The term "natural weight" as used here is misleading. It does not mean that people are supposed to be a particular weight. It refers to the idea that something—whether it's diet, genetics, environmental factors, or something else—influences the body's weight regulation mechanisms to "prefer" a certain body weight, and changing that is very, very hard.
Think of it like body temperature: normally, your body maintains a certain core temperature, and it will respond in a negative feedback loop when the temperature deviates from that set point. Conditions like infections can induce where your body raises that set point to fight the infection, and it takes time for that set point to come back down.
Something similar appears to happen with people's weight. Hormonal or other changes cause the body to gain weight, and once that happens, it resists losing weight in various ways: increasing appetite, changes to basal metabolic rate, changes to metabolic pathways involved in breaking down nutrients from food, all sorts of things. Deviously, fat cells actually produce hormones that play into these changes, which is one of many reasons why losing weight is usually harder than gaining it. And when people do manage to lose weight, often after a huge exertion of effort and willpower and major lifestyle changes, their set point may not have changed, and so as soon as they slip up even a little bit, they quickly regain back to their set point.
So they're not suggesting that there's some mystical force out there that decides some percentage of the population should be overweight. They're referring to the idea of a set point for body weight that is difficult to change without drugs or bariatric surgery.
If this were true I would not expect that changes in our lifestyle would cause broad scale weight increases like they have. I'm very skeptical humans are built with an average set weight way up in the unhealthy range.
Or maybe this is the case, but it is thrown off hard by our modern diets. Our natural set point is in the healthy range, but our meal is x calories per Y food now so it ends up artificially high.
The explanation just doesn't line up with what we've seen. I get that it's hard to lose weight once you've gained it, but that's different. This is absolving us of being responsible for our obesity as a whole.
I think you're misunderstanding. There is no "natural set point." The set point moves up and down based on hormones, genes, diet, environment, medication, etc. And the very act of gaining weight causes your body's set point to move up, because of how weight gain affects your hormones. Unfortunately the set point is pretty sticky, and once it moves up, it does not like to move back down, in part because for most of animal history, weight loss is a sign of starvation.
Today, there are a bunch of factors that have combined to move people's set points higher than they should be: calorie-dense diets, sedentary lifestyles, plastics, drugs like antidepressants and lithium compounds in the water supply, and who knows what else. No one is arguing that the "natural" set point is 300 pounds or whatever. The point is that there is no natural set point because it's a function of many different variables.
What is a set point not influenced by? The way you framed it, it seems to take everything into account. In that case, why wouldn't "your current weight" not just be your set point?
He didn’t explain the concept of a set point very well.
Your body’s set point is a weight that it wants to go back to. The set point can change, but not without great effort. Small efforts will simply result in temporary weight gain/loss and eventual reversion to the set point weight. Great efforts (long term changes in diet and lifestyle, not just a 7 day juice fast) are required to re-set your set point higher or lower.
Think of a hamster crawling up a giant mixing bowl or something, set on a particular spot on the kitchen floor. The hamster can walk forwards up the side of the bowl, but the bowl has not moved and since the sides of the bowl are very steep, the hamster will slide back down to the middle of the bowl where he started. If he wants to get to a different part of the kitchen, he will have to really slam his body against the side of the bowl, or work hard in a different way, to “nudge” the whole bowl across the floor so it’s now sitting at a different “set point”
> And the very act of gaining weight causes your body's set point to move up, because of how weight gain affects your hormones. Unfortunately the set point is pretty sticky, and once it moves up, it does not like to move back down, in part because for most of animal history, weight loss is a sign of starvation.
Kind of, but increasing doesn't go indefinitely either. People have multiple "set points", not one moveable one, long known among people intentionally increasing their weight as "plateaus".
Yes. I think the dominant theory is that it has something to do with gut microbiomes, and in particular sugar and/or artificial sweeteners screw it up pretty badly.
It would seem really odd to me if it was just one aspect of modern lifestyle and diet. I would be shocked if both proliferation of cheap highly processed and hyperpalatable food and declining activity rates/greatly increased in screen time didn't both play a major role.
I'm actually thinking about going serious about healing the gut microbiomes. The sugar part is the most difficult. It's very easy to eat food that helps and consume probiotics, but a life without sugar...Jesus I'd rather die.
Somehow I became a sugar person from a meat person after I immigrated to Canada. Not sure what the cause was though.
I struggle with sugar cravings too. Controls that work for me are intermittent fasting, eating more fruit after meals, and most importantly, just not having sugary things around the house. The sugar cravings pass after a couple of weeks, but only take a day or two after having sugary to start again.
Usually the stomach begins to complain. It has a certain burning feeling. I usually stop after that. I don't get that far usually because the mouth usually complaints before the stomach -- I got really acid smell in mouth when I eat too many cookies.
That is a theory, and I think most researchers agree that it's a factor, but I don't think most researchers would say it's primarily to do with the gut microbiome.
"The term "natural weight" as used here is misleading."
It just means that bodies have a set point that they'll defend. And that weight changes. If you get fat, no matter how you do it, your body will defend that weight and if you lose will take action, increase hunger, reduce metabolism, etc. making it near impossible to keep it off even if you lose it.
Think of it like body temperature: normally, your body maintains a certain core temperature, and it will respond in a negative feedback loop when the temperature deviates from that set point. Conditions like infections can induce where your body raises that set point to fight the infection, and it takes time for that set point to come back down.
Something similar appears to happen with people's weight. Hormonal or other changes cause the body to gain weight, and once that happens, it resists losing weight in various ways: increasing appetite, changes to basal metabolic rate, changes to metabolic pathways involved in breaking down nutrients from food, all sorts of things. Deviously, fat cells actually produce hormones that play into these changes, which is one of many reasons why losing weight is usually harder than gaining it. And when people do manage to lose weight, often after a huge exertion of effort and willpower and major lifestyle changes, their set point may not have changed, and so as soon as they slip up even a little bit, they quickly regain back to their set point.
So they're not suggesting that there's some mystical force out there that decides some percentage of the population should be overweight. They're referring to the idea of a set point for body weight that is difficult to change without drugs or bariatric surgery.