2024-01-28 10:01:37
Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) – If you think it is difficult to lose weight and maintain it, you are not alone, as studies have found that losing weight in the long term is very difficult.
Although estimates vary, it is believed that more than 80% of people who lose a significant amount of weight regain it within 5 years.
But failure to shed excess weight is often not due to a lack of willpower to make important lifestyle changes, such as eating healthily, reducing calories, and increasing physical activity.
The secret is that our bodies are programmed through evolution to retain fat.
“We evolved not to intentionally lose weight,” paleontologist Daniel Lieberman told CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, recently on Chasing Life.
Lieberman, a professor and chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, studies why the human body and functions appear as they do.
“All animals need some fat, but humans have evolved to have exceptionally high levels of fat, even thin people,” he said.
Lieberman explained that fat is storable energy, and it helped early humans survive, provided their bodies with energy to find food, kept their brains functioning, and made them healthy enough to reproduce.
While our bodies haven’t really evolved from those earlier times, our environment has, which Lieberman considers a major mismatch.
Nowadays, we no longer have to escape from wild animals, travel long distances on foot, or hunt and collect our next meal.
We can pick up a smartphone to order a meal and experience all kinds of modern conveniences.
As a result, many people now struggle with weight and obesity issues, and all the “diseases of mismatch” that stem from that.
Lieberman, who said we need to be “extremely compassionate” toward those who face weight challenges, including ourselves, suggests keeping these five facts in mind:
Developing an (evolutionary) perspective
Not everyone is supposed to be thin, no matter what you see on TV, in the movies, or on social media.
“Fat is especially important for humans,” Lieberman wrote in an email. “Even lean humans have 15% to 25% body fat, which is 3 to 4 times more than most mammals.”
You will always have a certain amount of fat, which is necessary in some ways.
Fat equates to evolutionary success
Fats actually help us survive and thrive.
“We evolved to store a lot of fat, which is a source of stored energy, because of our energy-expensive bodies and our life history,” Lieberman said. According to him, “These fats help fuel our large brains and high reproductive costs while maintaining physical activity.”
However, Lieberman noted, “We never evolved to store a lot of belly fat, which can lead to health problems.”
Small fluctuations are normal
Don’t worry if you gain and lose a few pounds over short periods of time.
“A lot of this difference is due to water,” Lieberman noted, adding that for most of human history, people regularly experienced times when they consumed more energy than they used, stored the excess as fat, and then used those fat reserves during times when they were thin. When they used more energy than they consumed.
The odds are really once morest you
If you find it difficult to lose weight, don’t blame yourself.
“Humans evolved to store a lot of fat when possible, and then use it when needed,” Lieberman said. “But we never evolved to voluntarily consume less energy than we used to—diets.”
He explained that following a diet triggers starvation responses in the body, which makes the dieter want to eat and save energy by slowing down his metabolism.
“So when people go on a diet, they are almost always struggling to overcome old, basic adaptations to prevent their bodies from losing weight,” he explained.
Diet versus exercise
If you’re wondering whether exercising or dieting is more important for losing weight, the answer is both, but for different reasons.
Lieberman explained: “You can lose more weight by dieting than by exercising, but exercise helps prevent weight gain or regain it, in addition to having many other benefits for mental and physical health.”
Regarding the obesity-inducing mismatch between our Paleolithic bodies and our modern environment, Lieberman argues that we must “figure out how to engineer our worlds to help us make the choices we want to make.”
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