Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes
My lovely friend, Kali Harmen, recommended that I read Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes, and I sighed, deeply!
It is an occupational hazard of being overweight (in America the current politically correct term is “a person of size”!) that every second person wants you to read their favourite book, and when you run a website called Live Free From Obesity the frequency rises dramatically!
Why We Get Fat: Kindle Edition
But I rate Kali’s opinion, so I thought I’d at least follow the link to Amazon, discovered that it’s only £4.05 on the Kindle (or on my iPad), thought “what the heck” and downloaded it just before Susan and I jumped into the car to head to Gatwick to catch the plane to Florida (to look after her sick Mom).
I had wanted to go to bed early, because we had to be at the airport early, but I started reading it in bed in the hotel and had to force myself to put it down and go to sleep at about 01:00am. By the time we landed in Orlando the next day I had read it one and a half times.
Gary is a science writer, but/and a very good one. He has been fascinated by all the bad (or non-existent) science behind nutritional advice, both in the USA and the rest of the world.
Gary’s theme is that we “people of size” (not his term) don’t get to be this way because we eat too much and exercise too little. And in the first half of the book he completely demolishes “gluttony and sloth” as adequate explanations for obesity. Gary says that we don’t get fat because we eat too much, but that we eat too much because we are growing fat. Does that scramble your brain? It did mine, until Gary talked about teenage boys.
We all know that teenage boys have growth spurts. We know that teenage boys eat a lot, and any of us who have had anything to do with teenage boys know that they can appear very lazy. But no-one would think to say “my son is growing tall because he eats too much”. We wouldn’t think of saying that the boy is growing tall because he never gets out of bed. We know that his hormones have triggered the growth spurt, and that his system craves more energy to fuel the growth spurt … and takes so much energy in making him grow tall, that he frequently doesn’t have the energy to get out of bed.
So why would it be any different if we’re growing width-wise as opposed to height-wise?
But why do we get fat? Popular wisdom says that it’s all down to the 1st law of thermodynamics, and that you can’t deny the physics. Take more calories in than you expend through exercise, and you’re bound to get fatter. Hmm, says Gary. Imagine there are a row of rooms and each of these rooms has an entrance door and an exit door. Now imagine that a crowd of people is moving through the rooms. But one room has many more people in it than all the rest. You ask me why, and I say it’s because more people are entering that room than leaving it, and you look at me as though I’m losing the plot. ”Well, obviously!” but why? I have just stated the obvious, without any sort of explanation.
That’s the same as saying that I’m fat because I ate too much and didn’t exercise enough. Yes. Obviously. But Why? Again, popular wisdom would say that it’s obvious that I’m a greedy, lazy slob.
Well, maybe.
But nowadays we get children as young as 6 months old who are obese. Can it be that they are already greedy and lazy? Unlikely.
Gary explains how it’s all down to our endocrine system, and gives us a series of lessons: Adiposity 101, Endocrinology 101, etc. I can’t reproduce the entire book here: go get your own copy!
But if you’d like to sample Gary’s writing before lashing out a whole £4.05 for the Kindle edition, or a massive £4.49 for the paperback, try some of his New York Times articles:
A good place to start is with “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie“, published in the NYT in 2002.
Next try “Is Sugar Toxic“, a response in the NYT (April 2011) to the runaway viral success of Robert Lustig’s You Tube video, which I wrote about in my “Truth About Sugar” blog post back in early April.
But maybe you’d like to see and hear Gary. He did a lecture at Crossfit (a physical training outfit for people serious about getting fit: that Crossfit link is scary, but Crossfit is actually for everyone: check out this story in Sydney, Australia.) and the lecture was videoed and posted in three parts on You Tube: here they are:
Gary Taubes Cross Fit Talk, Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obUBaclfsys
Gary Taubes Cross Fit Talk, Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNFlbRjOeHA
Gary Taubes Cross Fit Talk, Part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSq_J5acEto
The Diet Delusion
In that lecture Gary referred several times to his first (500 page) book, called Good Calories — Bad Calories in the USA, and The Diet Delusion in the UK.
If you want to study this stuff in depth, or you’d like to see what a serious scientific investigative journalist can get up to for five years, then this is the book for you!
It arrived Friday morning (today is Saturday) and I’m just a couple of chapters in, but already I am enthralled.
Just by way of interest: having read Why We Get Fat on the plane to Orlando, I decided (despite having two week’s worth of Lipotrim in my case) to try Gary’s eating plan. I ate really well: eggs and bacon for breakfast (with mushrooms and tomatoes), cold meats and salad for lunch, and steaks, broccoli, salads for dinner. My weight dropped slightly (I had been worried it might soar!). My blood sugar continued to fall, and my blood pressure fell slightly.
I will return to Lipotrim, just as soon as I have the psychological and emotional support I need in place, to go through what Atkins would call the Induction Phase. I will be writing blog posts about Atkins, The Gabriel Method, and about T-Tapp training, and will then start to tie all these together.
Watch this space!
