Why is it so difficult for humans to lose weight?

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South Bank University, BSC Psychology

                     Why is it so difficult for humans to lose weight?

This essay will evaluate various factors that influence eating behaviour i.e. social, developmental and physiological. Moreover, it will discuss the role of learning that underlines eating behaviour.

The beginning of a new year always starts with a variety of new resolutions. A typical question of this time of the year is: “What is your New Year resolution?”, we decide to take more care of our health and ourselves. The businesses of various health clubs, spas, health centres and weight loss clinics bloom in January. We buy health food recipe books, we follow Aitkin’s diet, Clinic Mayo diet, Pritikin diet, low-fat, high-protein, no carbohydrates diets, but yet all this weight lost with hard exercising and strict dieting comes back as soon as we stop with this regime.

People can loose weight, but what seem to a problem is how to maintain it, how not to regain it. Nancy Gerard (2003) points out that 90 to 95 per cent of people put back one-to two- thirds of the total weight lost within a year, and all of it within five years (the Observer, January 2003).

Eating should be natural phenomena, something that does not need to much attention, but reality seems very different; we are suppose to eat in order to live, but it seems that the coin turned and we live in order to eat. We do not eat only because we are hungry, we eat for all sort of reasons, i.e. when we are sad, bored, anxious, happy, when we celebrate, gather and so on. On the other hand, we do not eat when we are hungry; we starve ourselves when we want to loose weight, out of punishment or out of psychological disturbances.

When the calorie intake is higher than the energy usage, a person will gain weight, therefore it should be simple, eat less-exercise more, it sounds logical but this type of logic does not work regarding this method. The number of people who are overweight or obese raises rapidly all around the World, as Ellen Ruppel points out, 1.1 billion people in the West suffers from obesity and 34 per cent of the USA population are overweight, while 27 per cent suffer from obesity. Furthermore, around 50 per cent of the population in the UK, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Finland, Russia, Bulgaria, Morocco, Mexico and Saudi Arabia suffer from obesity or there are overweight (The Observer, January 2003).

Are some people genetically predisposed to be obese? Obesity can be influenced by an inherent factor, but it can be controlled by calory intake, energy expenditure and the level of physical activity (Bray, 1988 in Capaldi 2001).

A study of obesity started back at the early 1950s, when an unusually big mouse was spotted in the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbour, Maine (The Guardian, January 2003). The amount of food he consumed was three times more than a normal mouse would eat, and between the feedings he would just sit in the cage inactive. The researchers of that time named it “Obese”. Further research done by British scientist Gordon Kennedy pointed at the existence of a “fat thermostat” in rodents, i.e. “lipostat”, which controls the amount of fat in the body by modifying energy intake and expenditure in order to consistently maintain a stable state, i.e. “set-point” (The Guardian, January 2003, p 5). By reducing calories intakes and increasing physical activities the human body will attempt to compensate by slowing down the metabolic efficiency.  A body itself will try to return to previous weights, by slowing down the metabolism, burning fewer calories to do the same work. On the other hand, if weight is gained, metabolism would automatically speed up in order to keep one’s weight at the set point. Consequently, it is hard to maintain weight after the weight loss, it seems that “fat thermostat” works against people’s desires to stay thin.

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Furthermore, a biochemist Douglas Coleman (1970) pointed at behavioural problem in obesity, his research focused on satiety factor (The Guardian, January 2003). Moreover, Ethan Allen Sims, a physician at the University Of Vermont College Of Medicine looked at the differences in metabolic rates between those who were thin or fat in order to find out if it influenced their body frame. He conducted an experiment were twenty Vermont State Prison inmates were over-fed during two hundred days and remained physically inactive. The result showed that those who found it difficult to gain weight lost the gained weight without difficulty by ...

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