It’s about Hormones, not the Calories.
In the mid 1960s, Dr. Astwood, in his presidential address to the Endocrine Society proclaimed that “Obesity is a disorder, which, like veneral disease, is blamed upon the patient”. This attitude, that obesity is your own fault, caused by gluttony and/or sloth, is still highly prevalent today. It’s all Calories In, Calories out! A Calories is a Calorie! You just need willpower! Eat Less, Move More! Everybody ‘knows’ that obesity is caused by eating too much, and eating less is the cure. But it didn’t work, even a little. Why?
Because the underlying premise, that eating too many calories causes obesity is false. In 1968, Dr. Ethan Sims’ famous overfeeding studies demonstrated that simply increasing calorie intake generally did not cause long-term weight gain. The body weight of lean people, pushed to extreme overfeeding (8000–10000 calories per day), did grudgingly increase, but effortlessly boomeranged back down after the experiment finished. Dr. Sims had rediscovered a phenomenon called ‘luxuskonsumption’ by the German scientist Rudolph Neumann in 1092 . So why did lean people have no problem losing weight and overweight people have so much trouble? The answer clearly was not merely in the number of calories eaten.
