Maintaining healthy weight

 Look, regular exercise is an unalloyed good, regardless of your weight loss goals. But unless you are engaged in intense sports, exercise is a slow and frustrating path to losing weight. Most of the calories most of us burn in adulthood come from just being awake and normally active. Accordingly, successful weight loss (and healthy weight maintenance) depends critically on calorie count.

Easier said than done. Our bodies react to meals differently, depending on the type of food delivering the calories. Hormonal responses to diet can be our enemies in the weight battle.

"The carbohydrate-insulin models proposes that the hormonal and metabolic responses to diet, not simply calorie content, cause the body to store excess fat. After consumption of a high-glycemic load meal with lots of fast-digesting carbohydrates (e.g., processed grains, potato products, refined sugar), insulin levels rise excessively, and glucagon is suppressed. This anabolic hormonal response directs too many incoming calories from the meal into fat tissue, leaving fewer available for the rest of the body. Consequently, hunger increases, and we tend to eat more. If we try to ignore hunger and restrict calories, then metabolism slows down, producing a positive energy balance either way."

*snip*

"If this model is substantially correct, then calorie restriction amounts to symptomatic treatment, destined to fail for most people because it disregards the underlying predisposition to excess fat storage. Instead, a focus on what you eat, rather than how much, would be more effective over the long term.

Thus, the model attributes the rapid increase in BMI across the population in large part to the processed carbohydrates that flooded the food supply during the low-fat diet era (although other dietary and environmental factors can also affect fat storage through related mechanisms)."

Read the whole thing: https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/95104?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2021-10-19&eun=g1700464d0r&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Headlines%20Top%20Cat%20HeC%20%202021-10-19&utm_term=NL_Daily_DHE_dual-gmail-definition