200-Pound Weight Loss Without Hunger
In this series, I’ll look at the
factors that lead to both overeating and satiety. What food components
make us feel full? Why does more variety lead
to eating more quantity? And what lifestyle approaches
can we implement to increase the good food choices
and reduce the bad ones? Keep watching to find out. “200 Pound Weight Loss
Without Hunger” Anyone can lose weight
by eating less food. Anyone can be starved thin.
Starvation diets are rarely
sustainable, though, since hunger pangs
drive us to eat. We feel unsatisfied with low-calorie diets, unsatiated. We do have some level
of voluntary control, but our deep-seated instinctual
drives may win out in the end. For example, you can
consciously hold your breath. Try it right now. How long can you go before your
body’s self-preservation mechanisms take over and overwhelm your
deliberate intent not to breathe? Your body has your best interests at
heart and is too smart to allow you to suffocate yourself, or starve
yourself for that matter. If our body was
that smart, though, how could it let us become obese? Why doesn’t our body realize
when we’re way too fat and allow us the leeway to slim down? Maybe our body is very aware and actively trying to help, but we’re
somehow undermining those efforts. How could we test this theory
to see if that’s true? So many variables go into choosing
what we eat and how much.
There are psychological, social,
cultural, and aesthetic factors. To strip all that away and
stick just to the physiological, Columbia University researchers
designed a series of famous experiments using a food dispensing device. The term “food” is used
very loosely here. Their feeding machine was a tube
hooked up to a pump that delivered a mouthful of bland liquid formula
every time you pushed a button. Research subjects were instructed
to eat as much or as little as they wanted at any time. In this way, eating was reduced to just the rudimentary hunger drive. Without the usual trappings of sociability, meal ceremony, and
the pleasures of the palate, how much would people
be driven to eat? Put a normal-weight person in this scenario and
something remarkable happens.
Day after day, week after week,
with nothing more than their hunger to guide them, they eat exactly
as much as they need, perfectly maintaining their weight. They needed about
3,000 calories a day, and that’s just how much they
unknowingly gave themselves. Their body just intuitively seemed to know how many times
to press that button. Put an obese person
in that same scenario and something even
more remarkable happens. Driven by hunger alone, with the
enjoyment of eating stripped away, they wildly undershoot,
giving themselves a mere 275 calories a day—total.
They could eat as much as they
wanted, but they just weren’t hungry. It’s as if their body knew how
massively overweight they were, so it dialed down their natural
hunger drive to almost nothing. One subject started at 400
pounds and steadily lost weight. After 252 days of sipping the bland
liquid, he lost 200 pounds. This groundbreaking discovery
was initially interpreted to mean that obesity is not caused by
some sort of metabolic disturbance driving people to overeat. The study suggested
quite the opposite. Instead, overeating appeared to
be a function of the meaning people attached to food beyond its use as fuel, whether
as a source of pleasure, or perhaps relief from
boredom or stress. In this way, obesity seemed more
psychological than physical. Subsequent experiments with
the feeding machine, though, flipped such conceptions
on their head once again. If you take the lean study
subjects and covertly double the calorie concentration
of the formula, they unconsciously cut their
consumption in half to continue to perfectly maintain their weight.
Their body somehow detected the change in calorie load
and sent signals to the brain to press the button half
as often to compensate. Amazing! Do the same with obese persons,
though, and nothing changes. They continue to drastically
undereat just as much as before. Their body seems incapable
of detecting or reacting to the change in calorie load,
suggesting a physiological inability to regulate intake. Might the brains
of obese persons somehow be insensitive
to internal satiety signals? We don’t know if
it’s cause or effect.
Maybe that’s why they’re obese
in the first place, or maybe the body knows how obese it is
and is shutting down the hunger drive, regardless of the
calorie concentration. Indeed, the obese subjects
continued to steadily lose weight eating out of the machine,
regardless of the calorie concentration of the food being dispensed. It would be interesting to see if they regained the ability to
respond to changing calorie intake once they reached
their ideal weight. Regardless, what can we apply
from these remarkable studies to facilitate weight loss
in the real world? We’ll explore just
that question next.
Long-Forgotten Costa Rican Tradition Helped Me Melt 167Lbs
ᴛɪʀᴇᴅ ᴏꜰ ʙᴇɪɴɢ ᴏᴠᴇʀᴡᴇɪɢʜᴛ
ʜᴏᴡ ᴀ ʟᴏɴɢ-ꜰᴏʀɢᴏᴛᴛᴇɴ ᴄᴏꜱᴛᴀ ʀɪᴄᴀɴ ᴛʀᴀᴅɪᴛɪᴏɴ ʜᴇʟᴘᴇᴅ ᴍᴇ ᴍᴇʟᴛ 167ʟʙꜱ ᴏꜰ ꜱᴛᴜʙʙᴏʀɴ ꜰᴀᴛ ɪɴ ᴜɴᴅᴇʀ 1 ʏᴇᴀʀ ᴡɪᴛʜᴏᴜᴛ ᴅɪᴇᴛ ᴏʀ ᴇxᴇʀᴄɪꜱᴇ!
ᵢ ᵍₒₜ ᶠᵣₒₘ ₂₉₁ ₚₒᵤₙᵈₛ ₐₙᵈ ₘᵢₛₑᵣₐᵦₗₑ, ₐₗʷₐʸₛ ₜᵢᵣₑᵈ ₐₙᵈ ₕₐᵣᵈₗʸ ₘₒᵥᵢₙᵍ…
ₜₒ ₁₂₄, ₛₗᵢₘ ₐₙᵈ ₗₒᵥᵢₙᵍ ₑᵥₑᵣʸ ₛₑᶜₒₙᵈ ₒᶠ ₘʸ ₗᵢᶠₑ!
