Telling Porkies

In a recent article in the British Medical Journal it is believed that overweight people tell lies.  What do they lie about you may ask yourself?  They lie about the amount of food they eat of course!  In a study, a group of women who became overweight during or after pregnancy were compared with a group of women described as lean.  The first finding was that the metabolic rates of the women that were overweight was higher than that of the thin ones!  Yes, this is true!  Plump people burn up calories faster than thin people, thereby rejecting the common cry “I only have to look at a cream cake and I’ve gained a pound, or I don’t eat a lot but still gain weight”.

Finding number two was that overweight people’s energy expenditure in normal life was higher than that of the thin person.   This contradicts the common myth that thin people burn off all their calories in nervous energy. Here comes the lie.  The overweight people recorded in the study said that they ate less food than the thin people.  A lot less in fact, 800 calories less.  Their weight loss however did not result.  The weight loss they managed was equivalent to cutting back by 300 calories only per day.  Someone was lying about 500 calories per day and that’s a big fib.  It may seem a white lie, but 500 calories a day is an extra 1lb weight loss per week and that soon mounts up into extra inches.  The researchers were forced to conclude that the overweight people had been eating an average of 530 calories more food than they had admitted to eating each day, even though the over weight people thought they were telling the truth.

So what’s the answer, do overweight people deceive deliberately?  Do they misread the scales when weighing out their food and themselves?  Do they forget to record some of their food intake?   No wonder diets don’t work!  The dieter is barking up the wrong tree.  It’s not the amount of food we eat, but the amount of food we think we eat.

The conclusion to this is the next time you gain weight or stay the same weight, ask yourself have you been suffering from slimmers amnesia?