idea of your factory settings. It’s not perfect, but it’s a thumbnail sketch of where you want to be. You can record your waist size (or closest guess) from when you were eighteen, but, more important, think about your shape. Ask your parents about their body sizes-or find pictures of them-when they were eighteen, to help give you a good idea of what you’re supposed to look like.
YOU Test
Stand in Front of the Mirror.
Naked. Without Sucking in Your Belly.
For some of you, this assignment may feel natural, but for most the exercise is as uncomfortable as a coach-class airline seat. We’re having you do this not to benefit the neighborhood peepers, but for two other reasons. First, we want you to realize that we’re emphasizing healthy weight. Not fashion-magazine weight, not featherweight, but healthy weight. And we think that means you have to start getting comfortable with the fact that every woman isn’t as light as a kite, and every man won’t have the body of Matthew McCanoughey. Where you want to be may not be exactly where your body wants you to be. We’re not saying you need to accept a belly that looks like four gallons of melted ice cream, but we want you to get closer to your ideal health-and that means physically and emotionally.
Second, we want you to look at your body. Now draw an outline of your body shape (both from the side and front views). Ask a partner or close friend to look at the shape you drew and tell you-honestly-if that’s approximately what your body looks like. (Your clothes can be back on at this point.) This is just a quality-control check to make sure you have an accurate self body image. (Those with eating disorders have very distorted body images, making it an obstacle for getting back to a healthy weight.) This might be the first time you’ve ever had to articulate things about what your body looks like-and that’s good.
Chapter 2
Can’t Get No Satisfaction
The Science of Appetite
Diet Myths
Hunger is primarily dictated by what’s happening in your stomach.
The biggest battle in dieting involves willpower.
As long as a food is low-fat it’s not going to make you fat.
As much as an iPod bud in the ear, fat has become a regular part of our landscape. We see it everywhere. We see it tethered to a hunk of prime rib. We see it masquerading as a Nutter Butter. We see it crammed into evening gowns or cascading over belt buckles. We’ve seen paparazzi-haunted celebrities gain it and lose it, lose it and gain it. And, if we can bear a confidence-crushing six seconds of nudity in front of a mirror, most of us have seen our own share of flesh that droops, sags, or jiggles. So, reason would tell you that we should know as much about fat as we know about Angelina Jolie’s private life. But we don’t.
Sure, we know what it looks like, what it feels like, and that it can be as bad for our health as a steak knife lodged in our hand. But few of us really know how fat works biologically—how the Twinkie morphs from a wonderfully yellow spongy cake to the flab that conjoins our inner thighs, or how our skinny-as-a-straw friend can wolf down a meat-lover’s supreme while we feel bloated if we as much as sniff four carrots.
Starting in this chapter and continuing throughout the rest of part 2, we’ll show you the way that food travels—from the time your body wants you to eat it, to the time it exercises squatter’s rights on your hips, to the time you fry it into oblivion. The best place to start? With your appetite. Appetite really comes in two forms: physiological signals that make you hungry and emotional coaxes that lure you to food.
In this chapter, we’ll explore those physiological signals, because understanding and controlling your hunger and satiety signals will help you adopt a healthy eating plan. (We’ll explore the psychological and emotional aspects in part 3.) Once you know that those mechanisms have much more powerful control over how you eat than do your taste buds, then you can make the behavioral, attitudinal, and biological adjustments you need to live at your healthy weight.
Above all, there’s one sign that will clue you in to whether you’ve become an effective processor of food. It’s the sign that you, not a bag of gummy bears, are in control of your weight. It’s the sign that you, without having to work at it, have been promoted to captain of your waist management vessel. And it’s the sign that you’ve ultimately reprogrammed your biology so that your body uses food as a medicine to make you stay healthier so that you live long enough to see how Lost ends.
Fat’s Bad Rap
Sure, nobody likes body fat especially when it beats you through the door by five or six seconds. But despite potentially serious consequences, fat, by nature, is good. (That’s not a typo.) Besides helping Santa hopefuls land December jobs, it also helps your cells function and provides insulation. Most of your fat is stored in a reservoir throughout your body. You have drums and drums of it sitting passively, just waiting to be burned. But you have another kind of fat, too. It’s called brown fat and is usually found on the back of your neck and around your arteries (and has absolutely nothing to do with how much chocolate you eat). This increases in outdoor workers during cold spells to protect them from the weather; it insulates our vital organs. Though you have a fairly small percentage of brown fat as an adult about one-third of fat in babies is brown fat and it’s used primarily to keep them warm. What makes brown fat different? YOU-reka! Brown fat is alive. It has nerve fibers, like any organ, and it also has leptin receptors. When the level of this hormone goes up, it turns on energy consumption in the brown fat and burns it. This is important because it shows that the right leptin levels can signal you to immediately get rid of this fat. And it’s also symbolic of the inherent goodness of body fat-when it’s found in the right amounts.
That sign? Satisfaction.
As you change from always thinking about diet to never thinking about it, you will be reprogramming your body so that it’s not your eyes, tongue, or overzealous utensils that will guide you.
YOU-reka! Instead, it will be the chemicals in your brain and body.
By tuning in to your body’s signals, you’ll allow your anatomy to work the way it’s supposed to: so that you’ll never be famished, you’ll never pop a button at the table, and you’ll never bounce between hunger extremes. Instead, you’ll get a little hungry, you’ll eat, you’ll stop. Satisfied.
The Anatomy of Appetite
You’d think that the first place we’d start to talk about how appetite influences fat would be the spot that’s covered by an XXXXL shirt. But to understand appetite, you have to navigate farther north—to the place that may hold the least fat. In your brain, you’ll find the hypothalamus, a key command center for your body. Among the biological functions it controls are your temperature, your metabolism, and your sex drive. Located in the center of your brain, the hypothalamus (see Figure 2.1) also coordinates your behaviors that involve appetite—not just for food but also for thirst and even for sex. So while it may appear that call-to-duty signals come from your stomach growling or your loins tingling like a static shock, it’s actually your brain that’s sending out the signals that you crave either a quiche or a quickie.
