I love, love, love Whole Health Source … it’s one of my top 3 favorite blogs. But today it’s almost love/hate (just kidding!) as Stephan teases readers with the prospect of his “simple new idea” to enable “the body to naturally return to a lower fat mass.”
Oh, do tell!
But there’s a great nugget in this post too. He highlights Arya Sharma’s recent UW Science in Medicine lecture analogy on why “eat less, move more” is an inadequate strategy:
[Dr. Sharma] spent a little bit of time pointing out the fallacy behind conventional obesity treatment. He used the analogy of edema, which is an abnormal accumulation of fluid in the body.
Since we know that the amount of fluid contained in the body depends on the amount of fluid entering the body and the amount of fluid leaving the body, the treatment for edema is obvious: drink less, pee more.
Of course, this makes no sense. It doesn’t address the underlying cause of edema and it will not help the patient. Yet we apply that exact same logic to fat loss. Since the amount of energy contained in the body (in the form of fat) depends on the amount entering and the amount leaving, the solution is easy: eat less, move more. Well, yes, if you can stick to that program it will cause fat loss. But that’s equivalent to telling someone with edema to drink less water. It will cause a loss of fluid, but it won’t correct the underlying problem that caused excessive fluid retention in the first place.
Nightmare on ELMM St indeed! I’m looking forward to his future posts.
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our modern culture -- especially diet. Beth writes about ancestral health, health policy, & mindfulness. And cats! 
Drink less, pee more? I absolutely love the analogy.
Well it’s not necessarily that eat less, move more doesn’t work it’s that we need to figure out how to make it work long term and why it wasn’t employed previously. I think it’s a little dangerous to say there’s a problem with it (eating less and moving more) as it gives people license to eat more/move less and to discount strategies for losing fat (if in fact that’s desired).
Well, I’m guessing it wasn’t employed previously because for too long, it’s been looked at as a simple energy balance question, and shocker … that’s turning out to be overly simplistic.
Sure, no one is going to lose fat (if desired) by doing what they are doing now. I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t involve changing the way we eat and the way we move. But I also bet that that’s going to be far more about changing hormones/metabolism/etc then it will be about calories.
The Caloric Hypothesis is DEAD. It has no predictive value. Obesity is extremely complex, with unknows far more than knowns.