Man! I should have just started a thread about D&D editions
Umbran, I don't know if you're playing Devil's Advocate, or concerned skeptic, but I admit I am not prepared to intelligently debate my dietary choices here, nor is it what I set out to do in this thread. I’m already at a disadvantage because the current paradigm on obesity and health puts the burden of proof on me, but nobody questions mainstream hypotheses, even if they are flawed. If you need more details, feel free to research all this, but I warn you that you'll see "just how deep the rabbit hole goes..."
The science (and paradigm) IS changing, but it will take a long time. See things the
Ancestral Health Symposium recently at Harvard. It's maddening to see new studies in the mainstream that dance around potential answers, but ultimately come to flawed conclusions based on the same flawed hypotheses. Political and market forces that seek to maintain the status quo (food industry, Big Pharma, Big Agra, etc.) are major hurdles to this. No tin-foil conspiracy here, just capitalism.
And no, calorie restriction is not the simplest way to lose weight. "Eat less, move more" is only simple for those whose metabolisms are self-regulated due to either lifetime healthy habits, or more likely, winning the genetic lottery. Ask anyone who's tried depriving themselves of food when hungry, that is what "calories-in-calories-out" is - starvation. Remember, anorexics and bulimics lose weight too, but would you consider them healthy? When you're eating mostly carbohydrate from (whole) grains and sugar (even from otherwise healthy fruit), and skimp on animal protein and fat (because it's eevil, and Jillian Michaels would be angry with you), you never reach any form of real satiety (or balanced nutrition, for that matter), thus feeling hungry every 2-3 hours. Eventually, your will breaks and you wake up from a food coma with several pizza boxes and marinara sauce on your face
You know what is simple? Being able to go to work with just a cup of coffee in the morning and not being actually hungry until lunch time because you're successfully regulating your own metabolism. Then, being able to go to
parkour or martial arts lessons in the afternoon without a sugar-laden, healthy "energy” bar because your body is working on its own fat stores (as opposed to sugar). Being able to eat delicious,
eevil food afterwards (tell me a rack of ribs and sweet potatoes slathered in real butter aren’t deliciously
eevil), and not only NOT gain weight, but have to go to the store that weekend to get new work clothes because you’re starting to look like a kid wearing his dad’s clothes.
That's what's happening to me. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I've never been obese, but definitely overweight off and on since just after high school, even when I was in the military. This isn't the first time I've tried losing weight but it's the first time I seem to be losing it consistently, seemingly without effort (or feeling deprived), and in a healthy way (more on that after blood work from my recent physical comes back). I've been doing this for (give or take) a year.
This isn't "secret knowledge". There's nothing secret about eating the kinds of foods we would eat in the wild (as animal species ourselves) instead of manufactured foods, which have quantifiable negative effects on our bodies.
I honestly think that quite a few decades from now, hopefully within my lifetime, we'll be seeing things like "calories-in-calories-out", low-fat, whole-grain foods, MyPlate, and other such so-called “healthy” recommendations go the way of old ads with 3/5 doctors recommending Winston cigarettes for health.
