Fat Want to become the wealthiest person in the world? Just invent a magic bullet that will make fat people thin. It hasn’t happened yet, and it is unlikely to happen in our lifetimes. if ever. Nobody wants to be fat. Nobody sets out to become fat. Around the world, there are millions upon millions of fat people, most of them getting fatter, wanting to get skinnier, and more of these people are being created every day. Obesity is a pandemic, and a whole lot of people have caught the disease. If there were some easy way to get rid of fat, the world would be full of thin people.

 

The Skinny on Fat The reason it’s not easy to come up with a cure: weight loss is not a simple case of making the energy going out of one’s body equal to the energy going in. Consciously, we may want to lose weight. But in the subconscious, the body is being told "keep all the fat you’ve got, and add some more if you can. Starvation could be just around the corner." Animal bodies, including ours, were programmed through eons of evolution. Our hunger mechanisms evolved... and then stopped evolving. Our early ancestors came into a world where food was not always that plentiful and where they had to work hard to get what they could. They hunted and they foraged. They encountered lean periods, during which they had to get by with whatever energy was stored in their fat. Starvation was common, and it was those who stored fat best who survived. We are the descendants of the survivors who were the kings and queens of putting on the pounds. We now have bodies that, even though we may lose fat, retain all the cells created to store fat – cells that demand to be re-supplied. Our primal body has not accepted the fact that food is now plentiful. We have 400 genes in our DNA geared specifically to maintain weight. Thus, most people who go into weight loss programs drop out; the programs simply demand too much will power to overcome the body’s subconscious demands to keep that weight on. Of those who stay in the programs, most do not lose weight. Of those who do lose weight, most will gain it all back, and usually more poundage on top of that. The conscious brain tells us we would look better, feel better, and run less risk of taking on debilitating and potentially deadly diseases like diabetes mellitus (learn how to prevent diabetes), hypertension, and cardiac problems if we would just lose weight. But the subconscious brain wins over the conscious brain every time. Pass the pizza.

 

Common Weight Loss Obstacles As if this were not bad enough, there are a host of other factors that make weight loss difficult:

 

Parental influences Your American great-grandparents may have lived through difficult times before food became more plentiful and affordable in the 1940’s. They hadn’t much money and were careful to keep wastage to the minimum. They insisted that their children follow their dictum to "clean your plate." The dictum then came down from your grandparents through your parents: Eat everything you’re given. You’re grown up now, food has been plentiful for a long time, it’s quite affordable, you can toss what you haven’t eaten into the garbage, but you’re still eating everything on your plate, whether you need all that food or not. And how about the fact your parents ate few vegetables? Under their influence, you probably don’t eat enough fiber, either. Chances are you prefer to fill up on tastier foods with high fat, high carb, and high caloric content.

 

Lack of Exercise Fifty years ago, most Americans were employed in factory or farm jobs that involved physical labor. Today, the factories have been replaced by offices where workers sit and stare all day at computer screens. Having done that for about 10 hours, they then go home and keep staring at another computer screen or they watch television. Meanwhile, staring zombie-like at a screen, they eat a dinner they brought home from a fast food joint. Then it’s bedtime, and it starts all over the next day. There simply isn’t time to exercise, and there becomes less and less incentive to do so. Exercise, even in the form of games, is no longer a major part of our children’s lives as it was in grandpa’s day, either. Parks and swimming pools are too few, and physical education has been disappearing from the schools.

 

Stress The increasing difficulty of coping with a world where jobs are not secure, where jobs provide little personal satisfaction, where they pay too little, and where, on the way home from the job, you never know when some jerk is going to sit down beside you on the bus and blow himself (and you) up – all of this has piled more and more stress on us. This has resulted in anxiety and depression, both of which leave internal holes that cry out to be filled up with food, which makes up for the lack of rewards in other parts of our lives. We then get fatter, and this makes us even more anxious and depressed.

 

"Strange" Factors Did you know that if you are served smaller portions of a given dish, you will end up eating less? Did you know that putting your food on smaller plates makes you feel like you are eating more than you really are? That’s all to the good. But did you know that, when asked to describe how much we have eaten, most of us generally underestimate the amount? Eating is an activity over which we have less conscious control than we believe. Unknowns Every day, science learns more about the human body and the way it processes food. New hormones are being discovered, and we don’t yet know what their relationship to digestion might be. We now know, thanks to researchers like Dr. Michael Gershin in New York and Dr. Bill Go in Los Angeles that the intestines have their own nervous system that almost rivals the brain’s, that the gut chemically communicates with the brain, and that it has a major effect on such things as telling us when our food intake has been sufficient and we should stop eating. Science has discovered that gastric bypass surgery does not necessarily cause people to lose weight as a result of making their stomach smaller; nerves are cut during such surgery, and it has been found that this has a great deal to do with curbing hunger – for awhile. A Good Place to Start So, what can you do? Not a lot, and none of it is guaranteed to make you lose weight.

1. Use smaller plates, eat smaller portions. (To supress your cravings, read 15 ways to supress your food cravings)
2. Do not bring junk food into your home.
3. Eat more veggies.
4. Eat less meat and eat leaner cuts.
5. Eat more fish.
6. Eat more slowly; chew your food more and suck all the flavor out of it before you swallow it.
7. Eat with others; good conversation improves digestion and makes you eat less.
8. Don’t eat with the TV on.
9. Make time for more exercise by cutting out some sedentary activities like watching television.
10. Walk more.
11. Work to make changes in your community, like more parks and recreation areas.

If all else fails, you might consider a gastric bypass operation; keep in mind, however, that this operation has a fatality rate that might put you off and that only 5 percent who have the operation eventually get down to a normal weight. In summary, weight loss is a highly individual thing. What works for some will not work for others, and we still have not managed to solve the puzzle of overcoming obesity. For more information on this article, read how to lose belly fat.