Want to become the wealthiest person in the world? Just invent a magic bullet that will make fat people thin. It hasn’t happened yet, and it is unlikely to happen in our lifetimes. if ever. Nobody wants to be fat. Nobody sets out to become fat. Around the world, there are millions upon millions of fat people, most of them getting fatter, wanting to get skinnier, and more of these people are being created every day. Obesity is a pandemic, and a whole lot of people have caught the disease. If there were some easy way to get rid of fat, the world would be full of thin people. The Skinny on Fat
The reason it’s not easy to come up with a cure: weight loss is not a simple case of making the energy going out of one’s body equal to the energy going in. Consciously, we may want to lose weight. But in the subconscious, the body is being told "keep all the fat you’ve got, and add some more if you can. Starvation could be just around the corner."
Animal bodies, including ours, were programmed through eons of evolution. Our hunger mechanisms evolved… and then stopped evolving.
Our early ancestors came into a world where food was not always that plentiful and where they had to work hard to get what they could. They hunted and they foraged. They encountered lean periods, during which they had to get by with whatever energy was stored in their fat. Starvation was common, and it was those who stored fat best who survived. We are the descendants of the survivors who were the kings and queens of putting on the pounds. We now have bodies that, even though we may lose fat, retain all the cells created to store fat – cells that demand to be re-supplied. Our primal body has not accepted the fact that food is now plentiful. We have 400 genes in our DNA geared specifically to maintain weight.
Thus, most people who go into weight loss programs drop out; the programs simply demand too much will power to overcome the body’s subconscious demands to keep that weight on. Of those who stay in the programs, most do not lose weight. Of those who do lose weight, most will gain it all back, and usually more poundage on top of that. The conscious brain tells us we would look better, feel better, and run less risk of taking on debilitating and potentially deadly diseases like diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and cardiac problems if we would just lose weight. But the subconscious brain wins over the conscious brain every time. Pass the pizza. Common Weight Loss Obstacles
As if this were not bad enough, there are a host of other factors that make weight loss difficult:
Parental influences
Your American great-grandparents may have lived through difficult times before food became more plentiful and affordable in the 1940’s. They hadn’t much money and were careful to keep wastage to the minimum. They insisted that their children follow their dictum to "clean your plate." The dictum then came down from your grandparents through your parents: Eat everything you’re given.