Slappy, obesity is rising sharply in Asian countries recently.
Rising rates of obesity, diabetes a 'disaster' for Asian countries, experts say
Pretty much every time this subject comes up I refer to an article by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker that appeared a few years ago and made a huge impression on my thinking about this whole thing. The line I always quote from it is that "we are a species that has evolved to survive starvation, not to resist abundance." Jes covered a lot of it, but another aspect that has to do with Bella's complaints is how will fits into the whole thing.
I haven't been able to find the whole article back online (I wish I would have copied the whole thing back when it was available), so these quotes come from previous times I've talked about it here...
Heh, when I went looking for it, I found I'd addressed it to Bella before, too.
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1554315#1554315
This is more specifically what I'm going for, from a very similar article though not the one I had in mind:
Quote:It is hard to contemplate the human appetite without wondering if we have any say over our lives at all. We believe in will - in the notion that we have a choice over such simple matters as whether to sit still or stand up, to have a slice of pie or not.
Yet very few people, whether heavy or slim, can voluntarily reduce their weight for long. The history of weight-loss treatment is one of near unremitting failure. We are a species that has evolved to survive starvation, not to resist abundance.
The revealing moment is the meal. There are at least two ways that humans can eat more than they ought to at a sitting. One is by eating slowly but steadily for far too long. The more common pattern, however, relies on rapid intake. Human beings are subject to what scientists call the "fat paradox".
When food enters your stomach, it triggers receptors that signal the hypothalamus to induce satiety. Nothing stimulates the reaction more quickly than fat. Yet still we eat too much fat.
It turns out that food can trigger receptors in the mouth which, obversely, get the hypothalamus to accelerate our intake - and, again, the most potent stimulant is fat. A little bit on the tongue, and the receptors push us to eat fast, before the gut signals otherwise. Apparently, how heavy one becomes is determined, in part, by how the hypothalamus and the brain stem adjudicate the conflicting signals from the mouth and the gut.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/main.jhtml?xml=/health/2002/10/21/hfat.xml
At any rate, I think that there are different enough uncontrollable, physiological things going on that it gets really dangerous to say "if that person would just..." If YOU just did that, you'd probably not be fat. That doesn't necessarily extend to the person you're referring to. It's the 7-footer saying to the 5-footer "you just gotta extend your arms a bit more and then you can dunk." It doesn't mean that no 5-footer can dunk, ever (could Spud Webb dunk? I forget), but that the effort required for the 7-footer to do it and the effort required for the 5-footer to do it are very different. And, in case it needs saying, people who can stay thin just by eating reasonably and exercising (even a lot) are the 7-footers and 6-foot-6'ers...
I do think the yo-yo dieting part is huge here, too. I think that people who in previous eras would have been seen as pretty much normal (snood's picture) now consider themselves fat and start down a destructive road. Part of the Gawande article (though widely available information) is that every time you lose weight through starvation methods, it's much much easier to gain weight.
As in, if you start out at 120 pounds when you're 20 and then don't do anything in particular (eat normally, exercise a fair amount), all else being equal you're likely to add a certain number of pounds every decade until you're 140 or 150 or whatever -- not so slim, not
fat though, either.
But, if you think 120 pounds is way too fat and awful, and you diet through starvation down to 110, the process is then accelerated. You gain back those 10 pounds quickly, and because things have been re-set, 10 more. Then you try to get those off -- hard, but you can do it with extraordinary effort. Back down to 120. Then gain back the 10... etc. And within a decade, you're up to 160 already and things are still getting worse.
I saw something like that with my mom and have avoided any kind of starvation diets. I'm not as thin as I'd like to be but not following her course. I'm trying to do it through exercise alone, which helps a lot when I do it (whaps self over head).
At any rate, I wanted to get the will thing in there but overall I agree with Jes that it's not any one single factor, that there are all of these things swirling around that contribute.
