Weight gain has nothing to do with common-but-useless explanations such as a "weak will" or "bad genes" or "our flawed modern society".

(Editor's Note: This is the first of a series of eight articles on the factors that dominate Weight change. Others in the series are available to our readers at http://www.hamiltonwolcott.com)

Most people rightly fear weight gain because it happens so easily, is so hard to correct, and has such devastating effects on their self-esteem, social standing, energy level, and health.

But the reason for this is not as big a mystery as some people would have you believe---and it's not really that hard to fix.

To begin, we will state unequivocally that even if you have been overweight for years, you shouldn't believe it means you have some dreaded physical, mental, or moral defect---because you don't.

Specifically:

You don't "just have a weak will".

You are not "lazy".

You are not "neurotic".

You do not overeat because you need "a substitute for love", or because "your fat protects you from the world", or due to any other irrational compulsion to associate unrelated things.

Furthermore:

You are not "metabolically defective".

Your genes are no worse than anyone else's.

You don't have a maladjusted "set point" for fat.

In reality, there is a much better way to understand why some people gain excess weight and how they can lose it again.

Here's what really happens:

You get fat because you regularly eat too much food energy---Calories.

But you eat too many Calories because you are chronically hungry for something else you need from food and aren't getting enough of.

You are chronically hungry because your body is chronically low on one (or more) of the vital nutrients that you must get from food in order to be healthy.

Food energy (Calories) is certainly one of those vital nutrients, but it's never the one you are low on - as you can see in any mirror.

Your hunger makes you eat food---which always has Calories---but this food often doesn't have much of the thing you really are low on.

So you quickly run low on that thing again and quickly get hungry again---too soon.

Then you eat more food with more Calories---but again not much of what really made you hungry.

You repeat this sequence over and over---usually without realizing it---for weeks, months, and years.

Your body thriftily stores the excess Calories and you get fat.

Looked at from this point of view, the problem of "overweight" becomes both easy to understand and easy to solve.

To solve it, you do exactly the opposite of what made you fat. You learn to deliberately eat things that give your body enough of all of the nutrients it needs---except for Calories.

This means that you must still eat to deliberately make yourself run low on Calories. But much more importantly, you must also eat to deliberately make sure you never run low on anything else. Both are necessary and neither by itself is sufficient .

When you can successfully do both, your body simply pulls its energy needs out of its ample fat stores---which themselves won't run low enough to make you hungry for a long time. And when they finally do---by definition you're thin again! And that was the whole point of the effort, wasn't it?

It's not hard to learn how much of what foods and supplements you should eat in order to both eliminate hunger and maintain a constant Calorie deficit. It requires some reading and understanding, but there's no longer a deep theoretical mystery here.

And it's not rocket science to put this method into effect either. It takes some time, attention, and practice---but so did learning to drive a car. And learning the right way to eat is no more difficult than learning the right way to drive.

In my next article, we'll begin to discuss some of the food strategies that you can use to manage nutrition and lose weight successfully with this method.

--Anderson A. Anonymous, M.D., Ph.D.--

Copyright (c) 2002 Hamilton/Wolcott Publishing

Anderson A. Anonymous, M.D., Ph.D. is the author of The 2001 Multi-Diet: Taming The Beast! which is available from most neighborhood and online bookstores.

"Dr. A." is a nutrition researcher who has deliberately chosen to publish anonymously.

[Editor's Note: A special report --Powerful Tips for Simple Effective Weight Loss-- is available to our readers at the Hamilton/Wolcott website ( http://www.hamiltonwolcott.com ). This report explains how to use several epecially-effective, high-nutrient, low-Calorie foods to minimize hunger while easily losing weight.]

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