I have been researching obesity, weight loss, eating disorders, dieting and everything to do with these topics since suffering anorexia as a teenager and then bulimia. I was fortunate enough to be the first pupil from my school to graduate from Cambridge University and I can remember sitting in my room at Corpus Christi College, overlooking the inspirational Kings Chapel, and asking myself the million dollar question – why can’t I stop eating? When I want more than anything in the world to be slim…I believe that my unique contribution to research into obesity is to have answered this question – to have come across and researched three very common medical conditions, which cause insatiable food cravings, and to apply this knowledge to understand why we can’t stick to ‘traditional’ diets (eating less). The killer discovery was that traditional diets cause these three conditions and so, trying to eat less, turns you into a food addict – directly and indirectly, as my books explain.
The themes that I have been researching were published in “The Obesity Epidemic: What caused it? How can we stop it?” in October 2010. The introduction to the book can be found here. The chapters covered and a content summary can be found here. All the references in the book are posted here. And here are the first reviews.
If you currently think that eating less/doing more will solve the obesity epidemic, you need to read this book. If you currently think that 1lb = 3500 calories, let alone that “to lose 1lb of fat we need to create a deficit of 3500 calories”, you need to read this book. If you have ever wondered why obesity rates were just 2.7% in the UK in 1972 and almost 10 times that in 1999 – this book will tell you why.
On these articles page on this site, I have listed a few of the many medical journal articles that I analysed for The Obesity Epidemic book. I’ve put links on for articles that are freely available on the web. I have also listed some articles that can be bought through libraries, or direct from the journal (e.g. the famous Kekwick & Pawan 1956 article can be bought, on line, through The Lancet). This is just a small sample of the 400 references covered on www.theobesityepidemic.org web site.
For anyone interested in dieting and weight loss, I hope that all of you will find something interesting in these pages. I have listed the books I most recommend for each of the medical conditions and you may well find some of the obesity articles as interesting as I have done.
One of the postings has to be the Newburgh & Johnson 1930 article, which is generally credited as being the start of the calorie theory. I refer to this in “Stop Counting Calories & Start Losing Weight”. I spent a week in Feb 2008, with a fellow researcher, dissecting this article line by line, trying to understand how this article led to such conviction that counting calories is the answer to weight loss. Have a look yourself and see if you think an experiment done on one person (the main content of the article) justifies what we have gone on to take as gospel ever since.
Enjoy! – Zoe
