{Dramatic cartoon entrance music}
"Did somebody call for Captain Obvious?!"
Posted on 05/10/2007 12:15:05 AM PDT by neverdem
It was 1959. Jules Hirsch, a research physician at Rockefeller University, had gotten curious about weight loss in the obese. He was about to start a simple experiment that would change forever the way scientists think about fat.
Obese people, he knew, had huge fat cells, stuffed with glistening yellow fat. What happened to those cells when people lost weight, he wondered. Did they shrink or did they go away? He decided to find out.
It seemed straightforward. Dr. Hirsch found eight people who had been fat since childhood or adolescence and who agreed to live at the Rockefeller University Hospital for eight months while scientists would control their diets, make them lose weight and then examine their fat cells.
The study was rigorous and demanding. It began with an agonizing four weeks of a maintenance diet that assessed the subjects’ metabolism and caloric needs. Then the diet began. The only food permitted was a liquid formula providing 600 calories a day, a regimen that guaranteed they would lose weight. Finally, the subjects spent another four weeks on a diet that maintained them at their new weights, 100 pounds lower than their initial weights, on average.
Dr. Hirsch answered his original question — the subjects’ fat cells had shrunk and were now normal in size. And everyone, including Dr. Hirsch, assumed that the subjects would leave the hospital permanently thinner.
That did not happen. Instead, Dr. Hirsch says, “they all regained.” He was horrified. The study subjects certainly wanted to be thin, so what went wrong? Maybe, he thought, they had some deep-seated psychological need to be fat.
So Dr. Hirsch and his colleagues, including Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel, who is now at Columbia University, repeated the experiment and repeated it again. Every time the result was the same. The...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If your parents are fat you have an increased chance of being fat as well???! NO WAY!
Where’s captain obvious when we need him?
{Dramatic cartoon entrance music}
"Did somebody call for Captain Obvious?!"
It began with studies that were the inspiration of Dr. Ethan Sims at the University of Vermont, who asked what would happen if thin people who had never had a weight problem deliberately got fat.
His subjects were prisoners at a nearby state prison who volunteered to gain weight. With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. But it took them four to six months, eating as much as they could every day. Some consumed 10,000 calories a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that there were attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.
Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent. They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body surface to stay fat but needed just 1,800 calories per square meter to maintain their normal weight.
When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight. Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed there.
I was adopted at 3 months, and didn’t meet my birth mother until I was 30. I was overweight, as was she. My adopted father was big but not huge, my adopted mother was thin.
I now weigh 370, and need to do something about it soon before it kills me.
Ditto.
But it's still a lot easier to say than to do.
It’s all in the genes, I am 5’11, 165. There has never been an overweight person in my family, my siblings, parents, children and grandchildren are all normal weight.
Even in my ‘sedentary years’, I have no problem staying thin but I sympathize with those who are not blessed with ‘thin genes’.
I must be an anomaly; both my parents are as thin as rails, but I’ve always been consistently a chunky fifty pounds overweight and diets don’t seem to do a thing.
I hate to break it to you but, according to the study, you are adopted!
It is also well known that if your parents never had kids you probably wouldn't either.
If I invest 3 to 4 hours a day in exercise, I can crack that 200 pound barrier, but how can you have a family, job etc and do that.
My blood pressure is 120/70. My pulse rate is low, and it takes significant activity to get it up. My cholesterol is OK. In general other than being 60 pounds overweight, I am in good shape.
By the way I do watch my diet (lots of vegetables and fruits, reduced meat with lean portions, reduced bread, and no caloric drinks - I only drink water). I am always hungry. When I go super low on the calorie count (1400 calories/day), I start experiencing the starvation symptoms discussed in the article (dreaming of food, inability to sleep, and anger).
I think all males in my mother’s side of the family seem to have the same problem. Most of them eat about like I do or worse, and they do not exercise nearly as much.
It was that darned mailman!
I could give up beer, but I hopeful science will come through for me and the many others that suffer from beer code genetic syndrome.
Once that is cured, donuts are next. Then life would be perfect. If anyone would like to start a federally recognized BCGS organization, and get funding, emotional and medical support and victims rights status, FRmail me.
That's a little more than I needed to know.
But it's still a lot easier to say than to do.
You're not kidding.
I cut all wheat out of my diet once and the weight just fell off. I ate other grains; oats, corn, rice, but when I stated eating wheat again, it was all over. It wasn't the desserts that got me, but just bread. I only lasted about 3 months.
While the article was interesting, I have a couple of problems with it.
1. Childhood obesity is skyrocketing, and it is not because only fat people are having children.
2. The part of the article regarding identical twins is not bullet-proof. I know a set of identical twins, who BOTH have autism, but different kinds. One seeks sensory stimulation (including taste) and endless activity (rocking), and the other hates extra noise and chaos, and eats much less. Now around 40, one is quite pudgy (the one who wants stimulation) and the other is normal weight.
Ba-da-bing!
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