Why Crash Weight Loss Programs Don’t Work: Clues From Hunter-Gatherer Societies

Unravel the mystery behind the inefficacy of crash weight loss programs. Drawing insights from hunter-gatherer societies, we delve into the fundamental reasons that make these quick-fix solutions unsustainable and potentially harmful. Prepare to rethink your approach to weight loss.

What diet is best for weight loss?

Herman Pontzer argues that human metabolism has evolved to the point where how we eat and expend our calories is more important than all of our collective obsession with what to eat

• In his new book, Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Stay Healthy and Lose Weight, Pontzer breaks down the science of metabolism and shares tales from his work studying caloric expenditure among hunter-gatherer societies
• One of the most startling findings is the notion of constrained daily energy expenditure
• Our metabolism adapts to our activity levels to keep our daily calorie burn in a surprisingly narrow range – no matter how hard you work out

The paleo diet is based on the idea that when we were all hunter-gatherers, we ate a certain way, and we didn’t have problems with obesity or Type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure.

In reality, the Hadza have a mix of plants and animals in their diets, with about half of the calories coming from plants and 10-20% coming from wild honey.

One last thing that stunned me from your book:

You write about the metabolic cost of pregnancy – comparing pregnant women to Tour de France riders.

• Pregnancy is pushing the same metabolic limits as a racebike, both run your body’s metabolic machinery at full blast for as long as you can keep it up
• These things are all connected

In your book you debunk the common metaphor we use for caloric expenditure – an engine or a machine

The engine view gets a few things right

• We put fuel into our bodies in the form of food, and we do burn it off in all the tasks that our body does
• But an engine, like the engine in your car, doesn’t get to decide how it burns the fuel
• Your body is more like a business, with many different organ systems that work together
• When income is low, you can juggle things around and spend less on one task and more on another
• Juggling or prioritization that businesses do is the same with how your body can do with how it spends calories
• If you spend your calories on exercise, what that means is you’re spending fewer calories on other tasks

Exercise is essential for maintaining healthy weight

Your body really has to be good at prioritizing how it spends its calories.

• Physical activity ends up being another one of those things that the body can juggle and adjust
• For the Hadza, their “metabolic business” has adjusted so that they spend less on other body systems to make room for that big physical activity workload that they have
• Exercise changes the way that your body regulates how hungry you feel or how full you feel

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