As part of my ongoing Dieting Hobby, and my personal weight and food struggles, I've been investigating and experimenting with the Three Principles concept, which involves a shift away from the techniques of traditional Psychology.

The following article is an interesting, and thoroughly researched, overview of these concepts by a Cal Poly professor. He does not appear to a "practitioner", nor does he seem to support or to oppose the "Three Principles", and I find his outside perspective to be of value.
 

A Unified Field Theory of the Interior Life  (The 3 Principles)

         by Robert Inchausti, PhD

“Everything rests on a few ideas that are fearsome and cannot be looked at directly.” —Paul Valery

Sydney Banks (1931–2009) was a Scottish welder who had a mystical experience in 1973. He wrote a few books about his spiritual revelations and gave lectures. More importantly, he transformed the lives of a cadre of “post-therapy” psychotherapists who recast his ideas under variety of names, most notably “Health Realization Therapy” and “The Psychology of Mind.”

Banks’ ideas are currently experiencing a new resurgence under the moniker “The Three Principles.” Put simply, “The Three Principles” are a way of looking at the relationship between mind, thought, and consciousness that offers a kind of unified field theory of the interior life. Human beings are experience-generating animals, but the individual experiences we generate are the product of thoughts. It is our thoughts that shape the formless unknown into meaningful events and images. This is both a useful and disorienting thing since the process of human thinking takes us away from the limitless potential of absolute reality for the sake of a single, limited event or interpretation.

As a result each one of us lives in small, separate, psychological worlds of our own making. The problem is that we innocently believe that these worlds are outside of us, shaping our lives, when they are actually created from the inside out. When we move more deeply into these little worlds by thinking, we move even further from reality (limitless potential) into various narrow, imagined roles, needs, and identities.

This is really not something we can overcome. Human beings, by nature, must give up consciousness to engage in tasks and projects, and so end up innocently assuming their perceptions reflect reality when they are almost always and inevitably what the psychologists call projections.

We take our moods and insecurities as directives to think harder or take even more control over our lives — lives which we have already cut down to fit our small, particular culture-bound ambitions. The better road to mental health and happiness is to see these uncomfortable feelings as a signal to question our beliefs in order to rise to a higher level of consciousness.




According to Banks, our insecure feelings and anxious perceptions are always the product of emotionally driven ego states. In order to experience the deep security and peace of mind innate to every human being, we need only take our personal thoughts less seriously which, in turn, opens our minds up to natural contemplation and present-mindedness.

As human beings, we don’t know we have chosen such limited awareness or made habits of our fears, anxieties, and addictions until someone points this out to us because it seems so natural to be perpetually stressed and unhappy. It is only when something breaks through the complacency of our everyday lives — an illness maybe or a death in the family, great love or exceptional beauty — that we see through our false selves and limited worlds. Until this happens, we continue to blame our feelings of futility on the human condition. In fact, until we wake up from ordinary everyday despair, we will continue to imagine that all our problems are coming at us from the outside world and not through us via our own thoughts, ideas, and assumptions.

This is the “innocent” mistake all human beings make: forgetting that we are experiencing our thinking and taking our thinking for reality, and it takes a rebirth of innocence to overcome this convincing illusion.

Many of us, it turns out, are relatively high-functioning depressives suffering from general anxiety disorder and don’t even know it. And yet once we wake up to the fact that there is another part of us that sees through the roles we play and the thoughts we have, a formless consciousness peeking out at the world through a limited meat-spirit overlay conditioned and hypnotized by a conspiracy of illusions — we find our lives instantly transformed and return to our “normal” state of natural contemplation and psychological health.

Suddenly the hope we may have talked ourselves out of ten years earlier returns as an antidote to a self-inflicted despair. Or the dark thoughts we once worshiped shrink down to human size as we now realize how limited they are.

All human thoughts — even the thoughts of our so-called geniuses — are mere moments in the eternal, formless scheme of things. Once we see how we are situated with respect to thought, mind, and consciousness, we begin to appreciate — perhaps for the very first time — our own originality and existential uniqueness. We begin to see the ignorant perfection of ourselves as ordinary people whose ideas are just as limited and contingent as those of Kant and Hegel, but whose souls are just as limitless and large.

Luckily, as God and or as nature would have it, our feelings of alienation drive us to seek out a sense of true being to replace our limited thinking. This intuition of a transcendent absolute is our experience of the universal mind. It is that part of us that remains unconvinced by the world and unconvinced by our mere thinking. It is that part of us that recognizes the truth when we see it and connects us with being rather than becoming. This innate psychological health — or natural contemplation — then replaces the stressful thoughts born of our anxious, ego-driven attempts at self-management with present mindedness. In a phrase “The Three Principles” teach what Teresa of Ávila called “the thinking without thinking.”

Unlike other psychological systems that advocate various practices and protocols for achieving such liberation, Sydney Banks taught that it is enough just to see how we are situated within our own minds for the trance to be lifted. Any attempts to control thinking adds fuel to an already runaway fire of self-involvement. To get to our second innocence, we need only recognize ourselves as partial, yet unique, manifestations of universal divinity. Once we do this, even if just for a moment, we cannot go back to believing in our self-generated worlds of experience.

When this happens, all our private perceptions become suspect, and we suddenly find ourselves looking down upon and through ourselves from a new state of intellectual freedom. This gives us enough distance from our mistakes and life-long illusions to undo years of false posturing and self-limiting beliefs. Our anxious feelings settle down as our neurotic thinking becomes less real to us, and life’s hitherto unseen possibilities become present in ways not experienced since childhood. The unknown — which once frightened us — shows us a positive aspect we had previously. in our fear-driven state, not dared to take seriously.

Admittedly, there is not much new here, only the succinctness of the formulation and the operational definitions of the terms. Perhaps, most importantly, the willingness to believe in innate human goodness.

Sydney Banks, in a way, discovered a country already inhabited by every mystic, artist, and enlightened sane soul that ever lived. But what makes him important — and useful — is that the post-therapeutic therapy born of his revelation speaks directly to the prevailing neurosis of Western civilization: its self-mystification by its own ideas and media which have become echo chambers of false consciousness and fear.

Banks and his followers have not only noted, but described and explained exactly how this false one-dimensional emotionally driven consciousness multiples itself within and around us. In our ego-driven, meme overloaded lives, we have become occupied from within by false names and pseudo-hierarchies — by thought idols, images, heroes, and terrifying systems — which take precedent over our own native intelligence and self-worth.

The good news announced is that our depression, self-doubt, and addictions all exist in our consciousness first and foremost as thoughts we choose to entertain, and so we can decide whether or not we wish to be duped by them. We are the ones creating the pain and suffering for ourselves held hostage by our intellectual interpretations. Michael Neill, author of The Inside Out Revolution put it this way:

“When our thoughts look real, we live in a world of suffering. When they look subjective, we live in a world of choice. When they look arbitrary, we live in a world of possibility. And when we see them as illusory, we wake up inside a world of dreams.”

As any meditator or contemplative will tell you, thoughts condition our experience but thoughts are not who we are nor do they accurately mirror the world. Thoughts are partial, functional, and transitory metaphysical fixes and forms — momentarily efficient causes and disposable mantras that make up our fleeting experience of formless existence.

Our so-called identities are composed of the thoughts we choose to take seriously. Knowing this, we can unravel the imaginary selves we believe ourselves (or others) to be, the selves we struggle against or despair over. Our minds can then take their rightful place as servants to the universal mind, and when this second innocence occurs, we begin to live unconventionally again, spontaneously, joyfully, and creatively.

I do not think it was any accident a Scottish Canadian welder formulated these ideas in 1973 at the height of the counter-culture where thoughts such as these were floating around in the lyrics to almost every song one heard on the radio. Sydney Banks wasn’t the only one enlightened in those days, but he was unique in the way he articulated what he had come to see, and he was able to inspire an impressive array of authentically inspired students and disciples who continue his work.

In the 1980s Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys rock 'n’ roll band coined the slogan “Don’t Fight the Media, Become the Media,” and that turned out to not be the best advice. It matters very little who broadcasts illusions or how large an audience one garners for one’s thoughts if those thoughts merely spread more false beliefs and negative values. And although in a media culture, it may seem that perceptions are reality, in an enlightened state of consciousness and being, they never are.

The so-called war of ideas that makes up the intellectual life of our republic is a war of thoughts. And thoughts are never what they appear to be, never the solid things our egos think they are.

Thoughts, as Sydney Banks has pointed out, are merely projected illusions that have at best a temporary usefulness but no actual metaphysical substance. Seeing their true relationship to pure consciousness should breed in all of us a tolerance for one another’s tiny thought-driven lives, for our own past blunders, and from the intellectual overreach of both our friends and enemies. Only then will the war of ideas give way to a world where no one takes themselves or their leaders too seriously, and we all recognize each other for who and what we truly are: equally empty, equally divine, equally becoming the Christ-Buddha.

The human mind, as it turns out, contains its own self-correcting mechanism in its perpetual longing for beauty and truth — feelings that take us back to natural contemplation if we would only get out of its way.


Robert Inchausti is a professor of English at California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly). He is the author of five books and the editor of two anthologies of Thomas Merton's writings. His first book The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People was nominated for a National Book Award. His book on classroom teaching, Spitwad Sutras, is taught in teacher education programs across the country.


Books by Robert Inchausi:

• Thinking through Thomas Merton: Contemplation for Contemporary Times (2014)
• Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise, (2012, 2005)
  
• Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing (2007)
  
• The Pocket Thomas Merton (Shambhala Pocket Classics), (2005)
  
• Breaking the Cultural Trance (Insight and Vision in America), (2004)
  
• Seeds (2002)
  
• Thomas Merton's American Prophecy (1998)
  
• Spitwad Sutras: Classroom Teaching as Sublime Vocation (1993)
  
• The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People (Suny Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought)  (1991)
  
   

For more about my personal struggles and the 3 Principles concept, see my previous article: Beliefs.  Also, my article on Navigation issues could be helpful.

Here in my digital scrapbook, DietHobby, the collection of articles and videos involving that Three Principles issue are under BLOG CATEGORIES - The 3 Principles so that clicking on that link on the right-hand side of this page will provide easy access to all of them.

Also, the link on the right side of this page entitled: Contents Directory can help with DietHobby Navigation issues in general.

NOTE: Originally posted earlier in 2016, and reposted for new viewers.

                 

I’ve been researching the Three Principles concept and how it might be useful to me in my struggles with food and weight. This has led me to reflect on the issue of beliefs… the beliefs that we all carry around with us.

A belief is just an idea that, for various reasons, we have picked up and entertained. Basically, we’ve picked up a thought and repeated it inside our heads so many times that we come to believe it is true. When people hear or see something a great many times, they often mistakenly consider it to be Truth.

We are often totally unaware of many of the beliefs we carry around, and even when we see how they limit us, we are not inclined to let them go.

If we feel really threatened we can think some seriously stupid things in order to defend our Beliefs. Like: “I’d rather be dead than be fat”.  Even if we don’t mean it literally (although some people do), and that statement merely resonates within us, there’s no mistaking the fact that a Core Belief is inside us, which is a belief we are willing to fight for.

We tend to protect our beliefs because even when we know they limit us, they give us a feeling of safety. Sometimes we don’t care how strange we might act, or how miserable we make ourselves, just as long as we feel safe.

We have blind spots about many of our beliefs. Deep down inside we might know they’re there, but at best, we only can get a sense of them. They hide in the shadows of our minds, creating confusion with whispering voices. While not all beliefs cause discomfort, it could be useful to be able to see the ones that do.


Recently, I heard a Three Principles person say:

…That the first step to freedom from our limiting and unwanted beliefs is to see them; that when they become clear to us, it is easy to determine which ones we might wish to keep, and which ones we want to get rid of.

…That once we see the true nature of such a belief, it goes away all by itself,…. because it is merely an idea, made of thought. And because beliefs=thoughts have no life of their own they hold no power over us once we decide to let them go. It is like having unwanted guests in your home, like thoughts, the best way to get them out of your home is to stop entertaining them. A thought cannot think itself.

When unwanted guests leave your home it’s a big relief. Your home gets more quiet, you have more space. Life is also better without the burden of thoughts which are unwanted guests in our minds.

Treat your thoughts and ideas as guests in your home.

Be kind to all and stop entertaining
the ones that you don’t care for,

they will leave by themselves.

After’The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight
by Gina Kolata,   - New York Times, May 2, 2016

Danny Cahill stood, slightly dazed, in a blizzard of confetti as the audience screamed and his family ran on stage. He had won Season 8 of NBC’s reality television show “The Biggest Loser,” shedding more weight than anyone ever had on the program — an astonishing 239 pounds in seven months.

When he got on the scale for all to see that evening, Dec. 8, 2009, he weighed just 191 pounds, down from 430. Dressed in a T-shirt and knee-length shorts, he was lean, athletic and as handsome as a model.

“I’ve got my life back,” he declared. “I mean, I feel like a million bucks.”

Mr. Cahill left the show’s stage in Hollywood and flew directly to New York to start a triumphal tour of the talk shows, chatting with Jay Leno, Regis Philbin and Joy Behar. As he heard from fans all over the world, his elation knew no bounds.

But in the years since, more than 100 pounds have crept back onto his 5-foot-11 frame despite his best efforts. In fact, most of that season’s 16 contestants have regained much if not all the weight they lost so arduously. Some are even heavier now.

Yet their experiences, while a bitter personal disappointment, have been a gift to science. A study of Season 8’s contestants has yielded surprising new discoveries about the physiology of obesity that help explain why so many people struggle unsuccessfully to keep off the weight they lose.

Kevin Hall, a scientist at a federal research center who admits to a weakness for reality TV, had the idea to follow the “Biggest Loser” contestants for six years after that victorious night. The project was the first to measure what happened to people over as long as six years after they had lost large amounts of weight with intensive dieting and exercise.



The results, the researchers said, were stunning. They showed just how hard the body fights back against weight loss.

“It is frightening and amazing,” said Dr. Hall, an expert on metabolism at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. “I am just blown away.”

It has to do with resting metabolism, which determines how many calories a person burns when at rest. When the show began, the contestants, though hugely overweight, had normal metabolisms for their size, meaning they were burning a normal number of calories for people of their weight. When it ended, their metabolisms had slowed radically and their bodies were not burning enough calories to maintain their thinner sizes.

Researchers knew that just about anyone who deliberately loses weight — even if they start at a normal weight or even underweight — will have a slower metabolism when the diet ends. So they were not surprised to see that “The Biggest Loser” contestants had slow metabolisms when the show ended.

What shocked the researchers was what happened next: As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover. They became even slower, and the pounds kept piling on. It was as if their bodies were intensifying their effort to pull the contestants back to their original weight.

Mr. Cahill was one of the worst off. As he regained more than 100 pounds, his metabolism slowed so much that, just to maintain his current weight of 295 pounds, he now has to eat 800 calories a day less than a typical man his size. Anything more turns to fat.

‘A Basic Biological Reality’

The struggles the contestants went through help explain why it has been so hard to make headway against the nation’s obesity problem, which afflicts more than a third of American adults. Despite spending billions of dollars on weight-loss drugs and dieting programs, even the most motivated are working against their own biology.



Their experience shows that the body will fight back for years. And that, said Dr. Michael Schwartz, an obesity and diabetes researcher who is a professor of medicine at the University of Washington, is “new and important.”

“The key point is that you can be on TV, you can lose enormous amounts of weight, you can go on for six years, but you can’t get away from a basic biological reality,” said Dr. Schwartz, who was not involved in the study. “As long as you are below your initial weight, your body is going to try to get you back.”

The show’s doctor, Robert Huizenga, says he expected the contestants’ metabolic rates to fall just after the show, but was hoping for a smaller drop. He questioned, though, whether the measurements six years later were accurate. But maintaining weight loss is difficult, he said, which is why he tells contestants that they should exercise at least nine hours a week and monitor their diets to keep the weight off.

“Unfortunately, many contestants are unable to find or afford adequate ongoing support with exercise doctors, psychologists, sleep specialists, and trainers — and that’s something we all need to work hard to change,” he said in an email.

The study’s findings, to be published on Monday in the journal Obesity, are part of a scientific push to answer some of the most fundamental questions about obesity. Researchers are figuring out why being fat makes so many people develop diabetes and other medical conditions, and they are searching for new ways to block the poison in fat. They are starting to unravel the reasons bariatric surgery allows most people to lose significant amounts of weight when dieting so often fails. And they are looking afresh at medical care for obese people.

The hope is that this work will eventually lead to new therapies that treat obesity as a chronic disease and can help keep weight under control for life.

Most people who have tried to lose weight know how hard it is to keep the weight off, but many blame themselves when the pounds come back. But what obesity research has consistently shown is that dieters are at the mercy of their own bodies, which muster hormones and an altered metabolic rate to pull them back to their old weights, whether that is hundreds of pounds more or that extra 10 or 15 that many people are trying to keep off.

There is always a weight a person’s body maintains without any effort. And while it is not known why that weight can change over the years — it may be an effect of aging — at any point, there is a weight that is easy to maintain, and that is the weight the body fights to defend. Finding a way to thwart these mechanisms is the goal scientists are striving for. First, though, they are trying to understand them in greater detail.

Dr. David Ludwig, the director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, who was not involved in the research, said the findings showed the need for new approaches to weight control. He cautioned that the study was limited by its small size and the lack of a control group of obese people who did not lose weight. But, he added, the findings made sense.

“This is a subset of the most successful” dieters, he said. “If they don’t show a return to normal in metabolism, what hope is there for the rest of us?”

Still, he added, “that shouldn’t be interpreted to mean we are doomed to battle our biology or remain fat. It means we need to explore other approaches.”

Slimmer and Hungrier

Some scientists say weight maintenance has to be treated as an issue separate from weight loss. Only when that challenge is solved, they say, can progress truly be made against obesity.

“There is a lot of basic research we still need to do,” said Dr. Margaret Jackson, who is directing a project at Pfizer. Her group is testing a drug that, in animals at least, acts like leptin, a hormone that controls hunger. With weight loss, leptin levels fall and people become hungry. The idea is to trick the brains of people who have lost weight so they do not become ravenous for lack of leptin.

While many of the contestants kept enough weight off to improve their health and became more physically active, the low weights they strived to keep eluded all but one of them: Erinn Egbert, a full-time caregiver for her mother in Versailles, Ky. And she struggles mightily to keep the pounds off because her metabolism burns 552 fewer calories a day than would be expected for someone her size.

“What people don’t understand is that a treat is like a drug,” said Ms. Egbert, who went from 263 pounds to just under 176 on the show, and now weighs between 152 and 157. “Two treats can turn into a binge over a three-day period. That is what I struggle with.”

Rebecca Wright and her husband, Daniel Wright, have gained back a lot of the weight they lost six years ago on Season 8 of “The Biggest Loser”.  They are featured in the VIDEO at the bottom of this Article.

Rebecca Wright

Now

 Rebecca Wright

Six years ago
on Season 8
of “The Biggest Loser”.

    
     
Daniel Wright

     Now

Daniel Wright

Six years ago
on Season 8
of “The Biggest Loser”.

Six years after Season 8 ended, 14 of the 16 contestants went to the N.I.H. last fall for three days of testing. The researchers were concerned that the contestants might try to frantically lose weight before coming in, so they shipped equipment to them that would measure their physical activity and weight before their visit, and had the information sent remotely to the N.I.H.

The contestants received their metabolic results last week. They were shocked, but on further reflection, decided the numbers explained a lot.

“All my friends were drinking beer and not gaining massive amounts of weight,” Mr. Cahill said. “The moment I started drinking beer, there goes another 20 pounds. I said, ‘This is not right. Something is wrong with my body.’”

Sean Algaier, 36, a pastor from Charlotte, N.C., feels cheated. He went from 444 pounds to 289 as a contestant on the show. Now his weight is up to 450 again, and he is burning 458 fewer calories a day than would be expected for a man his size.

“It’s kind of like hearing you have a life sentence,” he said.

Losing a Key Hormone

Slower metabolisms were not the only reason the contestants regained weight, though. They constantly battled hunger, cravings and binges. The investigators found at least one reason: plummeting levels of leptin. The contestants started out with normal levels of leptin. By the season’s finale, they had almost no leptin at all, which would have made them ravenous all the time. As their weight returned, their leptin levels drifted up again, but only to about half of what they had been when the season began, the researchers found, thus helping to explain their urges to eat.

Leptin is just one of a cluster of hormones that control hunger, and although Dr. Hall and his colleagues did not measure the rest of them, another group of researchers, in a different project, did. In a one-year study funded by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, Dr. Joseph Proietto of the University of Melbourne and his colleagues recruited 50 overweight people who agreed to consume just 550 calories a day for eight or nine weeks. They lost an average of nearly 30 pounds, but over the next year, the pounds started coming back.




Dr. Proietto and his colleagues looked at leptin and four other hormones that satiate people. Levels of most of them fell in their study subjects. They also looked at a hormone that makes people want to eat. Its level rose.

“What was surprising was what a coordinated effect it is,” Dr. Proietto said. “The body puts multiple mechanisms in place to get you back to your weight. The only way to maintain weight loss is to be hungry all the time. We desperately need agents that will suppress hunger and that are safe with long-term use.”

370, 400, 460, 485

Mr. Cahill, 46, said his weight problem began when he was in the third grade. He got fat, then fatter. He would starve himself, and then eat a whole can of cake frosting with a spoon. Afterward, he would cower in the pantry off the kitchen, feeling overwhelmed with shame.

Over the years, his insatiable urge to eat kept overcoming him, and his weight climbed: 370 pounds, 400, 460, 485.
“I used to look at myself and think, ‘I am horrible, I am a monster, subhuman,’” he said. He began sleeping in a recliner because he was too heavy to sleep lying down. Walking hurt; stairs were agony. Buying clothes with a 68 waist was humiliating.

“I remember sitting in a dressing room one day, and nothing would fit. I looked at the traffic outside on the street and thought, ‘I should just run out in front of a car.’”

He eventually seized on “The Biggest Loser” as his best chance to lose enough weight to live a normal life. He tried three times and was finally selected.

Before the show began, the contestants underwent medical tests to be sure they could endure the rigorous schedule that lay ahead. And rigorous it was. Sequestered on the “Biggest Loser” ranch with the other contestants, Mr. Cahill exercised seven hours a day, burning 8,000 to 9,000 calories according to a calorie tracker the show gave him. He took electrolyte tablets to help replace the salts he lost through sweating, consuming many fewer calories than before.

Eventually, he and the others were sent home for four months to try to keep losing weight on their own.

Mr. Cahill set a goal of a 3,500-caloric deficit per day. The idea was to lose a pound a day. He quit his job as a land surveyor to do it.

His routine went like this: Wake up at 5 a.m. and run on a treadmill for 45 minutes. Have breakfast — typically one egg and two egg whites, half a grapefruit and a piece of sprouted grain toast. Run on the treadmill for another 45 minutes. Rest for 40 minutes; bike ride nine miles to a gym. Work out for two and a half hours. Shower, ride home, eat lunch — typically a grilled skinless chicken breast, a cup of broccoli and 10 spears of asparagus. Rest for an hour. Drive to the gym for another round of exercise.

If he had not burned enough calories to hit his goal, he went back to the gym after dinner to work out some more. At times, he found himself running around his neighborhood in the dark until his calorie-burn indicator reset to zero at midnight.

On the day of the weigh-in on the show’s finale, Mr. Cahill and the others dressed carefully to hide the rolls of loose skin that remained, to their surprise and horror, after they had lost weight. They wore compression undergarments to hold it in.

Mr. Cahill knew he could not maintain his finale weight of 191 pounds. He was so mentally and physically exhausted he barely moved for two weeks after his publicity tour ended. But he had started a new career giving motivational speeches as the biggest loser ever, and for the next four years, he managed to keep his weight below 255 pounds by exercising two to three hours a day. But two years ago, he went back to his job as a surveyor, and the pounds started coming back.



Soon the scale hit 265. Mr. Cahill started weighing and measuring his food again and stepped up his exercise. He got back down to 235 to 240 pounds. But his weight edged up again, to 275, then 295.

His slow metabolism is part of the problem, and so are his food cravings. He opens a bag of chips, thinking he will have just a few. “I’d eat five bites. Then I’d black out and eat the whole bag of chips and say, ‘What did I do?’”

Brain Sets the Calories

Dr. Lee Kaplan, an obesity researcher at Harvard, says the brain sets the number of calories we consume, and it can be easy for people to miss that how much they eat matters less than the fact that their bodies want to hold on to more of those calories.

Dr. Michael Rosenbaum, an obesity researcher at Columbia University who has collaborated with Dr. Hall in previous studies, said the body’s systems for regulating how many calories are consumed and how many are burned are tightly coupled when people are not strenuously trying to lose weight or to maintain a significant weight loss. Still, pounds can insidiously creep on.

“We eat about 900,000 to a million calories a year, and burn them all except those annoying 3,000 to 5,000 calories that result in an average annual weight gain of about one to two pounds,” he said. “These very small differences between intake and output average out to only about 10 to 20 calories per day — less than one Starburst candy — but the cumulative consequences over time can be devastating.”

“It is not clear whether this small imbalance and the resultant weight gain that most of us experience as we age are the consequences of changes in lifestyle, the environment or just the biology of aging,” Dr. Rosenbaum added.

The effects of small imbalances between calories eaten and calories burned are more pronounced when people deliberately lose weight, Dr. Hall said. Yes, there are signals to regain weight, but he wondered how many extra calories people were driven to eat. He found a way to figure that out.

He analyzed data from a clinical trial in which people took a diabetes drug, canagliflozin, that makes them spill 360 calories a day into their urine, or took a placebo. The drug has no known effect on the brain, and the person does not realize those calories are being spilled. Those taking the drug gradually lost weight. But for every five pounds they lost, they were, without realizing it, eating an additional 200 calories a day.

Those extra calories, Dr. Hall said, were a bigger driver of weight regained than the slowing of the metabolism. And, he added, if people fought the urge to eat those calories, they would be hungry. “Unless they continue to fight it constantly, they will regain the weight,” he said.

All this does not mean that modest weight loss is hopeless, experts say. Individuals respond differently to diet manipulations — low-carbohydrate or low-calorie diets, for example — and to exercise and weight-loss drugs, among other interventions.

But Dr. Ludwig said that simply cutting calories was not the answer. “There are no doubt exceptional individuals who can ignore primal biological signals and maintain weight loss for the long term by restricting calories,” he said, but he added that “for most people, the combination of incessant hunger and slowing metabolism is a recipe for weight regain — explaining why so few individuals can maintain weight loss for more than a few months.”

Dr. Rosenbaum agreed. “The difficulty in keeping weight off reflects biology, not a pathological lack of willpower affecting two-thirds of the U.S.A.,” he said.

Mr. Cahill knows that now. And with his report from Dr. Hall’s group showing just how much his metabolism had slowed, he stopped blaming himself for his weight gain.

“That shame that was on my shoulders went off,” he said.

SEE VIDEO Below
which accompanies this
New York Times Article

featuring
Rebecca Wright
and her husband, Daniel Wright,
who have gained back
a lot of the weight
they lost six years ago on
Season 8 of “The Biggest Loser”.

See Video Below
by Dr. Amy Johnson,
author of



The Little Book of
Big Change:
The No-Willpower Approach to Breaking Any Habit