The evolutionary pressure of survival, which makes us very effective at storing the energy contained in food in the form of fat, also pre disposes us to obesity, due to the culture of excess in which we live. Our society's over consumption of high-calorie foods produces a surplus of energy that is almost impossible to counterbalance with physical exercise, especially as people are becoming increasingly sedentary.
For example, to burn off the calories from a simple snack of a bag of potato chips, candy bar, and soft drink we would need to walk for more than two and a half hours or cycle for an hour and a half! That is indeed a high price to pay for a 10-minute snack.
The way to fight the influence of our "obesogenic" environment is not to deprive ourselves by following one of the many weight-loss diets fashion. Generally, these very low-calorie diets cause an intense feeling of hunger that may be alleviated in the short term, but in the long term only generates despondency and frustration. Such diets are generally ineffective in losing weight due to our remarkable genetic ability to extract the tiniest amount of energy from food.
More important, they end up destroying our special relationship with food by making us feel guilty and undermining the pleasure of eating.
How do we fight obesity?
The only realistic approach to maintaining an ideal weight is to avoid the influence of these excessively caloric industrial foods and adopt a diet to which our metabolism has adapted over the course of evolution; that is, we should aim for a diet consisting mainly of plant products such as fruits and vegetables and whole grains.
The cornerstone of all world cuisines, this combination of plant foods enables the internal mechanisms involved in appetite control to function optimally and thus avoid the energy overload inevitably associated with processed foods.
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Excerpted from Eating Well, Living Well Copyright © 2009 by Richard Béliveau, Ph.D., and Denis Gingras, Ph.D. Translated by Valentina Baslyk. Excerpted by permission of McClelland & Stewart. All rights reserved.
