Obesity, its causes, and solutions are not a soundbite or two.
We’ve evolved to what we are today because of improvements in efficiency.
We are so efficient now at producing food, we waste 30% of it globally.
It’s so easy to feed ourselves, we need to go against our genetics and do things with the sole purpose of removing excess food stores.
Biologically, we want to do things the quickest, simplest way.
Hence fad diets, extreme diets.
Hence arguments about the one cause or cure of obesity.
As Nobel Prize winner, economist and psychologist Daniel Kahnemann’s many studies show, the very act of thinking hard in itself depletes us of energy.
We want a quick fix, like our quick reactions in simply running from bears or hunting them.
Our bodies including the brain organ don’t like expending energy we will then have to replenish.
In the 12,000 years since we started farming, we have grown taller, and are now living longer, becoming more obese, but it’s not obvious we have evolved in such a short time.
Instead, though, our knowledge has grown.
It’s up to us to use the collective knowledge of our tribe to help each other make learning easier, buying the right food easier, and to help make regulating our weight easier to do and understand.
It’s up to us to stop insisting on extremist, over-simplified, and/or fad approaches that we can’t sustain long enough to make all the required changes.
Zenmode 