Perspective

It's not always the doughnuts

By ROBYN BLUMNER, Times Columnist
Published January 6, 2008

It's time to DIET. Everywhere you look you are being bombarded with that message. Madison Avenue's annual January assignment is to tell you: You're a fat slob. Why the heck did you eat so much junk? Have you no self-control? Now, get thee to a gym! Get thee to a weight loss center! Open your pocketbooks once again.

We follow like pudgy sheep. For the next six weeks, there will be no parking spaces at the gym.

Dieting is an American obsession. Women - especially women - believe their self-worth is measured in pounds. The scale is the decider. What it says determines how we will be judged by the world. It's not fair, but there's a lot of truth there.

Don't we all fall into the trap of making snap judgments based on someone's weight? Why is it that when I see someone significantly overweight my brain instantly condemns them. "How did you let yourself get like that?" is what I automatically think. Yet, I know how difficult it is to lose weight or keep it off. I know it's an exhausting battle of wills, where there is no real victory, just relentless skirmishing.

I also know that the body fights to be a certain weight. The nutritionists will tell you that the formula is simple: Calories in, calories out. It's not. We all know some people who seem to be naturally thin. We grow to be a certain height primarily because of our genes; why is it so hard to fathom that we are all essentially predetermined to be a certain size?

The lay person who has collectedthe most clear-eyed (and possibly the most depressing) scientific information on dieting is Gina Kolata, a medical reporter at the New York Times who has written the book Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss - and the Myths and Realities of Dieting.

Kolata has found that weight is largely a function of DNA. You want to know what to expect of your body mass index throughout adulthood? Look at your parents.

Kolata cites a study by Dr. Albert Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania, who used the meticulous medical records of Danish adoptions between 1927 and 1947 to evaluate whether it was nature or nurture that dictated weight.

Stunkard looked at 540 adults who averaged 40 years of age and had been adopted at very young ages - most at infancy. What he found was that the adoptees were as fat as their biological parents and the adoptive parents' weight had no bearing on the matter.

In another study, this one published in 1990, Stunkard looked at identical twins, some reared apart and some together. He found that, regardless of how, where or by whom they were reared, the twins had nearly identical body mass indexes.

So it didn't matter if the parents served their children low-fat, vegetarian foods or made pilgrimages to the land of pulled pork, the kids grew up to be as large as their biology determined.

Why does this happen? How do our bodies sabotage our weight-loss efforts? It's called metabolism and it's our own personal diet-killer.

In a series of studies by Dr. Jules Hirsch at Rockefeller University and Dr. Rudolph Leibel, they found that obese research subjects could be put on intensive diets to lose 100 pounds - sort of like America's Biggest Lab Rat - but they would quickly gain it back. It was almost inevitable.

According to Kolata, a couple of things were happening to these people even after the diet was over. First, the subjects suffered from a psychiatric condition known as semi-starvation neurosis. They obsessed about and dreamed of food, like someone being starved. Then their metabolism started burning calories at a slower pace - as much as 24 percent fewer calories than normal.

What's amazing is the opposite happens to people who are naturally thin who are forced to gain large amounts of weight. A study of people who were fed 10,000 calories a day and who increased their weight by 20 to 25 percent showed that their metabolism increased 50 percent. Soon after the experiment ended, they easily shed the excess weight.

Not to be a complete downer for those trying to lose that holiday heft, the body apparently will allow for small weight losses. But in general our bodies automatically try to maintain our weight within a 10- to 20-pound range, with our metabolism slowing by up to half its normal speed if it feels the onslaught of a calorie shortage.

With this understanding, we need to cut everyone a bit more slack in the weight department. Being fat is not a reflection of character as much as a "gift" from one's ancestors. That said, Happy Dieting.

[Last modified January 5, 2008, 20:48:34]