Weight Maven

Via Conditioning Research comes this 2008 talk by Dr. John Ratey at Google.

Watch the whole thing for a compelling view on the benefits of exercise re brain health. But for the purposes of this post, he makes an important point (around the 4:00 mark) that there are two traits we inherited from our ancestors:

I thought this a perfect complement to a post today over on engrevo (emphasis mine):

Weight loss is not caused by eating less food or fewer calories. Eating less is caused by weight loss. The “trick” is in convincing your brain that you have more fat than you need. Then hunger decreases, expenditure increases, satiety increases, satiation comes sooner… and so on. In short, your body goes into “lose fat mode,” and does so in a hurry.

The way to switch to this mode, it is proposed, is to eat a low-reward diet. I’d prefer to say that we should avoid obesity by avoiding an artificially high-reward diet.

So you could say: Eat real, unprocessed food with no ingredients list.

I have a quibble about the first two sentences (I don’t think eating less is caused by weight loss). But I think the highlighted sentence is spot on.

I’m not yet convinced that the answer is to eat bland food (sorry Stephan!). But limiting artificially high-reward foods is certainly the answer (or a large part of it). And I say limit because I like Harry’s idea of “intelligent control” of high-reward foods.

But as they used to say, your mileage may vary.