16 What is the main purpose of liposuction?To help people lose weight.To target problem body parts.To keep some Hollywood docs in business.To ensure another season of successful reality TV.
17 What is your omentum?A badly misspelled word.The part of your brain that’s stimulated to store fat.A chemical that controls hunger.A fat-storing tissue.
18 Health-wise, what is the optimal waist size for a woman?As little as possible.32½ inches.Under 35 inches.Whatever slides into that little black dress, honey.
19 Which part of your body that plays a role in weight gain works most like your brain?Your stomach.Your heart.Your small intestine.Your unmentionables.
20 What is CCK?The former Soviet Union.A hormone that regulates insulin levels by changing your blood sugar level.Colonic Creations by Katherine.Cholecystokinin, a chemical that tells your brain to stop eating the waffle.
21 Of the following items, what contributes most to weight gain?Periods of low levels of willpower.Short periods of high-intensity stress.Long periods of low-intensity stress.Periods of high-intensity dessert trays.
22 What is a duodenal switch?An effective surgical technique for losing weight.An intestinal transplant.The hot new band from Seattle.A program for cleansing your colon of toxins.
23 Which of the following can be an effective medical option for weight loss?Aspirin.Beta-blockers.Statins.Antidepressants.
24 Which activity is most helpful for waist control?Crunches.Cardiovascular training like running.Resistance training like weight lifting.Naked salsa dancing every other Tuesday.
25 What’s the worst side effect of losing weight?Increased risk of chocolate withdrawal.Increased risk of muscular and joint aches.Increased risk of yo-yo dieting.Increased risk of astronomical tailor bill.
Answers
1 a. The development of agriculture meant that we could now have foods we wanted, not needed. And that’s what provided the foundation for indulgence.
2 a. Most diets don’t reprogram you to think and eat automatically, so that eventually you’ll go off the diet just as surely as you went on it.
3 c. Eating a handful of nuts has been shown to help you stay full, while skipping meals can be detrimental because your body will go into a fat-storing, starvation mode when it doesn’t have enough calories.
4 b. Of these risks, blood pressure is the greatest indicator of health risks associated with being overweight.
5 b. Ghrelin makes you want to eat more.
6 d. Leptin keeps you full.
7 a. Cinnamon increases insulin sensitivity, which helps enhance the satiety center in your brain (and also reduces blood sugar levels as well as cholesterol levels).
8 b. Fructose, as in high-fructose corn syrup, doesn’t appear to turn off your hunger chemicals, so you do not feel full; thus you eat more.
9 a. Extreme stress (as in the case of a car accident, or even exercise) turns off your hunger. Chronic stress (like a long line of looming deadlines or family problems) can make you crave feel-good carbohydrates.
10 a. Whole-grain foods are loaded with filling fiber.
11 d. Playing video games works because it keeps your hands busy, so you can’t eat. (Training for a marathon is actually destructive to your body because of the risk to your joints, and for most people, 1,000 calories is a dangerously low daily caloric intake. Do we really need to explain colonics?)
12 c. Your liver is responsible for most metabolic functions.
13 c. PCOS is responsible for weight gain in at least 10 percent of women under age fifty. It’s now clinically called androgen excess; androgen refers to the male hormone.
14 b. Fiber fills you. A cup of oatmeal in the morning has been shown to prevent you from afternoon gorging.
15 a. Walk at least thirty minutes-at once or in intervals-every day.
16 b. Liposuction should be used to sculpt problem areas, not to remove a lot of fat.
17 d. Located next to your stomach, your omentum is fat that can cause damage to surrounding organs.
18 b. While 32½ inches or less is ideal, 37 inches is when women start seeing a greatly increased risk of weight-related disorders.
19 c. Your small intestine-with 100 million neurons-has anatomy similar to your brain.
20 d. CCK is a chemical that directly and indirectly sends a message to your brain from your guts that you’re full.
21 c. Chronic stress makes your body store more fat.
22 a. A duodenal switch is one of several surgical options for people with morbid obesity.
23 d. Bupropion, an antidepressant, has been shown to help control cravings and lead to about a 7 percent weight loss. Other antidepressants, such as tricyclic antidepressants or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), can often be associated with weight gain.
24 c. Adding a little muscle through resistance training helps your body burn more fat throughout the day.
25 c. Yo-yo dieting not only has physiological effects, because you end up gaining more weight after you’ve lost it, but it also has psychological effects.
Scoring
You get one point for each correct answer.
20 and above: Congratulations, doc. You’re an anatomical expert.
11–19: You’re average, but then again, the average person is overweight, so maybe this isn’t so good. Maybe you’d better read on.
10 and below: Don’t worry, you’re about to enroll in the ultimate course in the biology, history, and anatomy of fat-which is the best way to change your body.
Chapter 1
The Ideal Body
What Your Body Is Supposed to Look Like
Diet Myths
Your body doesn’t need any fat.
Fast food is responsible for most of our fat problems.
Dieting has to be hard.
The most common question heard among overweight people isn’t “Can I have more sour cream?” It’s “Why can’t I lose weight?” While you may think you know the answer (severe pancake addiction), the real reason is biological: We’re actually hardwired to store some fat.
Our bodies have more systems that allow us to gain weight than to lose it. Historically, as we’ll see in a moment, that served us well. Today, though, we’ve poisoned the systems that help us lose weight and empowered the ones that allow us to gain it—botching up our anatomy and turning our bodies into fat-storing machines. One of your goals will be to reprogram your body so that your internal systems can work the way they did when the greatest enemy we faced was a charging wildebeest, not a cheese-drowned pork roll.
Our ancestors survived by gaining and storing weight to survive periodic famines. That has left our bodies prone to storing fat and gaining weight, tendencies that willpower alone can rarely overcome. To see how our bodies have morphed from rock-hard to sponge-soft, let’s look inside the bodies of early man and woman. They looked like stereotypical super-heroes: strong, lean, muscular, able to jump snorting mammals in a single bound.
As we evolved, we created systems and behaviors to survive when droughts and poor eyesight made picking and hunting less than successful. We learned to thrive, and we learned to eat. In early times, our diets consisted of fruits, nuts, vegetables, tubers, and wild