When obese mice were put on a strict diet to get their body weight below that of lean mice, they "still contain more fat than the normal ones, while their muscles have melted away", Gary Taubes notes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It.

In the 1950's, Jean Mayer, a Harvard researcher, noted that these obese mice 'will make fat out of their food under the most unlikely circumstances, even when half starved."

The point of this is, as Taubes states repeatedly, that all of these animals become obese, not because of faulty appetite regulation, but because of a change in the regulation of fat tissue which causes their fat cells to suck up more calories which leaves other tissue (muscles and organs) starved for energy which causes these animals to eat more and exercise less. Read the entire article | Email this article

When a rat is made surgically obese by damaging the hypothalamus -- a part of the brain which controls hormone secretion throughout the body -- this alters the regulation of body fat, not appetite, Gary Taubes writes about this in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It.

This is important to note because what happens is that fat cells suck up more calories which, in turn, starves muscles and organs in the body, and this is why the animals eat more and become obese, that is, they are "overeating" to provide energy to other tissue in the body such as organs and muscle cells.

It also turns out that if they allow these animals to eat even a moderate amount of food, they still become obese. Read the entire article | Email this article

Studies on rodents done from the 1930's to the 1960's surgically-induced rats into becoming obese by damaging a part of their brain called the hypothalamus, which controls hormone secretion throughout the body, notes Gary Taubes writes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It.
When they did this, the rats became fat because their fat cells sucked up more calories, and left the rest of the body without enough fuel to function properly. Read the entire article | Email this article

"The evidence that fat tissue is carefully regulated, not just a garbage can where we dump whatever calories we don't burn, is incontrovertible," Gary Taubes writes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It. Read the entire article | Email this article

"We have to conclude, as Wade did for his rats, that those who get fat do so because of the way their fat happens to be regulated and that a conspicuous consequence of this regulation is to cause the eating behavior (gluttony) and the physical inactivity (sloth) that we so readily assume are the actual causes," Gary Taubes writes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It.

In other words, obese people overeat and avoid physical activity because they are fat rather than overeating and avoiding exercise being a result of a lack of will power. Read the entire article | Email this article

In Chapter 9 of his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It, Gary Taubes tells about experiments showing that when the ovaries of female rats are removed, they eat voraciously and quickly become obese.

However, when the amount of food is limited to the amount they ate before having their ovaries removed, "The rats got just as fat, just as quickly. But these rats were now completely sedentary. They moved only when movement was required to get food." Read the entire article | Email this article

"In 1978, Susan Sontag published an essay called Illness as Metaphor, in which she discussed cancer and tuberculosis and the 'blame the victim' mentality that often accompanied these diseases in different eras.

"Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power," Sontag wrote, "are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease," Gary Taubes writes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It.

"So long as we believe that people get fat because they overeat, because they take in more calories than they expend, we're putting the ultimate blame on a mental state, a weakness of character, and we're leaving human biology out of the equation entirely."

"Sontag had it right: it's a mistake to think this way about any disease. And it's been disastrous when it comes to the question of why we get fat." Read the entire article | Email this article

In 1947, Julius Bauer, a University of Vienna professor, wrote, "Those who still believe that the problem of obesity is exhausted by the statement that there is an imbalance between intake and output of energy, assume that only a particular behavior -- the craving for food on the basis of emotional reasons -- accounts for overeating and subsequent obesity."

"Do these authors wish to range obesity as a 'behavioral problem' among psychiatric instead of metabolic diseases? This would be at least the logical though absurd consequence of their theory."
Gary Taubes writes about this in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It. Read the entire article | Email this article

"Of all the dangerous ideas that health officials could have embraced while trying to understand why we get fat, they would have been hard-pressed to find one ultimately more damaging than calories-in/ calories-out. That it reinforces what appears to be so obvious -- obesity as the penalty for gluttony and sloth," writes Gary Taubes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It. Read the entire article | Email this article

The belief that we can eat less without it affecting our energy levels, or exercise more without it affecting our appetite, is wrong notes Gary Taubes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It.

"The very notion that expending more energy than we take in -- eating less and exercising more -- can cure us of our weight problem, make us permanently leaner and lighter, is based on yet another assumption about the laws of thermodynamics that happens to be incorrect," Taubes writes. Read the entire article | Email this article

Saying that we get fat because we consume more calories than we expend, which is what nearly all the obesity experts say, does NOT explain why we get fat; it is merely restating the problem notes Gary Taubes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It.

The question we should be asking is why do people consume more calories than they expend?

Taubes gives a great analogy to explain this by saying:

"If you asked me [ why a room or a restaurant was crowded ], and I said, 'Well, because more people entered the room than left it,' you'd probably think I was being a wise guy or an idiot. Of course more people entered than left, you'd say. That's obvious. But why? And, in fact, saying that a room gets crowded because more people are entering than leaving it is redundant -- saying the same thing in two different ways -- and so meaningless." Read the entire article | Email this article

"If we restrict the amount of food an animal can eat..., not only does it get hungry, but it actually expends less energy. Its metabolic rate slows down. Its cells burn less energy (because they have less energy to burn). And when it gets a chance to eat as much as it wants, it gains the weight right back," Gary Taubes writes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It.

"The same is true for humans."

"Eventually, our bodies compensate."

Therefore, as Taubes points out, the advice we have been given by health experts, that losing weight is simply a matter of diet and exercise, ignores this fact, and can only lead to temporary weight loss. Read the entire article | Email this article

"If we replace five pounds of fat with five pounds of muscle, which is a significant achievement for most adults, we will increase our energy expenditure by two dozen calories a day. Once again, we're talking about the caloric equivalent of a quarter-slice of bread, with no guarantee that we won't be two-dozen-calories-a-day hungrier because of this," writes Gary Taubes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It.

This is in relationship to the idea that weight lifting rather than aerobic activity like running will cause weight loss because weight lifting will increase muscle that will burn more calories, however, as Taubes points out above, the effect of this is tiny. Read the entire article | Email this article

"Two experts in the Handbook of Obesity, for instance, reported as a reason to exercise that the Danish attempt to turn sedentary subjects into marathon runners had resulted in a loss of five pounds of body fat in male subjects; they neglected to mention, however, that it had zero influence on the women in the trial, which could be taken as a strong incentive not to exercise," writes Gary Taubes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It.

This is in relationship to the idea that you can lose weight simply by by exercising which will burn more calories without appetite increasing as well to compensate for the extra calories burned. Read the entire article | Email this article

"Physicians, researchers, exercise physiologists, even personal trainers at the gym took to thinking about hunger as though it were something that existed only in the brain, a question of will power (whatever that is), not the natural consequence of a body's effort to get back the energy it has expended," writes Gary Taubes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It.

This is in relationship to the idea that you can lose weight simply by by exercising which will burn more calories without appetite increasing as well to compensate for the extra calories burned. Read the entire article | Email this article

"The dubious credit for why we came to believe otherwise goes almost exclusively to one man, Jean Mayer, who began his professional career at Harvard in 1950, proceeded to become the most influential nutritionist in the United States, and then, for sixteen years, served as president of Tufts University (where there is now a Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging)," writes Gary Taubes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It. Read the entire article | Email this article

""'Vigorous muscle exercise usually results in immediate demand for a large meal," noted Hugo Rony of Northwestern University in 1940," writes Gary Taubes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It. Read the entire article | Email this article

"Until the 196os, most clinicians who treated obese patients dismissed as naive the notion that we could lose weight through exercise or gain it by being sedentary," writes Gary Taubes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It. Read the entire article | Email this article

"As it turns out, very little evidence exists to support the belief that the number of calorieswe expend has any effect on how fat we are," writes Gary Taubes in his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It. Read the entire article | Email this article

"ndereating isn't a treatment or cure for obesity; it's a way of temporarily reducing the most obvious symptom," writes Gary Taubes in Chapter Two of his excellent book Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It. Read the entire article | Email this article