Fencing Bear at Prayer

I feel that I need to say a bit more about why I am so exhilarated by what I have been reading in Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories ( not , as you know , by any means the first book that I have read on diet or the experience of being fat).  It is not strictly speaking because he is telling me something that I have never heard before.  Rather, it is more like the snowflake that starts the avalanche: I have been building up to this insight for several years now, and Taubes has put it all into perspective. Maybe, indeed, French women don't get fat because they concentrate on eating only the freshest, most appealing foods only when they are hungry--but how do you deal with needing to eat those pastries and cookies and cakes not because you're hungry, but because you have learned that eating all those yummy sugars and starches makes you feel better, at least for a little bit?  Maybe, indeed, slim people are better at paying attention to the cues that their bodies ...

Let me say it again : "Being fat is a metabolic--not a moral--state.  It has nothing to do with how much you exercise or how many calories you eat." "Yes, yes," you say.  "But so what?  It sounds to me like you've simply discovered the Atkins diet .  Do we really need to hear yet again about the evils of carbs?"  Subtext (as I hear it): "Isn't this just another gimmick like all of the other diets for sale?" Possibly, but I don't think so.*  Indeed, I am convinced not.  Because Gary Taubes (whose Good Calories, Bad Calories has been my mealtime reading for the past week or so, much to the chagrin of my family, to whom I keep quoting it) is not about diets; he is about the actual metabolism of fat.  And about how the science behind our understanding of that metabolism has been skewed for pretty much the whole of my lifetime against fat as anything other than a moral state. How many times have you heard the dictum that to lose wei...

Being fat is a metabolic--not a moral--state. It has nothing to do with how much you exercise or how many calories you eat.  In most cases, it is simply a consequence of eating too many starches and sugars, a.k.a. refined carbohydrates. Not fats, not proteins.  Carbs. Because eating excessive carbohydrates raises your insulin levels and forces your liver to have to work overtime. Which, lo and behold, makes you more susceptible to the very diseases (obesity, hardening of the arteries) that we have been told for the past thirty-five years are associated with eating too much fat.  Not to mention making you more susceptible to diabetes.  And quite possibly cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and other chronic "diseases of civilization" that only appear in populations when they start eating lots of sugar, flour, rice, and beer. This is because insulin is our bodies' primary regulator for storing fat.  When our insulin levels are high, they encourage our fat tis...