Being fat sucks. I've always been a few pounds heavier than I wanted to be, and I've always been on a lose-weight-then-gain-back-more scallop curve. I'm not alone. Doc blogged that he was the heaviest he'd ever been; Dave just had a heart-attack major heart surgery (thanks, Dave!). Go to a tech or science fiction conference, and at every turn you meet people who are rounder than they'd like to be; as Patrick Nielsen Hayden writes, "You can't miss me at any gathering of science fiction people. I'm the middle-aged pudgy guy with a beard."
We're all sedentary as hell, sure. We also eat for shit, consuming way too much super-sized Big Gulp fat-shakes with extra high-fructose corn syrup. No matter what we try, it appears that we just get fatter.
This long, in-depth article from the NYT looks at the alternative hypothesis of weight-gain and weight-loss. Americans eat "better" (i.e., lower-fat) than they have since the 50s, they exercise as much as they have since the workout boom of the 70s, and they are fatter than ever. A long-discredited hypothesis to explain this holds that substituting carbs and sugar for fat is a bad trade-off. For twenty years, we've been consuming "healthy," fat-free, sugar-rich foods as a way to get skinny, with dismal results.
I'm not a dietician, but after reading this article, I thought back to all the people I know who've been successful at losing weight in the past five or six years, and all the people I know who haven't been. Universally, the crazy guys who ordered triple-cheeseburgers but eschewed the buns are the ones who can see their toes today, while the fat-free miseries that the rest of us endured have come to nowt but extra rolls.
As a result, the major trends in American diets since the late 70's, according to the U.S.D.A. agricultural economist Judith Putnam, have been a decrease in the percentage of fat calories and a "greatly increased consumption of carbohydrates." To be precise, annual grain consumption has increased almost 60 pounds per person, and caloric sweeteners (primarily high-fructose corn syrup) by 30 pounds. At the same time, we suddenly began consuming more total calories: now up to 400 more each day since the government started recommending low-fat diets.
If these trends are correct, then the obesity epidemic can certainly be explained by Americans' eating more calories than ever — excess calories, after all, are what causes us to gain weight — and, specifically, more carbohydrates. The question is why?
The answer provided by Endocrinology 101 is that we are simply hungrier than we were in the 70's, and the reason is physiological more than psychological. In this case, the salient factor — ignored in the pursuit of fat and its effect on cholesterol — is how carbohydrates affect blood sugar and insulin. In fact, these were obvious culprits all along, which is why Atkins and the low-carb-diet doctors pounced on them early.
