Losing fat isn’t a biological problem, it’s a behavioural problem.
Many have heard the oft quoted statistic that around 2/3rds of Americans are Overweight or Obese. Many battle cries have followed, more recently by figures like Jamie Oliver, who even won a TED prize for his efforts.
While he hasn’t solved the obesity epidemic, I do think it is a step in the right direction.
I say this is in the backdrop of many over-hyped yet ineffective methods of fat loss. From books like “Good Calories, Bad Calories”, which largely places the blame of obesity on Carbohydrates. To Scientists who put the blame solely on Fructose. To people who seek out surgical intervention like stomach stapling and liposuction.
What all these approaches have in common, is that they attempt to solve the obesity epidemic by targeting an external trigger. They’re trying to say, “It’s ____ that’s causing obesity. We have ____ to prove this. Eliminate ____ and the problem will be solved.”
It works sometimes, and fails most of the time. Of all the times that it works, the same thing happens: The person eats less than he/she expends.
In other words: They behaved differently.
Telling people to behave is hard. It’s hard because freedom festers a peculiar sense of self-righteousness that defends the right to lifestyle. It shifts the blame.
But we have to blame something. We have to have something to focus our efforts upon.
Blaming something else is easy; the power of negative cohesion is immense. Blaming yourself is self-defeating; it hurts the ego and squelches motivation.
So you know what we need? We need the Steve Jobs of the dieting world. We need someone to do something that makes everybody behave, and do so with a smile. Something blameworthy and simple. Something that takes the thinking out of the equation, and saves us from ourselves.
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