Wired for Hunger
Back in Stone Age days, Ray Thompson would have loved his body.
After chomping a slab of mammoth haunch earned by the sweat of his brow, Thompson would have thriftily stored any surplus calories as precious fat--fat to keep him moving, mating, thinking and foraging till the next mammoth fell under his spear.
That’s slim comfort for Thompson, who lives in L.A. in the year 2000, where embarking on a food expedition no longer means a five-day tramp across the tundra but a five-minute spin down to AM/PM. His body, however, is still thinking “tundra.”
It’s easy to see how he ended up at 271 pounds.
Millions struggle like Thompson. Their biology, like his, is at odds with their lives.
Fifty-five percent of Americans are considered overweight, according to the National Institutes of Health. Health experts have been warning for several years that we face an epidemic of diabetes, heart disease and other obesity-related health problems if we don’t find a way to turn the tide.
“It would be impossible to exaggerate the problem,” says James Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado in Denver. “Everything is going in the wrong direction. We have to take action.”
Solutions won’t come easy, experts say, because there is little in the busy American lifestyle to cheerlead weight loss, and everything to rah-rah pound after pound onto people’s frames.
Take Thompson. He’s up at 5 each morning, then it’s into the car and off toward his long-haul days at the CBS studios--as a lighting director on “The Young and the Restless”--passing fast food and doughnut stores and markets brimming with yummy, calorie-laden delicacies like the spicy chips he loves so well.
Meals, in his job, are best grabbed on the go, or missed then made up for in late-night refrigerator raids. Exercise, in his sedentary life, must be planned--hard when you never know how late you’ll be working.
Thompson, now 46, has struggled all his life to lose weight and not refind it. But now he is full of hope. He’s lost 76 pounds. He’s been holding steady at 195 for three months. This, he knows, is the critical time.
“I don’t want to go back there,” he says. “I’m not going back there.”
Since we’re stuck with our biology, and no one’s going to give up their cars and TV remotes, obesity and nutrition researchers are intensifying their efforts to find solutions to modern society’s weight problem.
They’re turning to science, to better understand the way our appetite is controlled, in the hope that they can blunt it.
They’re studying success stories: those people who have overcome their lust for food, lost weight and, more important, kept it off for years. (Only 5% to 15% of dieters retain their weight loss over a significant period of time.)
They’re brainstorming--about ways to alter the very structure of society so that more people can number among the successes.
And they’re arguing. Over whether high-fat diets are to blame for the nation’s plight. Or refined foods stripped of their fiber. Or the sheer variety of food. Or foods that are just dense in calories, no matter what they’re made of. Or, or . . .
“It is, shall we say, a highly controversial subject,” says Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children’s Hospital in Boston.
Understanding and Working With Biology
“Our body doesn’t like losing weight,” says Susan Roberts, professor of nutrition and psychiatry at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. “It defends itself.”
If you underfeed a person, she’s found, that person crisply compensates by slowing his or her metabolism and moving less. Less fidgeting. Less pacing.
If you overfeed people, they also adjust somewhat, by burning more calories. But not enough to compensate. Slowly but surely, the pounds add up.
And these days, overfeeding is easy. Our brain, which has special regions devoted to controlling appetite, loves the signals it gets about the sight, smell and taste of food. This stuff is hard to find, it says: Chow down!
And our brain loves the sheer, dazzling variety of foodstuffs at the supermarket. That makes sense. Back in prehistory, eating different kinds of roots, berries and meats was key to a balanced diet.
(Roberts suspects that many diet plans work simply because they limit your choices, and you get bored, which curbs your appetite.) Food, in fact, seems to trigger “pleasure centers” in the brain that are also tickled by alcohol and drugs. No wonder it’s hard to stop eating.
Paying attention to those evolutionary-created preferences of ours--instead of stubbornly ignoring them--is a factor in losing weight, experts say.
For instance, as food piles in, our stomach senses the mounting tension and tells our brain it might be prudent to desist.
This may play a part in a diet plan proposed in a new book, “Volumetrics,” by Barbara Rolls, a nutrition professor at Pennsylvania State University.
There’s evidence, she says, that people eat a fairly constant weight of food. Thus it makes sense to pack fewer calories into whatever volume of food you eat. (Fat-free pretzels, for instance, since they’re still pretty dense in calories, would not be a great weight-loss snack.) The key is to do it without sacrificing taste.
Her lab studies show, for instance, that people are more satisfied by soups than by casseroles with the same number of calories
Still, even if calorie density plays a part, it is not “the” answer to weight control.
“We’re talking about a big puzzle--this is a thousand-piecer for sure,” Hill says.
Other pieces of that puzzle lie in the gut, which measures how much protein, carbohydrate and fat we’ve eaten, then sends “Enough!” messages to our brain. And crucial puzzle pieces lie in the brain, where scores of chemicals work in concert to control our appetite--some of them making us hungrier, others satisfying us.
Pharmaceutical companies are working to develop new weight-loss drugs based on these chemicals, to add to the drugs now available, Xenical and Meridia, which help modestly with weight loss. (Xenical decreases absorption of fat in the gut; Meridia suppresses appetite by altering levels of several brain chemicals.)
Some scientists suspect it will take a cocktail of drugs, not just one, to radically dampen our appetites. Our body is just that dogged in its drive to fend off starvation.
Appetite researchers are also debating whether certain foods--independent of the calories they contain--are more likely to make us overeat. Some think a calorie is simply a calorie. Ludwig, for one, doesn’t agree.
Americans are eating less fat--and yet we’re still getting fatter, because we’re still getting too many calories, he points out.
“It may be too simple to view all calories as the same,” he says, suggesting that refined, low-fiber foods cause us to become hungry again too soon.
Nobody knows how these ideas--nor all those popular ones we read about--play out, long term, in a diet. Ludwig, Rolls and Roberts are among those embarking on trials to find out.
To Keep Weight Off, Exercise Is a Must
As work in the lab trundles on, some researchers have taken a different tack in their quest to understand the do’s and don’ts of weight control: studying people on diets, including folks who have succeeded in losing and keeping off significant amounts of weight, no matter what their instincts may be telling them.
The news from such studies is both discouraging and encouraging.
When it comes to losing weight, calorie counting is crucial. Exercise, while it helps and is good for the heart, is not enough to help shed the pounds.
But exercising during weight loss does a very important thing: It sets people up for habits that are key for the hardest part of weight control: keeping the pounds off once they’ve been shed.
“When it comes to keeping weight off, there’s only one really good predictor--doing regular physical activity. That’s it,” says James Sallis, professor of psychology at San Diego State.
Unfortunately, it may be more exercise than we’re used to hearing about. Instead of the public health recommendations of 30 minutes a day, newer studies suggest it takes at least an hour a day of moderate exercise--such as brisk walking--to stop pounds from slinking back. Something just a hair closer to those prehistoric marches across the tundra.
Many clues to successful weight loss and maintenance come from a registry of nearly 2,000 people who have managed to sustain an average weight loss of 60 pounds for an average of five years. Very few used fad diets or medication to get there.
Structured support helped many of them: plans like Weight Watchers, programs at clinics, support groups and more. (Such support also may be important for the long haul.)
To keep their new, svelte shapes, they exercise vigorously--burning about 2,800 calories a week.
Almost all continue to watch their diet carefully--counting calories, weighing themselves, opting for low-fat diets, avoiding foods that tend to make them overeat.
Obesity experts are fiercely debating what it will take to help more people succeed in their quest to lose lard. Will it take a massive education campaign? Workplace incentives--like extra vacation time--for using the company gym?
Or how about a tax on junk food, as promoted for some years by one Yale University psychologist?
But Ray Thompson can’t wait. He’s dealing with the here and now. After years of struggling on his own with every diet under the sun--high protein, cabbage soup, liquid, the works--he enrolled in a weight-loss plan at UCLA after his pants size hit 46 and he developed a loud, embarrassing snore. And this time, he says, it feels different.
For the first time, he’s totally changed how he eats. He’s stopped fooling himself with “salads” with more dressing than lettuce, or baked potatoes buried under mounds of sour cream and bacon. Also, he now parks his car at the far end of parking lots, eschews elevators, and walks briskly as often as he can.
And whenever possible, as “The Young and the Restless” rolls relentlessly onward, he’s doing curls with his weights in the lighting booth.
