Health Alert 313
Obesity is up in forty-nine out of fifty states.(1) Flab is increasingly becoming associated with the US, especially among Europeans. Sixty-five percent of Americans are now overweight or obese. Childhood obesity has doubled in the last twenty years.(2)
At my clinic, we have good results dealing with excess body fat with a strategy nearly opposite of the typical approach. In fact, when patients ask me about weight loss, the first thing I do is tell them to forget our government’s preachings on what Americans should eat.
In your next 8 Health Alert’s, I’ll show you the system we use for weight loss. You’ll see how it works for my patients and how you can apply these easy-to-use ideas yourself.
Obesity was not a problem in the past so to find the cause of this modern problem we must start by looking at what we changed.
What did we change about our diet? Here’s where the government gets it wrong. We didn’t start eating more fat. Changing the amount of fat you eat will not reverse the cause. For millions of years ago, our ancestors thrived by hunting. A hunter’s diet has more fat than the modern American diet. It had much less carbohydrate and no grain products though.
What did we change about our activity? Here again, the government gets it wrong. We didn’t work longer hours in our ancient past and their recommendation of exercising longer won’t reverse the cause. In fact, we started expending more energy and working longer when we switched from hunting to farming.
Now, in the modern world we have so many choices, so many things to do. We bombard ourselves with sensory stimuli from the moment we gain consciousness in the morning until we close our eyes at night. There is a relentless push to do more with nearly constant durational activity. It leaves us exhausted, weak and diseased.
The hunter spends much more time, planning the hunt, looking for prey and preparing for the kill than he does making the kill. The kill is intense and can be extremely strenuous but is quite brief. Since the success of the kill directly determined our survival, it had a dominating influence on our development.
In the natural world, we are all either predator or prey. Both have to accelerate to 100% of their maximum capacity in a heartbeat. This rapid adaptive response to an intense, sudden physical challenge is totally lacking in the modern world. In fact, it’s exactly what my colleagues in cardiology universally advice their patients to never do.
The problem is with this preaching is, if you don’t use it, you lose it. The consequences directly affect how you use and store energy. My research has shown that if you remove this natural challenge, you will store more and more energy as fat.
In your next Health Alerts, we’ll look at:
- What we learned from the Atkins bubble.
- Why you don’t want to follow a South Beach diet.
- How to restore natural ratios to your food.
- How to get back in touch with your natural “rhythm of eating”.
- An powerful example of how a patient went form blubber to muscle.
- A startling revelation from original research on burning fat with exercise from our Wellness Research Foundation.
Al Sears, MD
PS. In case you’re wondering which state didn’t get fatter, it was Oregon.
(1) Associated Press. Obesity rose everywhere but Oregon last year. USA Today. Aug 23, 2005.
(2) Luscombe R. Americans are getting fatter at a pace never seen before. The Guardian/UK. Aug 25, 2005.