Gut Feeling: Why Diets, Exercise, and Shaming have Failed

Gut Feeling: Why Diets, Exercise, and Shaming have Failed

*

Hamish Stuart

*

[Smashwords Edition]

*

*

Published in 2019 by Dark River, an imprint of Bennion Kearny.

Copyright © Dark River 2019

ISBN: 978-1-911121-72-5

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that it which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Dark River has endeavoured to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Dark River cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

Published by Dark River, an imprint of Bennion Kearny Limited, 6 Woodside, Churnet View Road, Oakamoor, Staffordshire, ST10 3AE

www.BennionKearny.com

Table of Contents

Title Page

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

PART 1: THE MYTHS

CHAPTER 1: Lifestyle Choice

Force fed the wrong messages

Global trends

Starting young

Getting older

The burden of weight

Salad days

No ‘one size fits all’ solution

CHAPTER 2: Willpower

No excuse

When ‘willpower’ came easy

CHAPTER 3: Diets

The perfect diet does not work

The long and short of it

The Biggest Loser

Quantity, not quality

Do you need to walk the walk?

Short, sharp shock

A million calories a year

Work in progress

The Atkins conundrum

Bad diet = good business

All in the mind

Small is beautiful?

Light as a feather

Balancing the options

Summary

CHAPTER 4: Mindless Exercise

Buzz off

All walk, no play

Blockhead

CHAPTER 5: So Why Are We Fat?

It’s about the brain, stupid

Fat Head

Mind control

The biology of the brain

So what has all this got to do with eating?

CHAPTER 6: Is Obesity An Addiction?

Fat rats

Addictive personality

Addictions do not have to be bad

Understanding others

Why over-eating is the worst addiction of all

PART 2: THE REALITY

CHAPTER 7: How Did It Come To This – The History

Survival of the fattest

CHAPTER 8: How Did It Come To This – Modern Society

Food processing

Not how many, but how

Famous Five a Day

CHAPTER 9: The Blame Game

Weight for it

I didn’t know they made XXXXL Hair Shirts

Milking the issue

Low fat, big problem

Chocolate can be good for you

BMI – Blooming Mathematical Idiocy

Spurious correlations

CHAPTER 10: In Fatness and in Health

Mistaken myths

Age Concern

The diabetes debate

Sugar and Swedes

Root costs

Giving fat people a leg to stand on

CHAPTER 11: Do You Believe Me Yet?

System failures

Swimming with the tide

PART 3: THE FUTURE

CHAPTER 12: The Future: What Governments Can Do

Nudge, nudge

Tax and bend

Changing tax

Cooking up a storm

Let fat people help themselves

Self-serving

CHAPTER 13: The Future 2: What Science Can Do

Skinny genes

Gut reactions

A whole new holistic approach needed

Index-linked

The lessons of smoking

Bariatric surgery

What’s in a word?

Is there an anti-hunger drug?

What’s in our food

Fear of failure

CHAPTER 14: The Future 3: I Believe The Children Are Our Future

We’ve been Ad

Bad sports

Taking action on action

Anti antibiotics

Trick or treat

CHAPTER 15: The Future 4: What We Can Do for Ourselves

Target practice

Rule makers, not rule takers

Rule One

Rule Two

Rule Three

Rule Four

Rule Five

Rule Six

A New Hope

And finally

REFERENCES

OTHER BOOKS FROM BENNION KEARNY

You Will Thrive: The Life-Affirming Way to Work and Become What You Really Desire by Jag Shoker

The Winning Golf Swing: Simple Technical Solutions for Lower Scores by Kristian Baker

What Business Can Learn From Sport Psychology: Ten Lessons for Peak Professional Performance by Martin Turner and Jamie Barker

Aphantasia: Experiences, Perceptions, and Insights by Alan Kendle

Write From The Start: The Beginner’s Guide to Writing Professional Non-Fiction by Caroline Foster

Finding Your Way Back to YOU: A self-help book for women who want to regain their Mojo and realise their dreams! by Lynne Saint

DEDICATION

To Andrea, Cara, and Aidan, for trying to keep me in line.

INTRODUCTION

The thing is – the thing so many people don’t get – is that no-one likes being fat.

It’s not about a ‘lifestyle choice’.

It’s not about ‘willpower’.

It’s nowhere near as simple as ‘eat less, exercise more’.

They say it is harder to be a vet than a doctor because animals can’t tell you what’s wrong with them. Well, fat people can talk but no-one listens to us.

No, really – they just talk at us. They think of ways to make money out of us. They ignore us because we don’t do what they say. They would rather study the behaviour of rats than listen to fat people.

Yet current attempts at ‘solving’ the obesity crisis are just adding to the ever-escalating problems. It is time for fat people to have a voice, time for the obesity crisis to be addressed by ‘doctors’ rather than ‘vets.’ It is time for a new approach.

Billions of pounds and dollars are spent, millions of column inches written, months of TV and radio airtime broadcast, with people pounding out the same old messages and warnings about obesity. But, as the world faces up to a growing obesity crisis, there is one truth that is undeniable.

We have to change our thinking because diets are failing. A lot of thin people are putting pounds into their bank accounts, while a lot of others are putting pounds around their waists.

The first thing we need to address is obvious. There is a growing obesity crisis in the world, in the developed Western world in particular, and it affects all areas of society and age groups.

The second thing is equally obvious. What we are doing now is not working, and the people leading the efforts into fighting obesity are not succeeding. Their response to their failures is the blame game: blame the fat people for not doing as they say. That too, however, is making things worse.

Of course, there are thousands of books offering diets and explanations of the obesity crisis, thousands of classes and clinics running every evening, hundreds of academic studies, and thousands upon thousands of magazine, newspaper, and online articles extolling answers. TV programmes on the subject have grown rapidly, as have fitness DVD’s and downloads; experts are breeding like rabbits. The bigger the ‘crisis’ gets, the more ‘experts’ there are – more and more people getting paid very well for failure. It feels as though anyone with a gimmick or a six-pack has a right to make money out of fat people.

Why are they failing? I think I know.

Almost all of the authors, writers, presenters, producers, experts, dieticians, and fitness trainers are thin. In their different ways, they are all basically telling fat people not to be so stupid – to be more like thin people, to be more like them. They are like a tourist, who does not speak a word of the local language, asking for something abroad – ‘if the natives don’t understand what you say in English, just say the same thing again . . . but louder.’ If we keep getting fatter, then just shout at us louder. Instead, what the experts need to do is to try to learn our language.

But that would involve listening.

And believing!

And thinking!

So why is this book any different?

This is the book I wanted to read, as a fat person. I wanted us to have a voice, I wanted someone to explain what we are and why we are, but in terms we can understand. I wanted someone to offer realistic help. I wanted someone to stand up for us. I wanted thin people to read it so they could understand better. I wanted friends and family to read it so they would help constructively instead of nagging. I really, really wanted this book to be out there to help move the debate to a more realistic place, to start finding real solutions.

I do not want to be seen as someone making excuses for fat people. I am certainly not asking for any sympathy, but I do want understanding of why we are fat. I do want better help. I do want to shatter some of the widely held myths.

But who am I to write this book? A few things that I’m not, first of all. I’m not thin. I’m not a dietician, I’m not a nutritionist, I’m not a doctor or a medical research expert. I’m certainly not a fitness trainer. I’m not a psychiatrist or psychologist. I have not come up with a gimmick to sell. I have not made loads of money out of the diet industry nor am I likely to. I am not a celebrity, which worryingly also seems to be a qualification for pontificating on the subject these days. I don’t have a catchy name for a faddy weight-loss programme. I’m not an Instagram model or social media ‘star,’ which again seems a worryingly common qualification. I have not lost enormous amounts of weight (either short term or long term) though I have lost some and more importantly kept much of it off.

I have worried, as I wrote this book, about who I am in comparison to all those scientists with their studies, their laboratories, and their rats. But then I look at the statistics to see the scale of their failures. I have come to understand myself better than they do - and the facts and figures back up the idea that I am far from unique. Hopefully, that means I understand you better than they do as well.

The joke goes that if you ask for directions in Ireland, then the local will begin by replying, Well, I wouldn’t start from here. The obesity debate, so far, has started from the wrong place. We concentrate on what makes thin people thin, but make little effort to find out what will succeed in making fat people less fat.

I can’t say I’ve tried every single diet, but I’ve tried a lot of them alongside plenty of exercise regimes. Sometimes I have put on a little more weight and sometimes a little less, but the graph has always gone up – until recently when it has started going the other way a little thanks to some changes I will be able to stick with for the rest of my life.

There is a long way to go, there may just be an acceptable dead end, but either way, I hope I am on a better track. Anyone can do what I do and should do their version of it, but I’m the last person in the world to promise a miracle cure. There are no diets, no gimmicks, in this book.

So this is a journey, we have to get from A to B, from the current crisis to a better place. I have already explained we are starting from the wrong place and we are shouting loudly at the people with local knowledge, rather than learning their language.

We must start our journey by knocking down the main prejudices about obesity, key approaches which have failed for forty years and which actually stand in the way of making any progress.

On the route, we need to understand the real reasons why we are where we are. We need to understand our bodies and our brains.

Finally, we have to find answers to reach our destination – but answers that can work. That has to be a team effort. We need to address the global solutions for the global crisis, but we also need to look at ourselves.

We need to expose the myths, understand the reality and find a better future.

For this isn’t some scientific theory to me; this is a daily reality. Quite simply, this is something about which I have a Gut Feeling.

PART 1: THE MYTHS

CHAPTER 1: Lifestyle Choice

People who are overweight don’t want unsolicited advice. Guess what. We know we’re fat. We live in homes with mirrors.

Al Roker

We can all agree that the current approaches to obesity are failing, but so many people reading this will still be absolutely convinced that those basic eat less, move more messages are completely correct. They believe fat people are greedy, lazy and lack control. That’s why we have to sort the myths from the reality before we can uncover what might be right. The myths become a barrier; at the expense of something else which might work better.

The first of these myths is that being overweight is a lifestyle choice.

This approach was perfectly summed up by a rather angry Sarah from Worthing speaking about serious obesity on a BBC radio phone-in. This is not a disease, these people do not have a medical condition; it is quite simply biology. These people eat too much and exercise not enough. The cure for that, quite simply: eat less and exercise more.

It sounds so simple, so how can that message not have got through? In fact, worse than that, how can such a simple message appear to have backfired and made the problem worse?

British Government policy on obesity, as explained through the National Health Service website NHS Choices, would seem to broadly agree with Sarah – even if the phrasing is slightly more polite. Obesity does not happen overnight. It develops gradually over time, as a result of poor diet and lifestyle choice.

You can find the same wording from Health Direct Australia. In turn, the US Department of Health and Human Services Surgeon General, David Satcher, MD Ph.D., phrased it like this in a 2001 Call to Action, For the vast majority of individuals, overweight and obesity result from excess calorie consumption and/or inadequate physical activity.

Many people would put it more bluntly. One blog post from the Women’s Health Research Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago stated, Last weekend I noticed a billboard on the highway that read: ‘Obesity is a disease, it is not a choice!’ Nice way to avoid responsibility – put the blame elsewhere. Just remember, you can have a bowl of cereal in the morning, or a chocolate-covered donut. It’s your choice... not some disease.

This reminded me of the movie The Book of Life, in which a fat boy gets stuck trying to fit through a small gap. His companion says he would have been fine without having had 12 doughnuts for breakfast. His defence was that he only had eight!

Sarah’s anger was sparked by an earlier radio interview given by Professor Francisco Rubino, the chair of metabolic and bariatric surgery at King’s College London, who told BBC Radio, "We have to change the public perception of obesity. The root of the problem is we completely misunderstand obesity; there is a lot of stigma against it. This is the last disease which is subject to prejudice and stigma.

Many others have been in the past, in the centuries before… obesity is just the last.

Mental health, addiction, shell-shock, and dyslexia (amongst others) are just some of the areas over which we have gained, and are gaining, greater understanding and acceptance. We are discovering subtleties where there was once an assumed simplicity.

The approach to obesity which has failed for 40 years is to treat everyone the same. However, in reality, the more we understand the differences between us, the better we can treat the problem.

We have to stop treating those differences as excuses – an attempt to avoid deserved blame. We have to stop calling obesity a choice.

Are you convinced, like Sarah from Worthing and many others, that ‘eat less, exercise more’ is 100 percent of the answer? Certainly, all the evidence would show there must be more to it, or that simple message would have worked. Like all the best lies, the ‘eat less, exercise more’ message is based on a grain of truth – but it has still failed. We all need to understand that failure much better.

Force fed the wrong messages

When examining obesity, we need to strip-out the prejudicial language that influences the debate. There is a lot of pre-judgement in the way fat people are described, and it reinforces stereotypes and skewed thinking.

- Thin people eat, fat people shovel food into their gobs.

- Thin people act, fat people are lazy.

- Thin people think and take care, fat people are too busy stuffing their faces to consider the consequences.

These statements may resonate with you. You may well hold those views, or something broadly similar. You may be thin and blame fat people; you may be fat and blame yourself. But these statements help maintain the status quo. They reinforce attitudes, and it is attitudes – and ultimately derived actions – which need to change.

They say that if you keep doing the same thing, don’t be surprised if you keep getting the same result. Whether you look at fat people with sympathy or distaste, with pity or blame, we can all agree we want a different result.

I am asking you to open your minds, listen to plenty of experts who have conducted years of research in their different areas, examine a new way of putting all that research together, and then think.

Over the years of failure to control my weight, I have listened to many of the ‘experts’. I have tried to put what they say into practice, but I have failed. The reasons may be personal to me, but there is plenty of evidence that I am far from unique in my failures, and my feelings are the same as for many other fat people.

Blame is an easy thing. We are blamed for being fat, we are looked down on for being fat, we are denied medical treatment for being fat, and we are denied the chance to adopt children for being fat. That’s just the start!

Being overweight affects fat people every second of every day, and part of that misery is how hard people work at not being fat, and not being able to enjoy the things they want.

Being obese is a bit like being an alcoholic – you never stop being one even if you have not had a drink for decades. Except being obese is harder than being an alcoholic – you can stop drinking completely, however tough that may be, but you cannot stop eating.

Each fat person faces their own battle, but there is more to this than individual choices. There are plenty of reasons why no-one would choose to be fat.

Global trends

There is a significant shift in the size of people across the world, and a recent study by Imperial College London[1] covering 186 countries, and just under 20 million participants, showed that obesity rates have risen in every country in the world over the last 40 years, without exception – including countries such as Somalia and Angola, where malnutrition remains an epidemic.

In a dictatorship such as North Korea, where there are many shortages for the common people, the increase is tiny. Japan is also low. Some other countries, with low increases, had high BMI rates at the start, places such as Bahrain and Nauru. In the Pacific islands of Micronesia and Polynesia, where size is not frowned upon socially in the same way as in the West, there have seen substantial increases with more than a third of men and more than half of women being classified as obese.

Globally, the average adult today is three times as likely to be obese compared to the average adult in 1975. The highest increase for men is in high-income, English-speaking countries; for women, it is central Latin America, though the rate of increase in high-income countries has slowed since obesity became a major issue around 2000.

To quote one conclusion of the study, Present interventions and policies have not been able to stop the rise in BMI in most countries.

So, what’s causing the rise? Fat people may be responsible for what goes into their mouths, but it seems clear there is more to it – factors outside the control of any individuals. Here are just a few examples often cited by scientists:

- The aggressive marketing of sugary drinks to all ages.

- Cheap convenience meals full of fat, sugar, and salt with low prices and questionable quality.

- Changes in farming and food production to make what we eat less nutritious.

- Growth hormones and antibiotics in the meat we eat.

- Changes in eating habits driven by multi-nationals, fast-food outlets, and supermarkets.

- Short-term diets.

- Government, education, and Health Service policies which – according to figures – are having no positive impact.

All these elements are part of the story. They all contribute to the amount and quality of what overweight people put in their mouths; they have all changed more in the last 40 years than the human body or mind.

The largest study held in the UK, backed by the Government with 250 contributing experts, concluded that excess weight was now the norm in what they called our ‘obesogenic’ society. They pointed to energy-dense and cheap foods, labour saving devices, the increased use of cars, and less active work. Dr. Susan Jebb of Oxford University, and the Medical Research Council, is one of the world’s foremost experts and she believes we have to abandon the idea that obesity is down to individual indulgence.

The stress has been on the individual choosing a healthier lifestyle, but that simply isn’t enough, she said.

So if fat people are to be put on trial for obesity, it seems they should not be alone in the dock. The people driving those trends in society should be looked at as well: the politicians, the scientists, the farmers and – maybe more than anyone – the food industry.

Starting young

Being fat has a negative effect on every single part of your life. It affects your wealth, your health, your happiness, your relationships, your work, your success, your self-esteem, your hobbies, your entertainment, how others perceive you, friendships, your fertility, your parenting, your pain levels, incontinence… have I missed anything out? Quite a lot, as it happens, but that list will do for starters! And interestingly, many of the social implications of being overweight – the prejudices against fat people – run deep in society and start at a young age.

Research by Leeds University[2] in 2013 shows that children from the age of four are reluctant to have fat friends. In one particular experiment, researchers developed a specially made up picture storybook about a normal-weight character called Alfie. A group of four-year-olds read the book and, when asked, said they would be happy to make friends with Alfie. Indeed, when Alfie was redrawn as being in a wheelchair, the children maintained that they would be friends. However, when Alfie was drawn as fat, something dispiriting happened. Only 1 out of 43 Reception and Year 1 pupils said they would team up with Fat Alfie.

And the sex of Alfie made little difference. When Fat Alfie was changed to Fat Alfina, only 2 out of 30 pupils