We’ve covered popular misconceptions about obesity, and found that people placing moral judgments on food choices are slimmer and healthier. But during a recent subscriber chat, someone argued I’d only demonstrated that food moralizers are slimmer while failing to prove that pleasure itself was a primary driver of obesity — isn’t it just an innocent byproduct? So I’ll take another crack at it and clarify what I mean.
Many factors contribute to obesity, but if I could choose only one principle to help those struggling with serious weight issues, it would be this: minimize food pleasure while maximizing nutrition, food water content, and intra-meal monotony (The first leads to the others).
People like to hem and haw. They say you can maximize pleasure while losing weight. Entire cookbooks and the diet industry itself is built on the premise of something for nothing. I think the mindset is an enabler of our obesity status quo, and that “you never have to give up pleasure” is a siren drawing people to the rocks. If you’re continuously failing to lose weight or keep it off, you probably have — at some level — a problem with pleasure, though we could quibble about definitions. If you want to stay fat, keep seeking pleasure above other concerns. If you want to shift course, consider this powerful doctrine.
Anyone can lose weight by reducing calories, but for many, it’s a white-knuckle battle that ends in regain. But if we replace food pleasure with another sort of satisfaction, something incredible happens.
Removing food pleasure often causes unintentional, effortless weight loss without restriction. It’s like an uncontrollable force drawing people to overeat suddenly lets go. Years of struggle disappear in days. Let’s look at some studies exploring this.
Slop = Slim?
The “food” must have been disgusting.
The researchers hooked a tube up to a fridge-sized appliance and told study subjects to push a button when they were hungry. Each push dispensed a mouthful of tasteless pale goop into their mouths.
The formula was designed to do only one thing — meet their nutritional and energy needs while stripping away everything tempting them to do more.
* It was bland and textureless and designed to convey no taste pleasure.
* It wasn’t stimulatory and offered no distraction from depression, anxiety, or boredom.
* No meal, “ceremony,” or camaraderie drove them to eat more than satiety demanded.
* It was monotonous, so the well-studied phenomenon of food variety increasing calorie consumption would be absent.
It was just boring food dispensed via tube.
When normal-weight people were put on this regimen — with no instructions about maximizing or minimizing intake — they impressively maintained their body weight by averaging 3,000 calories a day. Their hungry drive was accurate.
But when they put obese people on the glop, something amazing happened — they spontaneously shed weight without trying. One obese man started off at 400 pounds and drank only 275 calories a day while reporting no hunger. When the machine was switched off and he had to pour the glop from a pitcher into a cup to drink, his calorie intake increased slightly, but not enough to stop his rapid weight loss
Later, he was sent home with a supply of formula and ordered to keep drinking, and after 252 days, he lost 200 pounds without experiencing hunger.
It’s almost like our bodies have a homeostatic mechanism capable of detecting unhealthy obesity and dialing down food drive to remedy the problem, but pleasure and other psychological factors override the signal.
Trouble In A Bland Paradise
Years later, the researchers returned to the topic to see if they could find out more.
They altered the nutrition of the glop partway through the study period to double its calorie concentration. The lean subjects somehow unconsciously cut their consumption in half to compensate and kept their weight unchanged.
But the obese adults’ bodies appeared unable to detect the change, and ate the same amount of glop, though they still lost weight. But obese children consumed large quantities of the formula — too much.
This study introduces some mixed signals. Perhaps the obese subjects had a physiological miscalibration of their satiety drive. Perhaps we should still see this as their bodies continuing to course correct. But what of the kids? The researchers concluded:
“Lean young adults appear to regulate energy intake at the physiologic level when the nutritive concentration of the diet is altered covertly. Grossly obese adults seem incapable of such regulation.”
Well, the caloric density of real-world food choices varies dramatically.
Calories/Pound:
* Olive Oil: 4,008
* Pizza Hut Cheese Pizza: 1,372
* Whole Wheat Bread: 1,142
* Steak: 902
* Tofu: 657
* Lentils: 525
* Brown Rice: 507
* Skinless Chicken Breast: 508
* Sweet Potato: 439
* Cooked Oatmeal: 307
* Spinach: 104
* Cucumber: 54
Even if we could strip all “excess pleasure” from these foods, which is impossible, we’re left with the fact that some of them are so calorically dense that the obese are at risk of overeating them. Thus, bland food packed with calories is probably still a mistake.
So what happens when you take these ideas and apply them at scale?
The White Rice Cure All
Diabetes, high blood pressure, and kidney diseases used to be death sentences.
The rise of pharmaceuticals gave people “an out”, but prior to that, the only cure was removing the cause. So in the 1930s, Dr. Walter Kempner developed a single blunt-force instrument at Duke University — a monotonous diet of unlimited unseasoned boiled white rice with some fruit and nutritional supplements. It’s known as “The Kempner Rice Diet.”
Kempner’s normal-weight patients sometimes struggled to maintain their weight on this regimen, and he had to ok them eating sugar and syrup, with no discernible decline in outcomes.
The TLDR is that it worked really well, curing type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and stabilizing or improving degraded kidney function. Kempner's theories about why the program worked were sometimes wrong, but the results speak for themselves.
But the diet did something else — it helped obese people lose weight without restricting calories.
This study of 106 obese patients treated by Kempner as outpatients, with regular supervision and exercise, found that all lost at least 99 pounds, with an average weight loss of 141 pounds. Forty-three patients achieved a normal weight.
This level of success is unheard of in weight loss studies that don’t restrict calories.
Feel The Difference:
I worked as a diet/health coach for more than a decade, but I never told clients to subsist on glop or white rice forever. And I never gave puretanical lectures about food pleasure either. Not directly.
But this is a philosophy newsletter and I hope we’re sufficiently committed to exploring uncomfortable truths to see what’s at the heart of one of our world’s greatest problems.
I used to be obese, and through my own experimentation, it became clear that pleasure was a big problem for me, though from the inside it merely looked like, “I’m broken.” Obese people are unlikely to realize they’re in thrall of pleasure until the fever breaks and they can suddenly see clearly.
A Revelatory Experiment:
*This Is Not Medical Advice. Consult your Doctor*
I used to suggest an experiment to obese clients who wanted to experience what normal hunger was like: eat nothing but unlimited boiled potatoes with nothing added for two weeks. They could continue to drink black coffee, tea, and water with nothing added.
They found it boring, of course, but they were often blown away at how effortlessly the weight fell off them
Those eating high salt diets often felt slightly off for the first week as their aldosterone levels adjusted to stabilize blood pressure without salt. But by week two they usually experienced true physiological hunger and high energy levels.
After two weeks, they’d slowly reintroduce food variety (one new food/spice every three days) and see where “the pleasure line” lay, beyond which overeating begins/weight loss stopps. I suggested they delay adding salt, sugar, and fatty oils and butters as long as they could, as these were more likely to lead them astray. Broadly, I told them to eat like a peasant.
In the long term, I guided them toward no less than 1.2 g/kg of protein per day, and no less than 15% of calories from fat, but our bodies are adaptable and will endure periods of monotony just fine.
This program only worked for about 80% of my obese clients. The rest had to address other factors of weight loss (like glycemic index/load), or attention.
Not A War Against Pleasure
I find it funny that GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic hack the brain’s ability to experience pleasure, which causes weight loss, but often leads to people being unable to experience pleasure in any context.
My own approach feels modest in comparison. I’m pro-pleasure! Who doesn’t want pleasure? I simply think that if pleasure is leading you by the nose, if it’s enslaved you, you’re going to end up in dark places.
My modest argument is to consider trading extreme food pleasure — the likes of which our ancestors never experienced — for other worthwhile goods.
And to be clear, we’re not talking about giving up all food pleasure. Not only do taste buds and desires change to favor healthier food after abstinence from highly palatable foods, but the satisfaction of hunger by any means is pleasurable. Having such an addled hunger homeostat that hunger never ceases is a kind of hell!
I’m very aware that blandness won’t get the crowd on their feet.
It won’t outsell Cheetos or launch a diet influencer’s career.
Yet in more than a decade of coaching overweight and obese clients, few things were as effective for rewiring psychologies as a few weeks of eating bland, water-rich, healthy food before branching out a bit.
If you’re struggling, consider giving it a try.
Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.
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