I just ran across this article, entitled
"Doctor Urges New View of Obesity", via Obesity Panacea. Dr. Arya Sharma is scientific director of the Canadian Obesity Network.
Here is a quote from the article:
"I think one of the biggest misconceptions when we talk about obesity in general is that obese people are obese largely because of their lifestyles and because of the way that they live," Dr. Arya Sharma of the University of Alberta, told CBC News. Sharma points to studies where people's eating and activity are carefully monitored. They show that some people can eat an additional 1,000 calories per day and not gain a gram, while others would gain five to six kilograms over a six-week period.
"There's a huge variability in how people can cope with extra calories," he said in an interview with CBC News.
He says people who tend to pack on the pounds simply have bodies that burn calories very efficiently and store the excess as fat.
"They just take their extra calories, they don't even burn them because they're very fuel efficient, they'll just store those calories and they'll put them away."
This of course goes against the views of the dieting world, which essentially believes that anyone whose BMI is not perfect has gotten into this mess simply by stuffing their "piehole" (as one of the highly articulate commenters to the article said) to excess with junk food.
Indeed, if a visitor to our planet read through many (if not most?) dieting blogs, they would come away with the impression that overweight people are by definition lazy, junk food eating slobs.
The reason I keep my diet blog reading to a minimum is because I don't see myself in these blogs. Nor do I see the people around me in them, despite our embonpoint (a fancy-shmancy way of saying fat).
Read this article about Dr. Sharma and his revolutionary views on overweight. Then just try to eat a reasonably healthy diet in reasonable portions, take the stairs more often, take public transit instead of your car if at all possible, try to get a nice walk in as often as you can. That's all.
Then again, you might agree with the vitriol in the comments section.
Up to you.