Prior to the early 1980s, there were basically only two ways for researchers to find out how much food people were eating.
The first was to keep them in a facility with only measured portions of food served.
The second was to have them record everything they ate.
Each method has a problem. The first method is difficult, restrictive, and expensive. The second method relies on people to accurately record and report what they’ve eaten—and a surprisingly large number of them simply don’t report accurately.
The failure of some earlier researchers to understand this problem with the second method resulted in a whole bunch of flawed weight studies that seemed to find that some people gain weight even though they eat the same as or less than “normal” people.
These studies were invariably contradicted by the studies that kept people in metabolic wards where their food intake could be independently monitored. With independent monitoring, people always lost weight at exactly the rate predicted by the tables. But the flawed studies nonetheless gave rise to various theories of “endogenous obesity”—a term which simply meant that some people were thought to have either a “sluggish” or a “very efficient” metabolism that used fewer Calories than so-called “normal” people’s would. The problem was that these studies were wrong because they were based upon “self-reported food intakes”—which were too often “inaccurate”.J Although based on flawed data, this view still occasionally shows up in popular books and articles.
Since the introduction in 1982 of the “doubly-labeled water” measurement technique (and also indirect calorimetry) it has become possible to know with a high degree of accuracy (within about 1%) how much energy (Calories) someone is really eating—even if they fail to report it properly. In fact, it is possible to check the “self-reported” amounts eaten against the actual amounts eaten to find out just how large the discrepancy is.
In a 1995 report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers at The Obesity Research Center at Columbia University discuss the results of just such tests. In every case (every patient studied) the patients underreported the amount of food they ate. On average, these obese patients reported less than half of the amount of food they were actually eating! No wonder they didn’t lose weight! (No wonder those earlier researchers came to erroneous conclusions!)
One of the things that makes this particular report so fascinating to read is that instead of stopping there, these researchers tried to determine why these people were underreporting.
Was it because they didn’t know how to properly record what they ate? No—they’d been given comprehensive training in that.
Was it because they couldn’t accurately estimate the portion size of what they ate? No—when tested in the lab they showed they were actually quite good at it.
Did they just forget what they’d eaten? No—under test conditions they showed they could remember this reasonably accurately even after 24 hours.
Maybe they were trying to improve their “social image” by consciously misreporting, or their “self image” by unconsciously misreporting? This turned out to be the most likely explanation.
Tests with the MMPI, which is believed to be able to evaluate these factors, showed that one or both of these motivations was quite possibly the case. Other studies by different researchers have also supported this likelihood and also support the observed fact that some overweight people routinely “underreport” the actual amount of food they eat.
For dieters, this research is a warning of what happens if you’re not vigilant (or honest) with yourself. If you are going to allow (or even encourage) hunger to trick you into not noticing how much food you really eat, then you shouldn’t waste your time with any type of diet—not even the diet—because diets can’t work under those conditions.
The diet relies on you to recognize when you are beginning any type of “food-seeking” behavior. When you can recognize this, then you can consciously stop… before you “eat the whole refrigerator”, and figure out what it is that you really need to eat to make the hunger really go away—without giving yourself a lot of Calories in the process. This is the key to successful and painless diet weight loss.
The important principle to remember is that if you are overweight, hunger is never looking for more Calories when it makes you hungry. It’s looking for one of the other things that come from food and it needs intelligent help from you to figure out what that is and go get it. The rest of this site focuses exclusively on showing you how to give it that intelligent help. When you can do this, losing weight becomes so simple that you quite literally forget that you are doing it.