1. Calorie counting is OK, but not very useful
<The reason I started this blog>
This website is based on my personal experience of losing weight down to the thirty-kilogram range when I got into college. In the beginning, I was eating as much as possible focusing on high-calorie foods because I thought I had to gain weight, but I could not gain any weight. When I almost gave up, I thought that if the food wasn’t digested, it was meaningless, so I tried not to eat fat and fiber and ate moderate amounts of easily digestible carbohydrates (starch) and protein, etc. without overdoing it.
One day, I gained more than five kilos over the course a couple of days and something similar happened a few times in a similar situation. I was very thin, so I found out exactly what had caused the weight gain. There were also other people who gained weight rapidly as I did under similar situations. They didn’t eat much.
Through these experiences, I questioned the common belief that the causes of weight gain are obviously excessive caloric intake and/or lack of exercise.
In Japan, as there is a saying "a big eater who stays thin," some people eat a lot but never gain weight. On the contrary, there are others who do not eat much but are overweight. Moreover, I saw some people who gained weight little by little after they started dieting to lose weight.
Generally, such cases are explained using metabolism as an excuse or “it’s how they were born,” which I think is vague. However, I thought that all such contradictions could be explained based on my experiences, and then I started to formulate theory as a hypothesis.
While overeating and lack of exercise are currently considered the causes of obesity and metabolic syndrome, studies showing that excessive caloric intake leads to weight gain are based on relatively short-term interventions, lasting from a couple of weeks to a few months. In reality, there is no evidence proving that a lean person will eventually become obese with long-term excessive caloric intake.
According to Dr. Jason Fung, the author of "The Obesity Code," feeding experiments conducted by Dr. Ethan Sims in the 1960’s demonstrated that most subjects who experienced significant weight gain from overeating did not maintain the increased weight after the experiment ended. Their weight returned to normal without any effort.[1]
In addition, recent studies, as well as the experience of dieters, have shown that most obese individuals who were on a calorie-restricted diet eventually regained the weight they had lost within a couple of weeks or, at the most, a few months after they stopped dieting.
That being said, some experts have pointed out that each person has a stable weight based on their ability to maintain homeostasis. Since I started writing this blog in 2014, I have considered how that stable body weight (referred to as 'set-point weight') increases or decreases to be key issue in obesity, and this has been the core focus throughout my blog.
2. Easily digestible foods (refined carbs, ultra-processed foods, etc.) can cause weight gain in people
<Five tricks>
(1) The amount of calories ingested or burned is not the fundamental reason that some people become obese and others do not. I believe that increased set-point weight is the primary problem of obesity, and the set-point for body weight goes up by the induction of intestinal starvation.
(Check out my blog below)
A Set-Point Weight; The Precondition Regarding the Rebound Effect
Two Meanings to the Phrase "Gaining Weight"
(2) “Intestinal starvation" refers to a condition in which all food is digested in the entire intestines (or it might be the small intestine only), caused by a repetitive cycle of "eating" and "not eating (being hungry)," which is a message to the body that “there is no food.”
My Definition of “Intestinal Starvation”
(3) Refined carbohydrates, easily digestible protein, fast foods, and processed foods, etc. tend to cause intestinal starvation; conversely, fiber, fat, and less processed foods, etc. tend to prevent this.
I believe that the recent increase in obesity all over the world has been attributed to unbalanced diets leaning toward carbohydrates and irregular lifestyles.
Three (+one) Factors to Accelerate “Intestinal Starvation”
The Dilution Effect/ Pushing Out Effect of Carbohydrates
(4) For example, consider these two types: "people who want to gain weight, but can't" often eat high-calorie foods to gain weight, whereas "people who are overweight " often eat less to lose weight. However, on a caloric basis, it is my belief that they are theoretically doing the opposite action with regards to weight loss and weight gain.
Reality Works Opposite of What and How We Think
(5) Exercise is a must for being healthy, but not for losing weight. You can lose weight by changing your eating habits even with an absence of exercise.
Is Exercise Really Necessary to Lose Weight?
3. Objective
My main purpose for running this website is to let many people worldwide know my thoughts, but I don't want to eventually stop with just an "interesting idea." Ultimately, I’m hoping to somehow prove that "intestinal starvation makes people gain weight."
June 2023: I have begun to send out offers to obesity research institutes and universities around the world, including Japan.
4. Why me?
Maybe I should just leave this to the doctors and researchers. But I felt strongly that I had to write about this because I knew I was the only one that could write about this theory.
In fact, I used to lose confidence, but then I came across a book "Why We Get Fat" by Gary Taubes and it gave me courage.
"The history of science suggests another interpretation: if people have been thinking about this idea for more than a century and trying to test it for decades and they still can't generate compelling evidence that it's true, it's probably not. We can't say it's not with absolute certainty, because science doesn't work that way. But we can say that there's now an exceedingly good chance it's simply wrong, one of the many seemingly reasonable ideas in the history of science that never panned out. And if reducing calories-in doesn't make us lose weight, and if increasing calories-out doesn't even prevent us from gaining it, maybe we should rethink the whole thing and find out what does."[2]
References:
[1]Dr. Jason Fung, The Obesity Code, 2016, Pages 58-60.
[2] Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat, 2010, Page 56.