Your Body Wants its Missing Fat

Losing weight is hard enough.

Keeping it off is even harder.  And a new study involving a popular reality TV show may reveal why.

Your own body fights your attempts at keeping your weight down!

A six-year scientific project examined the ability of "Biggest Loser" contestants from the show's eighth season to keep off the pounds they lost.  A fan of the show, Dr. Kevin Hall, happens to be a metabolism scientist at the National Institutes of Health, and he approached the show's producers about following the contestants to see what would happen as their bodies responded to significant weight loss.

Hall figured the success of contestants to keep the weight off would depend largely on the traditional metrics we've been taught for years about weight loss:  You know; exercise, balanced diet, yadda yadda yadda...

Instead, Hall discovered that metabolism controls more than science has ever realized.  As a person loses weight, their metabolism will slow down automatically, but when the desired new weight is reached, and a person relaxes their weight-loss regimen, their metabolism often will not return to "normal."  Instead, not only does metabolism stagnate, it continues to slow even further, making weight stability a battle, let alone any efforts to lose more weight.

That's why keeping off lost weight is so difficult!  Have you ever lost a significant amount of weight - even ten pounds is significant - only to regain it?  Plus add a few more pounds as the months go by?  Well, this is likely the reason why.

On the plus side, at least all of the frustrations about not being able to maintain your discipline about exercise and diet can be alleviated!  Keeping lost weight off isn't simply mind over matter.  It's not about commitment to the cause, or weakness in the face of temptation.  It's not all about willpower.

In many people, according to this scientific study by a real doctor at a prestigious medical organization, the reason you can't keep off the weight is biological.

Your body has a mechanism at work whose purpose is to restore what weight was removed.

Weird, huh?  And yet, somewhat comforting.  At least, to a point.

Then you begin to get frustrated all over again:  Well, isn't there anything I can do to win the battle of the bulge?!

Sure there is.  Bariatric surgery can work.  You can increase the time and exertion levels you spend exercising.  You can slice even more bad stuff out of your diet.  Indeed, absolutely no cheating is allowed!  But even then, doctors say that you'll probably always feel hungry.

Doesn't sound very encouraging, does it? 

Obviously, it's best to start early and prevent the weight from adding up in the first place.  But none of us can go back five, ten, or thirty years to correct our poor eating and exercise habits, if indeed diet and exercise were the only reasons people gain weight to begin with.

And to a certain extent, it seems like some perverse trick on God's part, since as our Creator, He obviously is the One who designed our bodies to try and self-fatten themselves after we've lost weight.  Why would He plan out something so apparently counter-productive like that?

Perhaps He did it to help Christians who were being starved for their faith, such as the early believers at the hands of the Romans, or even people who were being starved in Nazi concentration camps?  Slower metabolism would help the body automatically adapt - at least somewhat - when nutrition was being intentionally denied.

Then again, maybe plumper bodies really are more beautiful than skinner physiques, as some cultures claim.  Or maybe gluttony really is more physically dangerous than many of us consider it to be, since our abuse of food isn't as correctable or reversible as we've been led to believe. 

At least this study provides further proof that obesity isn't a sin, although glutton is.

Only two of the contestants studied have been successful at maintaining their new lower weight; one has gained "only" a few pounds, and the other has managed to lose a few more, but she says it's been a royal struggle to do so.  And these are people who were equipped by the show with all sorts of weight loss and weight maintenance strategies, trainers, nutrition experts, and equipment for the task.  Imagine the daunting prospects for success facing the rest of us!

The basic take-away here is that, like many other things in life we'd like to correct, it's best not to start those processes that eventually produce unwanted results.

Because while it is possible to lose weight, your body doesn't make it easy at all to keep it off.

Your metabolism won't even let you splurge on your favorite comfort foods for consolation.

Don't Endorse the Evil of Two Lessers

It's time for America's evangelical voters to put up or shut up.

I've resisted the groundswell of #NeverTrump up until now, but today Trump provided the straw to break that camel's back.  He tipped the needle over the line.  He nudged the cart over the precipice.

Up until now, Trump has been "the lesser of two evils" for holdout evangelicals exasperated about choosing between him and Hillary.  Up until now, the plethora of conventional warnings from theologians and moralists about how spiritually and emotionally unfit Trump is for the presidency have carried little weight with the legions of religious conservatives who insist that political incorrectness is all Washington needs these days.

Up until now, Trump has been the celebrated schoolyard bully of this election season, dropping vulgar innuendos about the only Republican female contender, and snarking away on Twitter with juvenile jabs at other contestants who, one by one, have pulled out of the ugly race.  He taunts and belittles others while unabashedly boasting about the greatness he plans for America - even though he hasn't provided any detailed plans for achieving that greatness.  In any other election, his public package of empty promises, sound-bite insults, and incessant vanity would be considered bad politics, but this year, his followers cheerfully describe Trump and his schtick as refreshing.

It's the bully-fication of America, I guess, thanks to years of pugnacious right-wing talk shows, the dumbing-down of American history by the religious right, and thinly-veiled anger and confusion over the economic stagnation that casts a pall over a sprawling cross-section of voters.  Traditional conservatives remain adamant that America's One Percenters, despite their extreme wealth, really don't manipulate their assets to the detriment of the rest of us.  Meanwhile, ironically, this manipulation by the One Percenters has helped Trump attract an unprecedented amount of support from labor unions and other traditional Democrats; "liberals" tantalized by a so-called Republican who says he's fed up with all of the corporate cost-cutting, down-sizing, and offshoring of jobs that have eroded our standard of living.

Somehow, having an egomaniacal developer who leveraged his father's rental apartment business in one of the world's most expensive real estate markets into a multi-billion-dollar company represents America's last great hope of greatness.  Even though he's never run for any public office in his life.

And yeah, maybe it just might work, having a political neophyte win the White House without having to solicit campaign funds from a plethora of donors looking for taxpayer-funded handouts.  But what happens when that political neophyte holds anybody who doesn't embrace him in as much contempt as Trump does?

He calls people who don't want to vote for him "losers."  He delights in calling people "wacko," including Ted Cruz and Glenn Beck.  He's called Carl Rove a "failed Jeb Bushy."  He described Lindsey Graham as "one of the dumbest human beings."  And voters are drinking it up as entertainment.

Indeed, immature voters may giggle and guffaw at such petty insults, yet isn't that what the impotent, scared kids on the playground do when a bully is swaggering about, shooting off his mouth?

And when it comes to Trump's infamous insults, this isn't even the tip of the iceberg.  The New York Times is keeping a running tab of them - hundreds of them, regarding at least 210 people, places, and things - just from Trump's Twitter account.

Trump has made a name for himself of demeaning the names of so many people he doesn't particularly like.  And that's a good temperament for a president?

Add that to Trumps' mocking of a handicapped reporter.  How about his lusting after his own daughter?  How about his affairs... or is sexual infidelity so provincial now?  How about his multiple bankruptcies, or is he entitled to break a few eggs while making his omelette?

How about his weak flip-flop on abortion?  Or his ambivalence about freedom of religion?

He's still better than Hillary, even after all that?

Up until now, for many conservatives, he has been.

Then today, after the Baptist theologian Russell Moore refused to back down from his personal #NeverTrump stance, the Donald unleashed on one of the most popular and prominent evangelicals of our day:

"Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for.  A nasty guy with no heart!"

Now, I don't agree with Moore on everything, but I'm not sure anybody (except Trump) can point to anything Moore says or does that makes him a "truly terrible representative" for us evangelicals.  Moore is almost certainly not "a nasty guy" by any stretch of the imagination.  And it's downright goofy to say he has "no heart."

If Trump is entitled to his opinion, isn't Moore entitled to his?  So doesn't Trump's belittling of Moore in such a fashion say more negative things about the presidential candidate than it does the Baptist advocate?

It also raises a deeply troubling question:  For evangelicals to say that Trump is the "lesser of two evils," is this the type of president you'd want interacting with leaders within our evangelical sub-culture?  Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders - none of them have said anything even remotely as negative about any leading evangelical figure as Trump did today.

Sure, liberals in the public eye may think all sorts of nasty stuff about Moore and other prominent evangelicals.  But they usually think twice before publicizing those private opinions.  And that's because there's a greater power in thoughts that are publicized.  It's one thing for a public figure to think negative things about somebody else, or even discretely share them within a tight group of close friends.  But to unleash such negative things for the entire world to consume - especially as consistently as Trump does regarding his opponents - should be deeply troubling to the rest of us.  Such careless open vitriol bespeaks not only Trump's political incorrectness, it more than suggests a temperament of hostility, narcissism, and immaturity that would disqualify anybody else from virtually any leadership post in any organization... except the United States presidency?

Um... No.  Today Trump erased any benefit of the doubt regarding his being the lesser of two evils.

If you consider yourself an evangelical, and you've been willing to vote for Donald Trump, today is your day of reckoning.  I don't think I'm making too big a deal out of this, since, as I've been saying for months, it's virtually impossible to embrace the teachings of Jesus Christ and Donald Trump.

No, we're not electing a pastor.  This election is about the presidency of the United States.  And yes, Hillary has a lot of unseemly baggage that makes her a distinctly dubious choice as the leader of the "free" world.

But if you think people are wrong to vote for Hillary, then you should also understand why it's wrong to vote for Trump.

As the saying goes, there's such a thing as "the evil of two lessers."  If two candidates are wrong for the job, don't choose either of them.

It's not who you don't vote for that matters.
_____

Update 5/10/16:  Anne Graham Lotz claims she's voting for Trump because "he can change."  With all due respect to Lotz and her family pedigree, "he can change" is not a Biblical reason to vote for anybody.  Hillary can change, according to that logic, so why not vote for her?  Anybody can change, right?  Shucks, as far as banking on somebody to change, Trump could change into something even worse than what he is now.