Health & Obesity hypotheses
I've ended up with few hypotheses about obesity and nutrition. Hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenom, in this case obesity. I did look around and found out these are not new ideas, but wrote them down anyway. I also provide some other observations and suggestions that may help.
People treat obesity as if an overweight body was malfunctioning or that people are fat because they consciously decide to eat too much. Contradictory. When a biological system malfunctions, it usually dies within a timespan of minutes or hours.
It is fascinating that there are plenty of ingredients needed for life and American food industries have not managed to kill even half of the population with malnutrition despite replacing nearly every ingredient in their product with processed sugar to spare expenses and make it sell better. Despite this, two thirds of people in America are just obese, not dead.
Kwashiorkor is a symptom of a malnutritioned child with a protein starvation. It gives a belly and a liver bloating with fatty infiltrates. A similar fatty liver problem seem to be plaguing overweight people.
Obese people are often adviced to eat less or do fasting. Just like discrimination of diversity and incovenience, fat shaming is common among turf aware chicken. Chicken are nice and all, but you shouldn't always listen what they cluck.
"Fat people do not seem to listen my fabulous advice of eating less than they consume. It is irresponsible to eat like that." Eventually fat people listen and do something. Listening to idiots without knowing they are being stupid is perilous.
About 2-6 weeks after you have started the diet, you start getting this urge to eat things you're not supposed to. Sweet tooth starts itching like it was a dastard. That's the body trying to save your bacon. The "eat-less" diet eventually turns into a sugar eating frency diet and makes you a greater, larger, wider person.
Historically, before processed sugar, sugary meals have been a sensible attractive option for a body because sugar has traditionally never run away and contained fibers, fats and proteins needed to survive and digest food. The gained energy has helped people to hunt down the proteins that do run away.
The body seem to be constantly adjusting the taste and attractiveness of meals based on the needs and prior experience. It it was on a malnutritious diet, it would quickly ensure it ceases with any method available to it.
I guess that the obesity is a state of malnutrition, not different from the issues in developing countries. Note that it would still not be something to be shamed about, because the fat stays on for a lot longer than the causing nutrition issue.
Two thirds of dieters regain more weight than they lost on their diets. Perhaps the above would be an explanation for that.
I've been on a 1500-2000kcal calorie restricted diet for the last 8 weeks, losing 12 kilograms along the way. At the last weeks I felt like I've been starting slipping.
According to what I've read, a person consumes 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight every day. Also 44-77 grams of fats are used every day. Body needs bit of carbohydrates for energy and if it doesn't have them, it will deplete the protein supply. Whole grain oats, and multi whole grain products, and slowly-releasing carbohydrates in general, are good sources. Any vitamin or mineral deficiencies should be satisfied with foods that provide them.
I've changed by diet to accomodate for this and ensure that I eat enough. When I started suspect that the protein deficit can be the main issue, I started taking 10-20 grams of whey-isolate as a protein supplement. I have continued the diet.
All of the bodily functions aren't yet throroughly understood, therefore we can't know what are the real needs in a healthy diet for everything and pack them into a pill. To ensure that I don't get any deficit from decreased need to eat, I've eaten a different fruit every day. If I get cravings, I satisfy them with varying food sources of proteins, fruits and saturated fat.
I propose you keep diverse varying diet and primarily depend on real foods and not supplements to get the main share of nutritients. I think it's dangerous to do diets, especially if you know what you're doing.
Note that there can be worse, less diverse days as long as they aren't every day. It takes 24-72 hours for the food to pass through human digestive tract. When you eat food, it will enter the large intestine after 6-8 hours. This information may help when debugging your diet.
I started making soups every week. Cutting of few different vegetables to make different shapes for the soup is very relaxing once you get used to it. If you feel like you're easily cutting yourself then you're likely trying to use force rather than skill, and it helps if you study how to slice with a knife and keep it sharp.
I learned about a good trick to improve the soups. Add a teaspoon of edible acid such as vinegar or lime juice. It softens the contents of the soup and improves the taste. I suggest tasting the soup to see if you've added enough.
If you feel pressure on your right side under the lowest ribs after adjusting a diet it may be due to multiple causes that bloat the large intestine. It might be muscle pain too. Taking walks and moving around does help, also 25 grams of whole-oats boiled into a porridge may help.
If your digestion is already slow you may like to avoid consuming apple cider vinegar, at least in sour drinks as-it and without other food to accompany. It does slow down digestion even further and may be bad with diabetes. I would advice avoiding taking more than a teaspoon a day, and even then it should be diluted with two glasses of water.
Medication affects what you should eat and how. Excess salt in the diet may dampen effects of blood pressure medication. Some drugs and issues require you to steer away from some foods and cover them with something else.
If you're fat, remember that there's a beautiful body trapped among the mass that is you. There will be people in the future that cannot shed the fat for several reasons. Among that reason fat people should not be demonized, the another reason is that it's kind of a sign of undeveloped personality to do such things.
There's something I've been doing for years now. It's to measure your weight every day. To do this you need a good body weight scale that can measure up to 150kg or more, and gives the same result every time you stand on it even if moved around. Just plot it into a notebook or an excel file, either way or both. You may also want to do other daily body measurements as a habit, doesn't matter whether you're on a diet or not. Measuring is smart and shouldn't have connotations that you're abnormal.
It is very useful to measure what you eat and how much. Calorie counts can vary by as much as 75% from the measured so it's not entirely reliable way to eat exactly according to the scale. I plotted those in as well for a while, but now I just measure how much I have to put in what to get a good composition that matches with the dietary needs. Still, a good kitchen scale is a real asset when trying to cook food with consistent results. Nice easy to clean kitchen scales aren't expensive these days.
Thomas DeLauer has collected lots of research, especially protein supplement posts may be useful if you'd like to test the hypothesis that your diets are botched by protein cravings that get more demanding as weight increases.
In any case I suggest everybody to do a complete cease and ban on processed sugar as a principle of boycott. The American sugar industry distorted medicine science for their own gains in the 1960s. It is likely they were warned for the repercussions repeatedly. I think they are liable, as they are following in the footsteps of the people who did the crime, without changing the course or their company's culture. If they hadn't bribed scientists, doctors might have had reliable tools to treat obesity earlier and we wouldn't have as much of it today.