[Science journalist Gary] Taubes proceeds to stand the received wisdom about diet and exercise on its head in a particularly intriguing and readable synthesis.
We’ve got the whole thing backward, he argues. The overweight are not lazy hogs who eat too much and exercise too little. The thin are not virtuous and disciplined. Rather, all of us are fulfilling a fixed biological mandate, just as growing children are. Our bodies have a nonnegotiable agenda, and our behavior evolves to make that agenda happen, he writes: “Eating in moderation and being physically active (literally, having the energy to exercise) are not evidence of moral rectitude. Rather, they’re the metabolic benefits of a body that’s programmed to remain lean.”
In other words, you don’t haul your body off that couch and out to the gym; your body hauls you.
Meanwhile, “those who get fat do so because of the way their fat happens to be regulated,” Mr. Taubes writes. “A conspicuous consequence of this regulation is to cause the eating behavior (gluttony) and the physical inactivity (sloth) that we so readily assume are the actual causes.”
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