Healthy eating and exercise a waste of time, says obesity expert

Right and wrong.

A BATTLE of the bulge has broken out over how to best treat obesity following claims exercise and healthy eating are a waste of time when it comes to keeping off lost kilos.

Obesity expert Dr Joseph Proietto has come under attack for saying obese people are genetically programmed to regain any weight they lose and, given current technology, bariatric surgeries such as lap banding are the only effective long-term weight-loss solution.

"It's a very defeatist message," said Dr Leon Massage, founder of the private weight loss clinic Body Metabolism Institute.

"It sends a very bad message to people out there who are fighting a weight-loss battle."

Dr Proietto, who runs a weight-control clinic at the Austin Hospital, prompted controversy when he published his views in the Medical Journal of Australia, adding that public health campaigns encouraging exercise and healthy eating had proved overwhelmingly ineffective in tackling obesity.

It is true that "exercise" is a near impossible way to lose weight.

It is not true that "healthy eating" is a waste of time. It is just that few do it.

It is true that there are no "healthy foods."

"It appears weight is defended by the brain," Dr Proietto told the Sunday Herald Sun.

"When people lose weight, the body puts in place a defence mechanism to put it back on."

Two hormones, he said, were crucial to understanding obesity: leptin, which suppresses hunger, and ghrelin, which stimulates it.

"When people lose weight, ghrelin goes up and leptin goes down," he said.

"The result is that you are more hungry and this is the real reason why people regain weight after dieting. It's not difficult to get people to lose weight; it's difficult for them to keep it off. If you want to use exercise as a means of keeping weight off, you have to do a lot of it.

"I am talking about regular marathon running, not just walking around the block."

Dr Massage said while obese people had a genetic disposition to gain weight, their size could be controlled through healthy eating and exercise.

This is a lot of scientific-sounding technobabble.

It is true that for "exercise" to deal with weight, one needs to do an awful lot of it.

Weight loss is impossible because the recommended approaches by the weight loss establishment are all starvation diets. (e.g., see here, here, here and here.)

If recommendations were to change so weight loss became possible, i.e., sustainable, then the problem would go away.

Bariatric surgery is IMHO clearly malpractice since it is not to be performed unless someone fails on a diet and no one tells the dieter that he or she is doomed to fail since the diet advice that is provided is impossible to follow.

There is a right way to shed pounds.

It can be found here.