200-Pound Weight Loss Without Hunger

In this series, I'll look at the factors that lead to both overeating and satiety

What food components make us feel full? Why does more variety lead to eating more quantity

And what lifestyle approaches can we implement to increase the good food choices and reduce

the bad ones? Keep watching to find out. Anyone can lose weight eating less food

Anyone can be starved thin. Salvation diets are rarely sustainable though, since hunger pangs drive us to eat

We feel unsatisfied on low-calorie diets, unsatiated. We do have some level of voluntary control, but our deep-seated, instinctual drives may

win out in the end. For example, you can consciously hold your breath

Try it right now. How long can you go before your body's self-preservation mechanisms take over and overwhelm your deliberate

intent not to breathe? Your body has your best interest at heart and is too smart to allow you to suffocate

yourself or starve yourself, for that matter. If our body was really that smart, then how could it let us become obese

Why doesn't our body realize when we're way too fat and allow us the leeway to slim down

Maybe our body is actually very aware and actively trying to help, but we're somehow

undermining those efforts. How could we test this theory to see if that's true

There are so many variables going to choosing what we eat and how much

There are psychological, social, cultural, and aesthetic factors. To strip all that away and stick just to the physiological, Columbia University researchers

designed a series of famous experiments using a food dispensing device. The term food is used very loosely here

Their feeding machine was a tube hooked up to a pump that delivered a mouthful of brand

liquid formula every time you pushed a button. Research subjects were instructed to eat as much or as little as they wanted at any time

In this way, eating was reduced to just a rudimentary hunger drive without the usual

trappings of sociability, meal ceremony, and the pleasures of the palate. How much would people be driven to eat

Put a normal weight person in this scenario and something remarkable happens

Day after day, week after week, with nothing more than their hunger to guide them, they

eat exactly as much as they need, perfectly maintaining their weight. They needed about 3,000 calories a day and that's just how much they unknowingly gave themselves

Their body just intuitively seemed to know how many times to push that button

Put an obese person in that same scenario and something even more remarkable happens

Driven by hunger alone, with the enjoyment of eating stripped away, they wildly undershoot

giving themselves a mere 275 calories a day total. They could eat as much as they wanted, but they just weren't hungry

It's as if their body knew how massively overweight they were, so it dialed down their natural

hunger drive to almost nothing. One subject started out at 400 pounds and steadily lost weight

After 252 days sipping the brand liquid, he lost 200 pounds. This groundbreaking discovery was initially interpreted to mean that obesity is not caused

by some sort of metabolic disturbance driving people to overeat. In fact, the study suggests quite the opposite

Instead, overeating appeared to be a function of the meaning people attached to food beyond

its use as fuel, whether as a source of pleasure or perhaps relief from boredom or stress

In this way, obesity seemed more psychological than physical. Subsequent experiments with the feeding machine, though, flip such conceptions on their head

once again. If you take the Lean Study subject and covertly double the calorie concentration of the formula

the unconscious will cut their consumption in half to continue to perfectly maintain

their weight. Their body somehow detected the change in calorie load and sent signals through the

brain to press the button half as often to compensate. Amazing! Do the same with obese persons, though, and nothing changes

They continue to drastically undereat just as much as before. Their body seems incapable of detecting or reacting to the change in calorie load, suggesting

a physiological inability to regulate intake. Must the brains of obese persons somehow be insensitive to internal satiety signals

We don't know if it's cause or effect. Maybe that's why they're obese in the first place

Or maybe the body knows how obese it is and is shutting down the hunger drive regardless

of the calorie concentration. Indeed, the obese subjects continue to steadily lose weight eating out of the machine regardless

of the calorie concentration of the food being dispensed. It would be interesting to see if they regain the ability to respond to changing calorie

intake once they reach their ideal weight. However, what can we apply from these remarkable studies to facilitate weight loss out in the

real world? We'll explore just that question next. Thank you