Simple Effective Weight Loss

"Overweight is caused by the intersection of ignorance, affluence, and evolution. As with most other things, you fix it by getting rid of the ignorance."

BW: You say in your book that the Threshold Theory is not a "disease model" of obesity and you imply that looking at it that way is part of the problem. Can you explain that in layman's language?

AAA: Certainly. Here is an analogy.

Suppose you have a large complex machine into which you are dumping some kind of raw materials and out of which you are getting some sort of useful product.

For illustration purposes, say you're dumping in raw wool & cotton and a bunch of chemicals and the machine is producing premium blankets from this.

Then for some reason, the machine gradually starts producing defective blankets.

So you decide that some part of the machine is out of adjustment and you start trying to diagnose and fix whatever part you think it is.

That's a "disease model" of the problem. It's a perfectly reasonable approach - but it's not the only approach - and with the "overweight" problem it happens to be the wrong approach.

There is another and much simpler reason that the machine might start to produce defective blankets. This is that for some reason it's started to get the wrong "mix" of input materials to work with. For example, it might be getting too little of some important chemicals, and too much wool.

This is an "Input-Output" Model and the Threshold Theory is an example of it applied to diet, nutrition, and weight-loss.

In this case the "machine" is the body. "Useful output" is high physical energy and good health. "Defective output" is some mixture of low energy, poor health, and too much bodyfat. And the "wrong input mix" is too little of some of the non-energy nutrients relative to too much of the energy nutrients, (primarily fat, but also carbohydrate).

Please note that at this level of analysis, there is nothing much new about this view. Almost all "diets" are based on the belief that if you can just change what you eat in the right way, you'll lose weight.

It's a view that has been around for so many centuries that it can be considered the intuitive wisdom of ordinary people. However, it's been forgotten by most medical researchers and other investigators who have wrongly decided they must have a broken machine to fix.

Doctors, of course, are trained to think in terms of disease models so you can't get too upset with them when they fail to break free of this training even in situations where it would be better to do so.

But then there's another whole crowd that has decided that all of "modern society" is the broken machine that has to be fixed. Naturally, they are usually more than willing to offer themselves to be the "experts-in-charge" of the "fixing".

Of course, this kind of thinking is really just applying even greater ignorance and even less wisdom to an even broader field. But since I'm not a psychiatrist, I may not be the best person to discuss why some otherwise intelligent people insist on thinking this way.

It is my contention that research on what constitutes the complete set of vital nutrients and how much of each is needed by humans, has in about the last 10 years finally reached a level of completeness (though not perfection) which now allows ordinary people to learn to adjust the mix of input nutrients to get the right output of high energy, good health, and low bodyfat.