Do you ever wonder why people still struggle with obesity? And not just everyday people, but doctors,nurses, physical therapists, and any other health professionals you’d care to mention seem to have expanded not just their minds, but their belts. You’d think that with all the supposed advances in modern science, that “they” would have found some specific targeted answers for why people get fat, and a clear and direct path toward obesity prevention and treatment. Sadly, and quite clearly, this does not describe the current state of affairs. It seems that every few months there is a new fad diet gracing the pages of the “health” magazines laid out neatly for the public to “ooh” and “aah” at in supermarket ques and waiting room coffee tables.

With all these diets,tonics, miracle pills, and super foods, you’d think that at some point, one of these blindfolded buffoons would have hit a bulls-eye. To the dismay of the general public however, nothing seems to work. At least not in the long term. A particular diet or pill might be effective for a little while, but it seems that people always end up right back where they started, wondering, “just how the hell they got there,” and trying to figure what the next step might be.Even worse, many of us find ourselves in this exact spot, shedding pound after pound to try to stem the imminent onslaught of disease only to pile the weight back on again. The only difference is that this time, it’s your life that hangs in the balance, and not some numbers on a bathroom scale.

            And so,after wrestling with the topic for decades and coming up empty handed, we must resign ourselves to the fact that whatever theory we’ve been using to treat this obesity epidemic, isn’t working. The whole idea that calories are the motor that’s driving this boat is played out. The eat less, move more movement,though noble, has been found wanting. So what is it that’s really driving this obesity train at such a breakneck pace that we can’t keep up? It’s not fat,people have been trying low fat diets for the past 50 years to no avail. Protein’snot the culprit, all the super jacked dudes at the gym down piles of eggs, steaks,and fish, and even through the bro tank, you can see that there’s not an ounce of fat on them. And believe it or not, it’s not carbs. There are innumerable examples of cultures that subsist on high-carb diets, from the Kitavans, to the Okinawans, to traditional Chinese cultures, with little to no history of obesity, diabetes, or disease. This poses a problem.

Historically, we have looked for a particular macro-nutrient (carbs, fat, protein), or a particular unit of measurement (the calorie) to blame for the fact that shirt sizes and health care bills have been growing at an unprecedented rate over the past 50 years. My search for answers in this area recently led me to a book called The Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. In The Obesity Code, Dr. Fung outlines a theory of obesity that finally helped me make some sense of this mess. He suggests that it is not in fact calories that are spelling our inevitable doom or some magical pie in the sky ratio of macro-nutrients we’ve been missing out on, but rather hormonal imbalance brought on by poor eating habits, stress,and lack of sleep. Specifically, Dr. Fung calls out insulin as the main culprit.

Insulin is a hormone,produced by beta cells in the pancreas, that tells the body to move sugar(glucose) from outside the cell, to inside the cell. Insulin also acts as a kind of messenger to tell the body to store incoming energy for later (fat). This is a good and a useful thing if you’re a healthy individual. You eat a piece of fruit, that fruit is broken down into sugars, which are then taken up by your body’s cells for energy, and what’s not used up now is stored for later when you’re sleeping, or making that long grueling walk to the dinner table. This process is good and healthy if the body is allowed to do what it’s supposed to do. Break down food, release a bolus of insulin to move sugars from the bloodstream into the cell, and then move on. For many individuals though, this is not the way things work anymore. In many westernized cultures, we’re bombarded with ultra-processed foods which are inherently more insulinogenic(insulin stimulating)than their natural counterparts. Not to mention, we are pressured to eat these foods a bare minimum of 3 times a day, with snacks in between, just to make sure that our blood sugar doesn’t get too low. This lifestyle ensures that our bodies are constantly producing insulin to deal with the endless influx of sugars. If allowed to follow this lifestyle path for any significant length of time, we’re opening ourselves up to excessive weight gain, diabetes, heart disease,fatty liver, and a host of other issues that will have you trading in your running shoes for a walker a lot sooner rather than later.  

So now that we have this new set of lenses through which one can look at this obesity epidemic, the next logical question is: how can we tame and control these wild hormone imbalances that are causing so much trouble? In part two of this post, I’ll be discussing some of the things that can be done by the average overweight Joe to help tame insulin overload, and maybe just shed a few of those pesky pounds from more sleepless nights, sodas, and vending machine lunches than most people would care to mention.