Gary Taubes argues obesity is a hormonal disorder driven by insulin dysregulation, not a calorie problem. He says diet advice based on naturally lean people fails for those who gain weight easily, and that doctors have blamed patients for lying about their intake since the 1930s. Minimizing insulin through fasting, he contends, works better than willpower.
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There's a lot of anger. I didn't see a doctor for four years. I was really pissed in my late 20s. I'm like, you guys have no clue what you're talking about. You think I'm sneaking Snickers bars and I'm doing what you said, and I'm just weak and tired and hungry and all that. And that's part of it, too, is fixing that rift between people and doctors. Because most doctors really do want to help. They just didn't have the information. And at least now it's out there. I think any doctor who reads any of your books is going to have to at least scratch ahead and say, maybe there's two ways to lose weight.
Well, that's the thing when I'm writing and with the title. So originally I told you I wanted to call this In Praise of Fad Diets, but that was never going to fly with my editor. That was my fantasy. Then it was. And I think I have a chapter still called Them Praise the Fat Diets. Then it was how to Think about how to Eat. That was my wife's suggestion. I thought that was terrific. Because, you know, basically the idea is we've been getting lean people's diet advice. So lean people do what the authorities tell them to do, and it works for them. And then they say, well, it keeps me thin. Clearly, it'll keep me thin.
It works until they get cancer.
Yeah, there's that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Works for them. In the short term, we don't know what's going on long term, so we don't have those trials. So what we need to accept is that those of us who gain weight easily are different from those people who aren't. I mean, this is one of my revelations in doing this work that I told you Newton's law of obesity is you get fat because you've taken more calories than you expend. And that means the difference between a lean person and an obese person or some. If you have two kids who are both 17, 18 years old, and they're both relatively lean, and one goes on to become obese and the other other stays lean, the difference is the one who went on to become obese ate more than he expended and the lean person didn't. So that's the fundamental. That's the only. If these researchers thought about it, which they don't, but if they did, they would conclude that the difference between a person who gets fat and a person who stays lean is just how much they eat and exercise. Nothing. No physiological difference, no hormonal differences, no fuel partitioning differences in the body, no insulin differences. Or pick your hormone. It's just how much you eat and exercise. So this is insane. And what we need to understand is that those of us who fatten easily, we can't eat what lean people eat, because if we do, we'll be fat, hungry, tired, grouchy. And then when we go in to see the doctors, they'll accuse us of cheating on the diet because we're still heavy. That's one of the epicycles. If someone stays heavy and they're doing what you tell them to do, and they say you're doing what you tell them to do, then they're lying to you. And, I mean, this is built into the literature. 1930s, you could find doctors documenting that their overweight pediatric patients are lying to them about their diets, and therefore they just lack willpower. So, anyway, all this has to be rejiggered. You have the right paradigm. Obesity is a hormonal disorder. It's a hormonal dysregulation of fat accumulation. And the link to diet is through insulin. So you minimize insulin, and you could do it by fasting for long periods of time or intermittent fasting. You could lengthen this time that you're, you know, mobilizing fat rather than storing it, which is the time that your insulin levels are low and you can lose the weight you stored.
