This is a longstanding discussion on these forums. The standard advice is “eat less, move more,” and this does work—up to a point. Remember that the “Biggest Loser” contestants permanently damaged their metabolisms with the extreme dieting and exercise the programme put them through. And most of them regained a large part of the fat they lost on television. Which is why the programme will never have a reunion episode.
Gary Taubes has one of the best explanations of what the science actually tells us: there is a hormonal response to the foods we eat that determines how our body deals with it. Often this hormonal response trumps the question of how much we are eating. He suggests that while the First Law of Thermodynamics always applies, we may have gotten the direction of causality wrong. In other words, it is not that people get fat because they eat too much, but rather it is because they are in fat-gaining mode that they have to eat large quantities of food as a result. And if we eat in a way that puts us into fal-loss mode, of course we will use more energy than we consume—because our hormones are directing the process and setting the level of our appetite and our metabolic rate.
Consider the phenomenon of the pubertal growth spurt. NO ONE believes that the reason teenagers grow is because they are eating their parents out of house and home. EVERYONE understands that their appetite is necessary to fuel the growth spurt demanded by their hormones. Taubes suggests that we should also apply the same thinking to fat gain in adulthood, and his point seems really plausible. I find that, if I eat one way, I don’t get fat, whereas I do get fat if I eat another way. The quantity of food and number of calories is really irrelevant to this.
I have come to the conclusion that “eat less, move more” is a conspiracy on the part of skinny people to punish people they think are weak, lacking in self-discipline, slothful, and gluttonous.
