans were built to genetically expect and thrive in. I really like a lot of what technology offers us and don't plan to give it up, but I think it's good to be aware I wasn't designed to exist in a completely climate-controlled neutral temperature without daily sun, little movement, light all night, weird processed chemicals and foods, etc. and to take whatever steps I find reasonable to offset the negatives: better food, exercise, sunlight, heat/cold exposure, selectivity in product purchases, minimize the blue in electronic screens at night, etc.

Exactly, well said. That's my understanding and approach as well.

Jean

I found out just how sick a person could be with all this artificial elements of our environment sending all the wrong signals. Fixing all these things was vital to my continuing recovery.

The article seems to talk about what's called semi-starvation. We have a famous experiment that already explains everything we need to know about it: The Minnesota Semi-Starvation Experiment by Ancel Keys. For example, the article says "neurological changes", the experiment says "neurosis". I guess it's the same thing for these experts. And for example, no mention of low-carb or insulin.

As far as I'm aware, every single problem mentioned in the article is taken care of with low-carb. But, as with all other diets, long-term success is not a function of the diet itself, but of on-going support, because all diets inherently contradict the official guidelines which is thrown in our face all day long 24/7/365, or are very hard to stick precisely because of that neurosis. The success curve is the same for all diets. Big effect to begin with for a short time, drops off midway, plateau, then back up as people just quit progressively. It's not a failure of the diets, it's a failure of the support.

Here's something I found out about support. There's basically only two largest support groups. This very forum, and the official guidelines. Oh I'm sure there's others, you say? Try it for yourself. Imagine you don't know about any other support group, now do a search and see what comes up. Check out what you find, you'll see there's basically nothing else but the two I mention. The paid-for support groups, well, you gotta pay for, ya? This limits their actual support in the facts. The official guidelines isn't strictly a support group, it's more a in-your-face-all-day-long-dogma-repetition-ad-nauseam kind of thing, but it amounts to the same thing because that's pretty much what a support group does.

Read the quotes below in the comments section following the article.

This from someone who leads by identifying herself as a nurse:


and this from another poster:
.

I pity them.

I suspect that most of us here--I know this is true of me--know what it's like to fight hunger in eventually-fruitless attempts to lose weight. I finally got to the point where I would not and could not go back there. I'm so grateful to have found a way to eat that nourishes and satisfies me, and allowed me to reach a lean healthy weight. I can't imagine living the way these people do.

I feel like I'm working with my body's needs, not against them, and that hunger is my friend: it's a pleasant reminder that it's time to fuel up, to eat good-tasting and nourishing food and then get on with life when I'm satisfied.

I don't know if we can be like them. My mother and brother were both chronically underweight. My mom would have 1 Little Debbie everyday. My brother probably never noticed there were Little Debbies and we weren't getting one. They had medically prescribed protein shakes to help them beef up. Guess who drank them?- Me. They both forget to eat when they get busy and are surprised to find they lost 10lbs. I've never had a surprise 10lb weightloss. Their just not into food.

The biggest failure of the article, ignoring that if you are prone to weight gain, "decadent desserts" have the power to make things worse. Limitations of willpower aren't a reason to succumb to decadent desserts, but a reason to avoid exposure, to avoid giving your willpower the sort of tests that it's likely to fail.

Also the New Year resolution thing, the New Year's resolution high rate of failure is famous. Failure rates can be deceiving. When I had to stop smoking pot in my mid-20's because it was worsening schizophrenic-type delusions and hallucinations, I probably failed at least a dozen times. Add that one time where it stuck, and I've got about an 8 percent success rate. If other people were just like me, quitting pot would have a 92 percent failure rate, pretty discouraging. The failure rate isn't the same as the probability of eventually succeeding. Giving up is a good way to lock in failure. Telling people that trying again just isn't worth it is a kindness if it's true, but no favour if it's not. I have to wonder if experience is of any value, whether people learn things even in failed attempts that will come in useful in future attempts.

Teaser, I do like what you wrote.

I'm wondering if maybe we ought to redefine what it means to be a success or a failure at efforts like losing weight and giving up smoking. I've known people who tried to quit smoking a dozen times before finally succeeding. I've known other smokers who had managed to quit for years suffer a relapse and begin smoking again. One of my brothers quit smoking for nearly ten years. He was a "success..." until he went thru a stressful period and picked up the habit again. Suddenly he was a "failure." He smoked again for several years and then was diagnosed with colon cancer and has quit again. He's now going on 5 years smoke-free. Just how do you take that history and simplify it into some sort of easily reportable "percent success rate"?

And, dieting is much the same.

Maybe each person who has EVER attempted one of these efforts should be considered a single data point and then, if they consider themselves to be "currently successful" then count that person as a success....but pay attention to how many attempts it took them to get to that point. If they consider themselves to be "currently unsuccessful" then count that person as a non-success. Even if it turns out that it takes, on average, a dozen attempts before one successfully quits smoking or successfully manages to lose weight, we should not be discouraging people from trying by telling them that the success rate is less than 1 in 10. So much better to be able to truthfully report something like, most people (more than half?) who keep trying to quit do manage to be successful at quitting by the time they've tried a dozen times.

We learn from failure, as a matter of fact. Nothing to learn from success, or more appropriately from no failure. If we always win, we don't learn anything new, we already know everything we need. It's the instant we fail that we first learn that we must learn something new.

I believe the problem is the effect of failure otherwise. It just doesn't feel that good. We dwell on that feeling. We get stuck. Fatalism. I also believe solving that problem requires one to take a step back, to get perspective, become cynical a little bit, finally analyze the facts with a cold hard eye. Personally, I'd probably be depressed today, yet I'm not, because that's what I did, found a few solutions, still haven't found everything but I'm still looking. See? Had I not failed, had I maintained good health, I'm sure I would have remained ignorant of a bunch of useful things (I would probably not have developed my paradigm, for example), cuz I'm driven to learn by the facts, not by some mysterious ideal.

So yeah, the advice to not try again is fatalism, probably derived from personal failure, but more importantly from failure to learn from it. I guess that's probably the biggest possible failure of all. If you fail to learn from failure, that's it, you're done.

Just looking at people lately, and noticing there must be a whole lotta bad genes in Americans.

You are so right. I quit smoking a dozen times before I quit for good - & if I could afford cigarettes, there are times I'd be perfectly willing to start again. That's also when I learned that quitting one addiction starts another. The first time I quit smoking for over a year I gained about 40 lbs. I started smoking again & lost the weight. When I quit smoking for the last time - more than 25 years ago - I eventually gained over 100 lbs. I was addicted to food.

Low carb helped, but I wasn't able to control my food very well (understatement). Finally found OA & that's been a great help.

The other day I heard an interview on NPR that really held my attention; the woman described her husband's opioid addiction & it sounded just like my food addiction! You can read it at: https://www.npr.org/2017/12/29/5745...-husbands-death

It's so easy to blame my lack of control on lack of willpower - after all, I am able to eat appropriately for days, even weeks, before losing it. I don't eat grains or sugar, so my blood sugar doesn't get terribly out of whack. But I'm the only person I know who can binge on meat.

Sometimes attributing my problems to an addiction feels like a cop out - but that's the only thing that makes sense of my behavior.

Bonnie, not the only person. As the cook of the family, and also the one who has to put away the leftovers, it is always a question about what (of the meat) is put away, and what is eaten. And this, after a full meal. I've always said that dessert doen't interest me much, but seconds or thirds of the meat will serve me quite well as dessert.

Maybe our bodies are just more efficient at retaining energy...maybe that was a desirable trait before food was constantly readily available.

It truly was a desirable trait when there were so many times of famine. Historically, winter was always a very lean time for food availability, especially if the fall harvest was not good. It was advantageous to have genes that slowed your caloric usage, so you'd make it through the winter, even more advantageous if you had genes that allowed you to survive a couple years of famine.


If you look back at US history, think about the fact that our population came mostly from other countries. Many of them came to the US during times of famine in their countries of origin, or during times of persecution, when they were reduced to near famine levels of food supplies.

All countries have people who have come from ancestry that survived lean/famine times, so there's a good chance that most people in the world inherited the genes that prompt them to eat as much as they can when it's available, in order to survive a possible famine.

They were desirable genes to have - good genes throughout most of recorded history, but genes that have backfired on us in these times of plenty, especially in the US. It's also happening in other countries that are going through economic changes that have dramatically increased their food availability.

There have definitely been famines that have affected certain countries in recent decades, and many lives have been lost in those countries due to starvation. Not everyone starves to death during a famine of course - only those who haven't managed to put on enough weight during the times of plenty, while having the genetic ability to draw on that weight as slowly as possible during the times of famine.

The Naturally Thin Nicky's of the world don't seem to have those genes - or if they do, they're so weak as to not prompt them to overeat during the times of plenty, in order to survive any times of low food supply. In a famine situation, they wouldn't survive, simply because they've never been able to muster up enough appetite to consume any excess at all to help see them through a time of famine.

Because the Naturally Thin Nicky's of the world don't ever gain weight, they also have never forced themselves into an artificial famine state (i.e: gone on a diet), so their bodies don't even have a chance to learn to conserve calories. Those of us who gain weight and find it difficult to lose do so because our genes are determined that we must take in and conserve extra to survive famine, and that determination is enforced by our dieting (artificially created famine state) to conserve as much energy as possible in case of famine (or another weight loss diet).

At least with LC, we don't need to create that artificial famine state to lose weight. We can still eat a very adequate amount of calories, and lose the weight we gained by eating starches and sugars. Or at least some of it, since this works better for some people than others, and probably depends a lot on how much you gained, what age you gained it, how it affected your metabolism, how strong those calorie conserving genes are, and whether or not you taught your body to conserve even more calories by going on calorie restricted diets regularly before going LC, and possibly other factors as well.

Link

So true, so true. As someone once said, "You didn't win the race if you were born on the finish line."