Sounds too easy as well as obvious, but it’s surprising how many people don’t totally grasp this concept. The majority of the Diets out there assume that we’re overweight human beings because we eat too much of all the wrong foods. Yet, the real basic problem and backbone of losing weight may not actually be overeating. We’re usually overweight because we’re just not active enough.
The overall big picture of why we’re overweight often unfortunately gets overlooked. This is because we need to understand the real elemental problem before we’re able to devise some type of real weight loss solution.
The majority of diets on the market don’t bother taking these factors into account, and as a result, they just don’t simply work since proper nutrition isn’t always the primary underlying problem. The key problem can usually be pinpointed to inactivity.
The Evidence Is Painfully Obvious In Any Society
The transition towards urban life from a rural one in any society is accompanied by soaring obesity rates, along with similar accompanying diseases such as high blood pressure and diabetes.
For those who are living in large metropolitan areas, the inhabitants will commonly just sit around their home or in their office cubicles for the majority of their lives. What most will do is very little activity, thus not getting enough exercise to be able to properly regulate their body weight and monitor their health at a safe level.
For those individuals who are highly active, being overweight isn’t usually a problem, regardless of how much they eat. In various studies where these active volunteers increased their actual food intake by 50% percent, there were no significant increase in their body weight among those who were tested. But those who were completely inactive packed on plenty of weight while eating the same food.
Doing any type of physical activity is instantly capable of raising one’s metabolism rate higher while resting, as well as feeling the warmth that we experience directly after a meal, known as the thermic burning effect of food.
A lot of the food energy that we consume, as it has to go somewhere, is spent in producing this heat for those who are active, instead of it getting stored as fat, for those who are not active.
What this means is that for those people who are always on the move, whether exercising or doing physical labor, they will expend a lot more energy to do these movements. The food is then used to replace the energy that’s used.
Since they’re so much more physically active than their sedentary counterparts, individuals who live in active subsistence societies, all as a group have extremely lower levels of being overweight and are not obese. So the transition towards a more relaxed urban lifestyle may be one of the culprits.
A Constant Active Lifestyle
There was a study recently performed on a group of individuals in North America of Mexican descent who were known as one of the most obese groups of people on earth. At one time, generations ago, they were all originally occupied as farmers, so the entire group were thin as any other subsistence individuals.
This phenomenon has often been associated as well as been attributed to genes. The same group of people who were still living in Mexico were also tested. They were from the same group who still lived in Mexico and were all still active as farmers, and were genetically similar.
This group didn’t have the same incidences of being obese as their same counterparts living in North America did, although they ate significantly more than their overweight siblings living a more sedentary life in North America.
The Obese And The Thin
The same paradox applies to everyone else who happens to be thin, anywhere in the world. The one’s who happen to eat more than their overweight counterparts is found repeatedly in every walk of life within the same race or group.
Among those who are hunters and gatherers, such as the Ache from South America, the average male weights around 150 pounds, which is substantially less than the average North American male. The Ache male however consumes around 3,200 calories per day, where the North Americans consume around 2,500 calories per day on average.
How does the Ache tribe manage to consume more calories per day without getting overweight? The reason is because they’re extremely active when compared to their American counterparts, expending up to three times more energy by doing the physical activity that they’re required to do.
What this additional activity does is it burns off around 1,800 calories when compared to burning off 600 calories for the average North American male. So for those of us who leads an active life, we’re then able to properly regulate our weight, this regardless of how much we eat.
Farmers and ranchers living in rural areas have long known that if they’re wanting to fatten up their cattle, the best method is by confining the livestock in a small isolated space with limited movement, and then supplying them with plenty of food containing high energy.
So when we restrict our own movements by being sedentary, we’re basically doing the same thing to ourselves. Regardless of what diet we choose to go on, if we’re not active at the same time, the weight will not go away.