Why Are We Getting So Fat?

     By now most people know that we are in the midst of an "obesity epidemic." What most people haven't figured out yet is that there are billion-dollar industries getting richer while we get fatter. With all the so-called "solutions" for weight-loss available to health and fitness consumers, we are in the worst shape in the history of modern civilization. The truth is that there is big money and a lot of profit in sickness and fatness. Each year, millions of people are tricked into spending their hard-earned cash on diets and fitness products that won't help them. We spend billions of dollars jumping from one failed solution to another without understanding the reason why we are in such poor shape. Before you spend another penny on diets and weight-loss and fitness products that don't work, start by understanding why we are so fat.

The desire to lose weight without any work drives over 70 million people to go on a diet each year, and funds the $58 billion dollar diet- and weight-loss lie. Thousands of diets profess to have the solution for weight loss, yet the long-term positive results from dieting falls below the 5 percent margin. After ending the diet, most dieters will regain their weight they might have lost and more. There are three simple reasons that diets alone will not give you the solution for sustained results:

1. The concept of "going on a diet" means you are changing your eating habits for a specific period of time to effect a change in your body weight. Whatever changes you make to your diet have to be sustained for the rest of your life, or they'll only provide short-term results.

2. Dramatically reducing your caloric intake slows down your metabolism and causes your body to burn fewer calories at rest. An innate response to a slower metabolism is that it causes your body to preserve fat to avoid starvation.

3. When you reduce your caloric intake, you also reduce the energy source your body needs for physical activity. Most diets make you tired and lethargic, which make it difficult to increase physical activity. Unfortunately, increased physical activity is the most effective way to lose weight.

Forget about the glycemic index, food combining, low-carb or high-protein diets. Don't buy into the grapefruit or cabbage diets and don't think for a second that French women and Japanese women don't get fat. Every day, you burn a certain number of calories just by walking, talking and breathing. This is called your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR). Moving more through exercise and physical activity will help you burn more calories beyond your RMR. The difference between the calories expended through your combined RMR and physical activity compared to the number of calories you consume equals your caloric surplus or deficit. A surplus of 3,500 calories equals one pound of fat gained and a deficit of 3,500 calories equals one pound of fat lost. When it comes to gaining or losing weight, calories are THE most important factor. We've been led to believe that we can weigh less if we eat more, and that's by the diet and weight loss industry. That is a big, fat lie. There's no getting around it, you need to move more and not eat as much if you want to lose weight. Here's a tip: start moving more and stop dieting. That's the key to losing weight permanently.

Copyright (c) 2008 Craig Pepin Donat

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