https://www.sermorelin.me/hormone-imbalance-may-impact-weight-more-than-caloric-intake
For all our lives, most people have lived under the assumption that dieting is just a simple addition/subtraction problem. If you want to lose weight, simply eat fewer calories than your body burns in a day! A combination of eating less and working out more is the classic combination for dieting. As nutrition science advances, however, we're learning that our past assumptions on dieting are vastly oversimplified.
Our Understanding of Diet and Nutrition Has Evolved Over Time
The modern science of dieting and weight loss begins sometime around the early 20th century. Scientists got a handle on the number of calories in various foods and dietitians set to work to get people to eat fewer calories to lose weight. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was widely believed that dietary fat was the biggest obesity threat, because fat calories are more dense than carbs or protein. In the modern era, processed foods, sugars, and fats all became prime targets for dietary restriction.
Upon investigation, there are some serious problems with how we understand diet as it pertains to obesity and weight loss. While average calorie intake increased from 1970-2000, it's mostly flattened out or declined since the turn of the century. In spite of this, the number of Americans with obesity has gone up by over 33% over the same time frame, now afflicting 42% of the population. One might argue that sedentary lifestyle is the cause of this rapid increase, but Americans have actually become slightly more active in recent decades.
