Whenever we talk about overweight or obese people, we fall into a common but huge mistake.
Thinking that overweight people eat a lot.
That is to consider their extra pounds as the result:
– of a bad diet;
– the uncontrolled access of calories.

When these people say they don’t eat a lot, they think they are lying .

The search for a singular causal model is a cognitive bias typical of the human being: but it remains a cognitive bias.
Put simply: when a phenomenon has more than one cause, people usually focus on looking for one that causes it, ignoring the others.

Another striking example of this cognitive bias is how we view diabetes. Since the symptom of diabetes is high blood sugar, then the cause of diabetes is thought to be carbohydrates or a specific type of them: simple sugars.
But in obesity, things are not that simple: there is no single cause that determines obesity and overweight.
Just like it doesn’t exist in diabetes.

As   this physicist Ignatius Brady explains, it is scientifically established that many overweight people eat as much as thin ones. Furthermore, when they manage to lose weight on a restrictive diet, they will be forced to eat much less than naturally normal weight even in the maintenance phase.
This as a result sooner or later leads to eating more and returning to the starting problem.
In fact, in the case of an unsustainable maintenance for survival and after the metabolism has adapted to the caloric restriction, it is absolutely normal not to be able to make it.
If you were forced to live forever on 1300 or 1400 calories to keep yourself lean, how many of you would accept such a life? So let’s try to understand why it is by no means certain that overweight people eat a lot.
And the consequences of this wrong judgment.