I'm listening to this lecture series on stress. One of the lectures is dealing with how stress affects appetite. Apparently the reason we crave carbs when we are stressed is that carbs lower some of our stress related hormones. Science has started to shift into understanding how our environment affects the choices we make and how those choices affect us. Another fun fact is that if your grandmother was a second or third trimester fetus during a time where food was scarce that increases the likely hood that you will be overweight.
Time and time again I hear people lament that this just causes people to make excuses. Its the weirdest thing to me. No psychologically sound person wants to be fat. I'm sure their are some disturbed people out there who receive gratification from being fat. Heck there are actually people who seek to be infected with HIV so anything is possible.
Most of the time when someone blames their genetics or something like that what they are really saying is that they are afraid. They've tried and failed. They've been given too much conflicting information. They've experienced negative consequences while losing weight.
Weight loss and maintenance are hard. Another fun fact is that losing a large amount of weight, I forget the numbers, can lead to hormonal shifts that make it harder to keep the weight off. Specifically in a hormone called leptin, which tells your body you are full. Of you are morbidly obese and lose weight leptin levels can take years to recover. You could litterally spend years having a an endocrine system that doesn't tell you that you are full.
I can go on and on about the emotional, physical, financial, societal and psychological impediments to weight loss and maintenance. Science is really working hard to not only understanding them but understanding how they affect different people differently. My point is that these are important conversations to have. That obese and overweight people are not lazy or immoral. That people are not making excuses when they blame outside influences and that an insignificantly small group of people actually want to be overweight or obese. That we do ourselves, and society wrong by not addressing the many different barriers to weightloss and weight maintenance.
[link] [comments]
from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2LR8oD6
No comments:
Post a Comment