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Why You Should Never Try To Lose Weight
Health results from focusing on the right things, not fixating on one misleading metric
For the last couple of decades we’ve been living in an extraordinary time. For 99.99% of human history, there have always been more under-fed people than fat people. But since the turn of this century, we’ve lived in a world in which there are more fat people than thin people. This is because we live in a world of superabundance, a world of calorie-rich but nutrient-poor junk foods that earn large food corporations huge profits by slowly poisoning consumers.
Not surprisingly, as the world has grown fatter and fatter, people have increasingly looked to fad diets as a way to slow down the seemingly inevitable accretion of ever-more blubber. But despite all the fad diets that have come, been hyped, and then gone, the harsh reality is that fad diets are guaranteed not only to fail, but to result in even greater weight gain.
There’s a basic underlying metabolic reason for this that is a consequence of our evolutionary history.
For nearly all of our history as a species, food was scarce. Fat is the way our bodies store up calories for survival during lean times. Fat contains around 10 calories per gram, compared to both protein and carbohydrates which yield…
