I find carrots leave my bowels, erm, active. But they don't seem to cause me to lose weight, sadly.
(Long essay on fat storage and loss and my opinionated views follows...)
I got seriously interested in the whole subject of fat in the body a few years back, though not many, and went through a phase of watching documentaries, talks etc., and reading research and opinions.
That's what left me with my very strongly held opinion that it's multifactorial, that we shouldn't expect one solution to work for everyone. On the other hand, it's great when different ways of helping people are found.
We know there's been a shift in very recent years in countries such as the UK and US away from "carbs are fine, cut fat" to "fat's fine, cut carbs", often very simplistically expressed. Sadly, given that I am inclined to believe the theory that the US pushed the cut fats approach hard because in the cold war they wanted their country to be reliant on what they were able to produce best, which was stuff like corn and beef.
That being so, there's big money to be made from oil, so I'm going to be wary as well of any over-simplistic 'carbs are bad' messages as well.
There's also a nice little observation that I came across a few years back that if the popular weight loss organisations such as Weightwatchers (now WW?), Slimmers World, Rosemary Conley worked long-term, they'd go bust because they rely on repeat business.
I do rather like a theory I came across that's accepted more widely now than previously that one major factor in international spread of obesity is to do with gut bicrobiome. Put in crude terms, the theory is that you can 'catch' obesity as it were. There is as yet no suggestion that it's a single type of bacteria that does it, but nevertheless researchers have found that if they do gut flora transplants between fat and thin people, the thin people can get fatter and vice-versa.
Thus one approach for people is to see whether tweaking what they eat less from a calorie perspective, but more from a 'gut flora balance' perspective helps them. It seems to be a key factor for some not others. That can include tweaking sugar intake levels as some bacteria seem to like sugar more than others. Others find things like certain sorts of yoghurt etc. help them.
Incidentally, on the sugar front, modern potatoes are rather different from potatoes that originally spread round the world. That showed up when researchers analysed remnants of 'lumper' potatoes from Irish famine era and found that the subsistence potatoes were higher in protein than export crop potatoes, which were like our modern supermarket ones. If you think that's accidental, you don't share my sense that big, successful businesses work out what sells well. Did you ever consider the contrast between paintings of important people in Ancient Rome & Ancient Greece, and more modern ones? The sugar and tobacco trades flourished around the time Western art started pushing the notion that fatness was beautiful and a sign of wealth and importance.
And I'm now going to sound defensive. I've been accused by various people in the past of passing on these analyses of how and why some people get fat as an 'excuse' for my own fat. No. I admit that I'm a comfort eater, and insofar as I say "But I also have problems with my pituitary signals to my thyroid and with obesogenic medication and I believe that there are general dietary and gut flora issues" that is not to excuse my comfort eating. It is, however, important when trying to tackle it. For me personally, as for lots of people, it's about tackling 'both, and' not 'either, or'.
And I will continue to speak out against fat-shaming and also what I'll call poverty-shaming and ignorance-shaming. Sneering towards what some people like to call 'chavs'. I remember the point at which someone posed a question that really stuck in my mind. "If you're struggling financially and you don't have much in the way of cooking facilities, how do you get protein?" For many people, it's buying this week's special offer from the takeaway. And when people sneer at them, the question to ask is "How often do takeaways offer salad with those chicken nuggets or pizza or kebab, as opposed to chips?"
I went in a supermarket in a deprived area and out of curiosity checked some prices. The comparison I remember is that frozen chips, which can be cooked in a microwave, under a grill, in a small countertop oven etc. were much, much cheaper per kilo than fresh potatoes.
I hope I'm not offending anyone. On another messageboard, I clashed so often with someone else on this that we had to agree not to respond to each other. I mentally characterised her as 'sneery' and I think she characterised me as 'making excuses'. The irony is that we clashed because we both share a very strong view that too much fat of the wrong sort can be very harmful and undesirable.
So if on here I find myself at odds with someone over this, I hope we'll be able to reach a similar compromise.
