As we all know, every winter, brown bears across their range lie down for their long nap. Some do little more than roll over for six months or so before emerging to begin their various jobs breaking into cars and riding unicycles. They accomplish this feat by putting on a thick coat of fat in the preceding months from which they draw energy in order to survive their fast. During their hibernation, it’s not just the fact they aren’t out hunting down hikers that helps them conserve their energy stores. Their metabolisms slow down, making their fat last longer than it would otherwise.
This is regulated by hormones, of course. A bear’s growth, whether growth in general or growth in a specific region of the bear’s body, is controlled by hormones. The bear doesn’t eat because he consciously knows winter is coming. He’s not that smart. He feels hungry because his fat cells have been stimulated by hormones to want more fat in them. They start sucking up any food energy the bear puts in his ferocious mouth. His other tissues are actually deprived of energy because his fat cells are sucking it all up. That leaves the bear needing to continue to eat. No matter what the bear eats in the months leading up to its hibernation, the bear’s hormones will partition that incoming energy into its fat stores for the coming winter, and, due to this storage, the bear will remain hungry. It’s natural, and there’s not a whole lot one could do about it.
But what could you do about it, if you really wanted to? If you decided that you didn’t want the bear to gain all that fat for whatever reason, how would you prevent it? One strategy would be to deprive the bear of food and thus calories. Maybe cut the food provided to bear in half. Fat in food is very calorie dense. It might be a good place to cut a bunch of calories. You might also decide that you were going to train the bear to be friendly (unlikely at best) and start taking the bear for walks in the woods. Maybe you could force the bear to walk for miles with minimal sustenance.
What would happen, of course, is the bear will begin to lose weight. He’s now burning more calories than he takes in. Unfortunately for the bear, because of the influence of his hormones, some of the mass he loses is from tissues other than fat. His muscles get weaker. Even his organs get a little lighter. Under the direction of his hormones, his fat cells continue to be driven to grow despite the lack of food input. That is impossible, though. He is constantly without energy, because his body is still trying its best to store any provided food as fat anyway. Due to the lack of energy supply in the blood, fat is eventually pulled out of storage in order to keep the bear from collapsing on the trail.
Release the bear into the wild after a month of this torture, and the bear will put the weight back on very quickly. In fact, the bear’s fat stores will probably recover more quickly than the damage you’ve done to the bear’s other tissues. This is, again, due to hormonal influences. Those fat cells are just so needy when the bear’s hormones want them to be.
By now, if you have read this far, you see where we are going with this. “Eat less, and exercise more” is the mantra of the skinny. “Energy in, energy out.” But the skinny literally cannot comprehend the truth of what it means to be fat.
Homo sapiens is another organism whose growth and metabolism is regulated by hormones. The growth of the long bones in legs and arms seen in children and teenagers is the result of hormonal influence. All other growth is as well. Teens don’t begin the growth spurt of puberty because they suddenly start eating a lot. They eat a lot because they are growing, and their energy is being partitioned into creating new tissues. This growth is controlled by hormones.
Fat is a body tissue whose growth is, like all other tissues in the human body, regulated by hormones. Just like in the bear. When hormones promote the partitioning of energy to fat storage, H. sapiens gets fat. It accomplishes that feat through various means: by reducing the basal metabolic rate; by reducing the mass of other tissues to harvest energy needs without tapping into regulated fat tissue as much; by locking away any food energy into fat stores and thus reducing the available energy for expenditure on activity. Locking the food away in fat stores reduces the organism’s ability to access that energy, causing both inactivity and the need to eat again in a vicious cycle.
That's right. Growing fat cells motivate humans to eat more and move less.
But we blame the obese individual for his plight. We believe in free will and all the praise and blame that goes along with it. We're told that all a fat person needs to do is stop eating so much and exercise more. That he needs to learn to control himself. That he needs to stop being so weak.
Yeah, that will work for a few. A few will find the willpower to somehow break away from this cycle. Many of those will accomplish it through what amounts to self-starvation and maybe a long forced march in the woods or a gym membership. That makes the majority who fail seemingly all the more blameworthy for their “lack of discipline.”
Insulin is one of the few hormones that healthy humans can take a measure of control over. Insulin also happens to be the hormone that promotes the uptake of fat into fat cells. People need to learn how to reduce their average insulin levels.
Skinny people who seem to easily stay that way have a very hard time understanding the underlying drives of fat people. They don’t understand that some people’s fat cells, due to genetic or environmental factors, react more strongly to the effects of insulin. A skinny person who seems to eat a ton and never put on weight has fat cells that for whatever reason do not take up as much fat as an obese person’s. The skinny person is left with an excess of energy at their disposal. They tend to fidget. They tend to be active. They tend to run marathons.
But they don’t understand that they are simply fulfilling the wishes of their hormones. You’ll do what you are driven to do, whether you realize the underlying reason or not. The obese are driven to eat more or sit around more or both. The skinny are driven to eat less or run and play more. There’s no blame, and there is no praise either way.
