Is it your fate to be fat?

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If you're worried about your weight you may have the feeling lately that science is really messing around with you.

Consider recent findings: Rats fed saccharin gain weight faster than rats fed sugar. Some overweight humans live longer than skinny ones. Diabetics who drive down their blood sugar to "normal" levels are more likely to die of heart disease.

Even the end result of "just eat less and exercise more" is under scrutiny, as researchers find that some obese people are destined by their genes and metabolism to stay fat.

Maybe it's time to be realistic and play the cards we're dealt.

"The reality is that people have less control over their weight than they realise," said Gina Kolata, whose book Rethinking Thin looks at the science of weight loss. "Weight is inherited almost as strongly as height. No matter how much you'd like to be skinny, you may not be able to be as thin as you would like."

Kolata suggests that we should stop blaming people for obesity.

"It's just as hard for a thin person to gain 45 kg as it is for an obese person to lose it - or even 20, or even, I hate to say it, eight," she said. "It's not that easy to change your weight just because you will yourself to."

Hard as dieting is, losing weight is easier than keeping it off.

Even Oprah Winfrey, one of America's wealthiest women with personal trainers and chefs, struggles with gaining and losing repeatedly, points out University of California-Davis nutrition professor Judith Stern.

"It's really hard to keep weight off," Stern said. "Some of it has to be biology. Some of it has to be the environment."

And some of it is probably interactions between the two that we don't fully understand.

Just as with diet soft drinks, artificial sweeteners and other food controversies, Stern said, "when all the evidence is in, the patients will be dead. We don't have all the information right now."

In the absence of firm knowledge, she advised people to try out different strategies that do have some support in medical literature, and see which approaches might suit them.

Among things you might try:

Drink unsweetened tea, especially oolong, which has a long tradition of use for weight control in Japan. Before dinner, have a bowl of soup, not just broth but something with vegetables. If you're prone to mindless eating at a desk or elsewhere, keep healthy snacks around.

No matter what you settle on, Stern said, "Know who you are. Know what compromises you're willing to make. Know what you're not willing to do."

Stern is such a dessert fan that if a restaurant has one of her favourites, she will sometimes order it first, relish it completely, and then order the rest of her meal, perhaps just a salad or appetiser. She knows she'll order the dessert no matter what, so she may eat less overall by eating dessert first.

Good tips - but tips weren't enough to help truck driver Mike Williams. Faced with intractable obesity, he eventually tried something more drastic.

"Diets work, but I don't think they last," said Williams, 54, who says he has fluctuated by 22 to 30 kilos at least five times.

At 160 cm, Williams zoomed up from his high school weight of 66 kg, than 90, then more than 115, 120 and even 125. He lost on Weight Watchers, NutriSystem, the Atkins diet and even a soup diet, but for nearly 30 years, he regained every time.

Finally, after even his post-heart attack weight loss failed to stick, Williams opted for gastric bypass surgery.

Today his scale reads 86.

For those looking for a solution less invasive than surgery, another strategy is to set modest, more personalised goals. Liz Applegate, an expert on diet and fitness at UC Davis, advised setting an initial target of dropping 2 or 5 kgs.

"When you've achieved that, you'll have a sense of accomplishment," she said. "Be realistic - don't announce that you're going to lose 20 kgs or weigh what you weighed in high school."

She said long-term studies of people who have managed to maintain weight losses show similar patterns: They don't skip meals, particularly breakfast. They don't fool themselves about how much they're eating. They find ways to exercise during the day for a total of 60 to 90 minutes.

And they are vigilant about not letting kilos creep back: "They have a monitoring device that works for them: A scale. A notch on a belt. A skinny pair of jeans."

Applegate's mantra is that it can be done - and Kolata agrees, up to a point.

"I don't want to say it's useless, that you can't lose any weight, because people can and do," she said. "But it's very hard not to get caught up in this zeal that people think they can weigh anything they wanted to if they just will it. It's like saying, 'I could grow a few centimetres if I just really wanted to."'

MCT

Arts Express: ZHAO Ya-zhi by CCTV as a summer hottest star. The over 50-year-old woman, tall and does not face 30-year-old woman than less, then let her interpretation of what is a not old legend? Michigan Aunt candidly said: My life is the law, eating very natural, not partial eclipse, the sentence: I pay attention to nutritional balance. Nutritious seemingly simple it is not easy in our daily lives How are we going to balance nutritional? Discovered in weight management center Jinshan (BLOG).

Reduce food intake GI

GI (Glycemic Index), is the glycemic index, that is, in vivo uptake of food into sugar ratio. GI index higher glucose into fat so that the speed will be. Change diet structure, multi-use beans, vegetables and fruits as food production can reduce the fat.

2. Will not reject them fat

Now many are afraid of fat diet, will be hard-hearted to reject the fat, and fat is the body s need material, it is a human tissue cells an important part of protecting the body, maintain the body temperature of the hero, so it should be limited to fat intake.

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