Fat? It’s all in your BRAIN!

Traditional diet and exercise advice is all wrong. The best of diet intentions fail in late afternoon and evening because dieters fall for certain traps that sabotage success. For instance, you come home from work and turn on the TV news, which shows commercials for fast food that could make anyone hungry. In fact, manufacturers make foods ADDICTIVE with chemicals and preservatives and sugar and salt combos.

So you go on a diet, but while dieting and aerobic exercising together reduce calories, they also cause primitive starvation-survival mechanisms to kick in, making the brain scream for food. And if you eat a high-fat diet and are too fat, you may have injured your neurons, or nerve cells, in a part of the brain that controls body weight. Obesity expert Joshua Thaler says, “The possibility that brain injury may be a consequence of the overconsumption of a typical American diet offers a new explanation for why sustained weight loss is so difficult for most obese individuals to achieve.”

Thaler and his colleagues studied the brains of rodents for the short-term and long-term effects of eating a high-fat diet. After giving groups of 6 to 10 rats and mice a high-fat diet for periods from one day to eight months, the researchers performed detailed analyses on the animals’ brains. They found that within the first 3 days of consuming a diet that had a similar fat content to the typical American diet, rats consumed nearly double their usual daily amount of calories.

These rodents developed inflammation in the hypothalamus, the part of the brain containing neurons that control body weight. Will they ever invent a vaccine to prevent our getting fat? Believe it or not, it’s on the way. A new therapeutic vaccine to treat obesity by suppressing the appetite-stimulating hormone ghrelin decreases food intake and increases calorie burning in mice, a new study finds. Obesity researcher Monteiro says, "An anti-ghrelin vaccine may become an alternate treatment for obesity, to be used in combination with diet and exercise."

And what about so-called "yo-yo" dieting, where you lose weight, only to regain it? Anne Strieber’s famous diet book "What I Learned From the Fat Years" tells you how to prevent this and KEEP the weight off. But doctors it’s say better to attempt to lose weight despite repeated failures at keeping the weight off than to not diet at all and remain obese. Obesity researcher Edward List says, "The fear of negative health consequences due to weight cycling may be overemphasized. From our study, it appears that it is better to continue to encourage weight loss regardless of the number of attempts and failures," so KEEP TRYING.