Sunday Story…Fat Phobic

We live in the most over fed and under nourished country in the history of the world. Never before have so many people eaten so much and been so sick from the food they are eating.

How did this happen? What shifted to create a world where, in 1806, Britain’s first obese man weighed 53 stone or 335 kilograms or 737 pounds? That man, Daniel Lambert, was considered a medical oddity. In today’s world that man would not even get an honorable mention. As a matter of fact, in the UK they have specialized ambulances designed for people who exceed the 700 pound mark. It isn’t until you exceed 1000 pounds that the crews of these ambulances sit up and take notice. This is the top end of the obesity epidemic. But that isn’t where the real problem lies. The real problem is that all of us are 20 to 30 pounds heavier than we were 50 years ago. We haven’t noticed because our world has cooperated in the gradual expansion by making things bigger…car seats, xl pants are now L, large pants are medium…everything’s bigger so we think bigger is normal.

Why are we so fat? Have we become more gluttonous as a people? Have we become lazier? Maybe we just aren’t moving as much so we are fatter. Unfortunately neither of those things is true. A recent study shows children’s physical activity is the same as it was 50 years ago. The big change is in the food we eat and more specifically the amount of sugar we consume. This is sugar that we are consuming without really knowing it.

About 40 years ago a tectonic shift took place in the way we look at food. Someone decided that fat was the culprit behind heart disease. The food industry seized this opportunity to create a new class of food called “low-fat.” The problem is when you take fat out of food it tastes like crap. So in order to get people to eat “low fat” the industry added sugar. And much of that sugar showed up from a chemical product called high fructose corn syrup. This gave the corn producers a big boost to get rid of excess corn production and allowed the food producers a cheap way to make “low fat” the preferred choice for the consumer.

Unfortunately we started getting fatter. People who ate low calorie diets and exercised were gaining weight. People who ate and drank a lot of calories got even fatter. A disconnect was in place and no one put it together that our sugar intake was off the chart. In 20 years the proportion of people classified as obese (BMI of 30+) went from just under 2% on average to over 12% on average.

The real problem is that the more sugar we eat the more sugar we want to eat and the hungrier we are. We became, we are insatiable in our desire for sugar. Eating sugar is highly pleasurable, it give you momentary happiness and this takes over your brain. This is why it is so hard to give up or cut back on sugar.

We traded a healthy relationship with fat for a dysfunctional one with sugar. Sugar now owns us. Stop eating low fat food unless it is naturally low fat like broccoli or green beans. Every time you are eating food labeled as low fat your alarms should go off for high in unnatural sugar. All those years ago when we were told to eat less fat it didn’t mean to eat more sugar, it meant to eat more kale!

Don’t be afraid to eat healthy fat…coconut oil, avocados, coconut, nuts, seeds, ghee, tallow, butter, eggs…all the things our grandmothers used to use all those years ago. It turns out she was right about this stuff too!

Namaste

John Mariotti

www.crossfit-odyssey.com
www.martialartsnevada.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com



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