Our society has long treated weight gain as a function of insufficient willpower. If you’re overweight, it’s because you chose to be. You ate too much, or you didn’t exercise enough. You lack the virtue and the discipline of the thin.
This story is great. It is great for punishing anyone who struggles with weight. It is great for justifying discrimination and maltreatment. But it is just nonsense if you take even a cursory look at the data.
And Stephan Guyenet has looked — and I put this very lightly — a lot deeper than that. Guyenet is a neurobiologist by training. He is obsessive about study interpretation and experimental design and methodology.
And his book, “The Hungry Brain,” is, to me, the most convincing model for why obesity is rising year after year, why so many who try so hard to change our waistlines fail, even after they sometimes first succeed, and why our individualized narratives around this are so cruel — and also so wrong.
His argument, based on reams of evidence, is that weight gain is a product of this fundamental mismatch between our brains — not just our waistlines or something — our brains, our genetics and our social environment. We live in a world where we are surrounded by endless varieties of cheap, convenient food that is engineered to make us crave it.
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