3 Ways The System Is Built To Keep You Overweight — And How To Beat It
For any one who has struggled with excess weight, you might feel like the world is rigged against your seemingly endless efforts to achieve normal body mass.
Well, guess what. You’re right.
If you’re like me, you've always marvelled at thin people’s ability to stay fit. How do they do it in a society that entices and rewards you with food at every turn. How did the skinny people slip through the cracks and not fall victim to the schtick?
There are powers out there who not only want to keep you in the no man’s land between hoping you’ll finally find the magic solution for losing weight and never really believing you actually will, first and foremost they want you to keep on spending your money trying.
Here are three ways our society is doing all it can to keep you in a perpetual state of striving to lose weight. At the end of each one is the hack you need to know that will help you stunt their efforts.
1. Food Packaging
Since the dawn of the industrial age, manufacturers and the government have dreamt up every trick in the book to separate us consumers from our money. And Big Food producers are amongst the most unscrupulous, paying big bucks to your government to look the other way at the misleading health claims they slap on their packages.
Just yesterday I was at my cottage in the country, a house my wife and I share with other members of the family. One of the cabinets was filled with boxes of processed foods one my relatives bought. Amongst the items was a box of muesli cereal.
The packaging was designed in a way that screamed “healthy, wholesome, high quality nutrition”. The enticing design was supported by the bold claims “Slim Line”, “Made From Whole Grains.” & “With Omega 3-Rich Flaxseed.”
What the package didn’t highlight on the front, but chose to hide in fine print on the back, were the rest of the ingredients, which included sugar, high fructose corn syrup, various candied fruits, puffed wheat, puffed rice, hydrogenated oils and a slew of artificial additives — a deadly combination guaranteed to spike blood sugar and bring on insulin resistance and the slew of illnesses it leads to.
And while several types of whole grains and flaxseed did appear on the list, they came in such marginal amounts at the bottom end compared to the sugary, chemical foodless ingredients dominating the top end.
This brand (and countless others) successfully (and intentionally) misled my relatives into believing that their product is a good nutritional choice for keeping slim and healthy.
The antidote:
Don’t believe everything you read on the front of packages. Get into the habit of reading the ingredients on the back. If the top of the list is loaded with ingredients like wheat flour, sugar or hydrogenated oils, the benefits of the healthier ingredients at the bottom of the list are going to be minimal in comparison.
But the best thing thing you can do to combat the malpractices of food makers is to stop buying their food. If you want to be truly healthy and eliminate the foods that are keeping you in a perpetual state of overweight, cutting out processed foods and opting for real, whole ingredients is one of the key first steps.
Try eliminating packaged, processed foods from your diet for 30 days and see how you feel.
2. Weight Loss Supplements
Green coffee bean extract
Green tea extract
Conjugated linoleum acid (CLA)
Garcinia cambogia extract
Raspberry ketones
Glucomannan
I could go on and on.
Unfortunately I’ve tried them all at one time or another. If only I had saved the money I spent on them throughout the years, I could have put a sizeable chunk of cash towards my daughter’s college tuition or bought a couple of tickets to a yoga retreat in the Maldives.
The marketers of these miracle belly flatteners drag you in with enticing ads online claiming that rare ingredients only found here or there have been the secret to why this and that indigenous culture has been thin and fit for centuries. Many of them make their way onto morning talk shows touted by quasi doctors who promise you this one is the real thing because it hinders a recently discovered fat producing enzyme we never knew about before which is now the key to weight regulation. Or it slows down the breakdown of carbohydrates in the gut. Or it increases levels of a hormone believed to be related to weight loss. Or it feeds the friendly bacteria in your gut, essentially encouraging them to eat up your food before it makes you fat.
Make no mistake, weight loss is big business. A recent report shows that the U.S. weight loss industry alone was worth $58 billion in 2021. And one report put the supplements segment at $33.4 billion. Yet, the U.S. and the world are getting fatter and fatter.
Here's a fascinating look at the big business of weight loss and how it paradoxically keeps us suspended in a state of weight gain:
The antidote to these supplements is simple.
Before spending your hard-earned cash on the latest miracle pill do a little research. PubMed is a free resource supporting the search and retrieval of biomedical and life sciences literature with the aim of improving health and providing people with factual information untainted by the interests of business.
The PubMed database contains more than 34 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature. If a supplement has shown real promise in legitimate studies or trials conducted by qualified professionals, the results will be posted here for all to see.
If not, think twice about believing the lofty claims and enticing marketing of the products, designed to lure you in and spend, spend, spend.
3. They target our children
Remember being transfixed as a child by those enticing TV commercials peddling sugary cereals, salty snacks in fun shapes and sizes, irresistible looking burgers and fries that made your mouth water just by watching the TV screen? The system is designed to reel us in and keep us on the hook from an early age.
We’ve known that food manufacturers target children for years. And yet, no one seems able to do anything about it. As far back as 2006 a report by the Institute of Medicine pointed to the targeted marketing of unhealthy foods to children as a major cause of a growing child obesity epidemic that has now spread across the entire planet.
The UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, a watchdog organisation that (among other things) strives to protect children from the harmful effects of food advertising, reports that food companies spend billions every year to advertise snack foods on television, in magazines, in coupons and on the internet, now increasing more through mobile devices — despite the fact that more than one-third of the products advertised to kids are not considered healthy dietary options.
Read the summarisation of the latest report here:
It’s no surprise that so many of us grow up struggling with out weight and have little knowledge about healthy eating and proper nutrition.
The antidote for this one is tough
Children have greater unrestricted access to media than ever before, and there are more channels and ways to reach and indoctrinate them than any other time in human history. And it doesn't look like governments are going to choose tighter regulation over big money any time soon. So as parents, we're on our own.
It all starts at home with education. The sooner we can beat the big food producers in the race towards the hearts and minds of out kids, the sooner we can make them more resistant to the huge influence of advertising and marketing that will reach them sooner or later whether you like it or not.
Set the example yourself by practicing what you preach. Don't buy sugary and processed snacks for your kids or for yourself. Keep them out of your home.
Teach your kids early on what sugar does to the body, how it leads to serious illness, food addiction and hyperactivity.
Show them all the wonderful alternatives out there that are just as satisfying: fruits and natural desserts you can make with them, homemade savory snacks made from real, whole foods and quality ingredients.
The more exposure they have to the good stuff, the more they'll prefer it over the junk in the long run.
There are no doubt more ways our hyper-distracting world keeps us suspended in a state of poor health. If you know of others, send them in the comments. Together we can eat to defeat obesity, type 2 diabetes and metabolic disorders and be the healthy, fit, illness resistant people we are supposed to be.
More about me
I’m Scott Cohen — I run a coaching business called Kitchen Therapy where I help my clients learn to live with type 2 diabetes, obesity and metabolic disorders by learning how to live without them. https://www.kitchen-therapy-coaching.com/about-me
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