Metabolism Booster Baltimore MD

By Mark Hyman, MD

We’ve all heard the fiendishly simple axioms that abound in our culture about losing weight: Just eat less and exercise more; it’s all about willpower; overweight people are lazy, undisciplined, and self-indulgent. Most of you trying to lose weight have internalized this cultural message: It’s your own fault you’re fat. And that’s what I too believed when I first started my medical practice two decades ago. Now I know better. Not only is this myth completely unsupported by scientific literature, it develops a blame-the-victim mentality that tells people struggling with their weight that if they only tried harder they would lose their excess pounds. There is only one problem with this point of view: It’s not true.

The truth is nobody wants to be fat. Even if you had enough willpower to keep yourself from eating when your body tells you to, you may still not be able to lose weight. Why? Because our bodies are genetically wired to make us gain weight and keep weight on. But even though you can’t avoid this basic biological, evolutionary truth, you can do something about your weight.

The trick is learning how to tune up your metabolism and use your body’s natural calorie-burning capabilities to help you lose weight and get healthy. What makes us thin, fat, or somewhere in between does indeed have something to do with how much we eat and exercise. But the oversimplification stops there.

UltraMetabolism, a new science of metabolism and weight loss based on our genetic makeup, carries us far beyond the old ideas about losing weight. In fact, telling someone who’s overweight that all he has to do is eat less and exercise more is like telling someone who’s poor that all he has to do is make more and spend less.

One of the factors left out in such a simple equation is what I call the starvation syndrome. When you buy into the idea that eating less will make you lose weight, you convince yourself that you need to restrict calories from your diet. Clearly, most of the popular diets on the market recommend that you do just that. The problem is that calorie restriction almost always backfires. The reason? Your body thinks it’s starving to death and sets off chemical processes that force you to eat more. The most fundamental parts of who we are as biological creatures are designed to keep us from starving ourselves. It is a very basic survival mechanism.

Blame it on your lizard brain
All seems backwards doesn’t it? If we are indeed genetically engineered to gain weight, then it would seem that we’re wired incorrectly. Why would we evolve to overeat and grow fat?

It all comes down to the oldest and most primitive part of our brain, our limbic, or “lizard,” brain, so called because it’s the same as a reptile’s brain. It governs our survival behaviors, creating certain chemical responses over which we have no conscious control. Our lizard brain controls three basic survival behaviors: our fight-or-flight response, our feeding beh...

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