Weight Loss Files: Secrets the Economy May not Survive

If weight loss is one of your biggest issues, you’re not alone. Just take a look at these dieting and weight-loss statistics:

• An estimated 45 million Americans go on a diet each year.
• Americans spend at least $78 billion per year on weight loss products
• 95% of diets fail
• Nearly 50% of obese individuals who take part in weight loss programs regain all of their weight within 5 years.
• Losing weight is consistently within the top 3 or 4 New Year’s resolutions.

But despite all the products and programs they buy and all the diets they try, approximately 160 million Americans are still overweight or obese.

Regardless of all the disappointment, though, they are almost always willing to try the next new thing that promises to help them lose weight permanently. And there’s no end to the people and industries willing and happy to cash in on their desperation and misery.

The obvious profiteers of your weight loss woes are the diet and fitness industries. Weight loss centers and bariatric surgery centers also rake in huge profits. But others who are not directly related to the weight loss industry profit, too. After all, obesity contributes to or causes most diseases. So…who else profits from your condition? That would be doctors, hospitals, and medical suppliers.

Processed food companies, fast food restaurants, and the sugar industry also helped you put on the pounds. Their profits depend upon you staying overweight or obese.

Have you ever stopped to wonder what would happen if — suddenly — everyone were thin if there were no more obesity in the world? The economy would suffer a crash worse than the Great Depression!

Once people learn the secrets to safe, SANE, long-term weight loss, everybody could be at a healthy weight. Here are some of those secrets that would destroy weight loss profiteers — and may ruin the economy — if you and everyone else learn the REAL facts about how to lose weight permanently.

Weight loss doesn’t depend on calorie counting.

If you’re like most people who have struggled with your weight for years, you’ve been on many diet and fitness programs. But no matter how different the program, almost all of them focus on the calorie-deficit theory of weight loss. This theory has trapped you and hundreds of millions of people on the dieting roller coaster. It’s why every diet and exercise program you try fails, keeping you shelling out your hard-earned money on the next diet and fitness product you hope will work.

The calorie deficit mantra has been the guiding principle of weight loss since the 1960s. Experts state it as truth, but there is no truth to it. It is actually a theory that likens the metabolism to a scale. If you want to lose weight, you need to unbalance the scale by eating fewer calories than your body needs or burning them off through increased exercise. This creates a calorie deficit causing you to lose a certain number of pounds a week based on a mathematical equation.

There’s only one problem. The math never works out as they say it will. Though you might lose a few pounds quickly in the beginning, it soon slows down to a dribble. You wonder what went wrong. What did you do wrong? You probably blamed yourself because the calorie deficit theory of weight loss couldn’t be wrong!

Oh, but it is.

Weight loss happens naturally when you lower your setpoint weight

You see, many studies have shown the calorie-deficit theory of weight loss is inaccurate. It is true that you must have a calorie deficit to lose weight, but it’s not true you have to count calories. Your body is designed to regulate the calories for you. It is not like a scale but like a thermostat,  regulating your calorie burn to keep you near your setpoint weight.

Your setpoint weight is the amount of stored fat the body works to maintain by regulating your appetite and metabolism through your hormones, brain, and genes. It doesn’t matter how much or how little you eat or exercise, your body defends this weight. The system works perfectly, ensuring you’ll never be too fat or too thin.

Until something goes wrong.

Factors that elevate setpoint weight

An elevated setpoint weight is caused by a combination of dysregulated hormones, gut diaspora, and brain inflammation. They create a situation in which the hormones do not send correct signals to the metabolism. It confuses the hormones, and they don’t know how much fat you need in storage. But since their job is to keep you alive, they signal the metabolism to give you more fat.

Your body keeps you at this weight no matter what you do. This is what leads to yo-yo dieting. No matter how much weight you lose, you always regain it up to your setpoint weight, plus a few more pounds for good measure.

Most of the factors that elevate the setpoint weight are ones that, if you reduce or eliminate them, will doom the industries that profit off your obesity.

Let’s take them one by one.

Processed foods

Processed foods have become a buzzword for all things evil, causing everything from obesity to heart disease to cancer. But let’s be clear about the meaning of processed foods.

Strictly speaking, food processing is anything that changes the structure of food before consumption. By that definition, anything canned or frozen is processed food, even if you do it yourself. Food processing has been practiced for thousands of years by various civilizations, and we cannot attribute obesity or other health problems to these practices.

What does cause these problems and elevates the setpoint is modern-day processed foods, those containing preservatives and other chemicals. These foods are moderately to heavily processed.

Today, more than 70% of foods in U.S. grocery stores are moderately or heavily processed,  and Americans are eating them, as researchers at the School of Public Health at the University of São Paulo, Brazil discovered.

When researchers examined the dietary habits of more than 9,000 people from the 2009-2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, they found almost 60% of the calories they consumed came from heavily processed foods. Moreover, a whopping 90% of their calorie intake was from added sugars.

Cutting out processed foods aids in weight loss

The researchers said these foods are easy to overeat, a known risk factor for obesity. Plus, many studies have shown excessive sugar consumption causes weight gain and obesity. The researchers theorized that reducing processed food intake would automatically reduce added sugar consumption, thereby lowering the obesity rate.

The reason processed foods and sugar cause weight gain is that they elevate setpoint weight.

And here’s an irony for you:  Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem, and Jenny Craig preach weight loss yet feed their clients/customers processed foods that guarantee they won’t lose weight!

If you and everyone else rejected moderately to heavily processed foods, what would happen? General Mills, Kellogg’s, Nabisco…all food companies would close. Hundreds of millions of people would lose their jobs. These companies would eventually reopen after they figured out a way to produce SANE foods.

Sugars

Like processed foods, sugar has been around for a long time. By the ‘1960s and ‘1970s, however, some experts debated its effects on health, mostly because of the heart disease epidemic.

In the 1950s and 1960s, rates of heart disease skyrocketed. There was a push to find out the cause of heart disease. Health experts publicly wondered whether saturated fat or sugar consumption was to blame.

To try to refute any role they might play in heart disease, the Sugar Research Foundation hired three Harvard researchers to conduct a literature review of studies into the possible effects of sugar and fat on heart disease. The foundation supplied all the studies the researchers reviewed. The results? The researchers found something wrong with every study implicating sugar in heart disease, but they endorsed every study implicating saturated fat, even though there were some glaring weaknesses in those studies. The researchers concluded that excess fat consumption, not that of sugar, was the biggest risk factor for heart disease.

The New England Journal of Medicine published the review in 1967, and it caused quite a stir. The Foundation never disclosed they funded this review, and the truth of what happened didn’t come to light until 2016. But from the moment they published this review, saturated fat was THE cause of heart disease. Sugar’s possible role was dismissed.

There is no evidence that the Foundation edited the review or paid the researchers to slant the review in their favor, but it is suspicious that they overlooked huge weaknesses in the studies that implicated fat.

The Seven Countries Study

This review added to the growing public chorus against fat that had begun with the publication of the Seven Countries Study several years before.

The Seven Countries Study is the first large-scale study to examine nutrition and lifestyle in addition to other cardiovascular disease risk factors over a lengthy period of time, spanning diverse countries and cultures.

Minnesota physiologist Ancel Keys directed this study. Keys became interested in heart disease while reading the death notices in the newspaper. He wondered why so many well-fed American businessmen were dying of heart attacks.

He compared their diets of rich, fatty foods with those of Europeans, whose foods had been rationed after the war, and concluded that excess fat consumption led to heart disease. To test his theory, Keys studied the dietary habits of 22 countries, finally selecting 7 of them to use in his study. He then compared the dietary habits and heart disease rates of those 7 countries.

He found an undeniable link between saturated fat consumption and heart disease. His study was published in 1958, and Keys made the cover of Time Magazine in 1961 for his discovery. He was praised for his life-saving discovery. But experts today see huge holes in his methodology.

For instance, critics say the 7 countries Keys included in his study are ones in which the citizens regularly enjoyed fatty diets. And Keys knew this before he selected them. The countries he excluded are ones in which the citizens enjoyed high-fat diets but had low rates of heart disease.  Also, experts looking at his study today say it actually implicates sugar, not fat, in heart disease.

But if Keys had critics back then, they were drowned out by all the praise. Keys’ work even persuaded the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, and Human Needs to issue Dietary Goals for the United States, a document urging Americans to reduce their fat and increase their carbohydrate consumption.

The no-fat/low-fat revolution: no help for weight loss

Though the panel meant for Americans to increase their carb intake by eating more fruits and vegetables, it didn’t work out that way. People thought any food was okay to eat as long as it didn’t contain fat.

By the 1970s and 1980s, the no-fat, low-fat revolution was in full swing. No-fat and low-fat products filled grocery store shelves. When food companies removed fat from these products, they replaced it with sugar.

The obesity epidemic had begun.

The obesity epidemic

Until around 1980, the obesity rate in this country was 12% to 14%. But in the late 1970s to late 1980s, they jump up from 22% to 25%. One of the causes for this increase, many experts believe, was the low-fat, no-fat movement.

According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 39.6% of adults in the U.S. are obese. In addition, 30.2 million adults in America have been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, which can be caused by obesity.

The sugar industry can no longer hide.

The sugar industry has had it easy all these years, but it can no longer hide. More and more researchers are going public with what they have discovered about sugar’s damaging effects on health.

For instance, Dr. Robert Lustig’s lecture on YouTube, “Sugar: the Bitter Truth,” went viral. For the first time, many people heard about the health and obesity dangers of sugar, and it surprised and shocked them. In his lecture, Dr. Lustig mentioned many studies showing that excessive sugar consumption is toxic to the body, causing many diseases, including obesity. If people rejected sugar, food companies would go out of business. There would be no center aisles of the grocery store!

Things that help weight loss? lower setpoint weight!

The only way to lose weight — and keep it off — is to lower setpoint weight. You can do that by reducing processed food and sugar consumption, which will help lower your setpoint weight.  Other principles of the setpoint diet include eating non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole-food fats, and low-fructose fats. You’ll be so full you won’t crave sugar or processed foods.

Isn’t it time to bring some SANEity to your life and take back control from the people and industries who profit off your distress?

Next step: master weight loss with SANE