Perhaps sooner. I'd have to root around for the article, but recently, scientists looking for an anti-tumor-angiogenesis drug (angiogenesis is the process that occurs when a tumor sends a signal for the body to grow blood vessels to it, which makes it grow bigger. Your body does this because cancer cells look pretty much the same to your body as normal ones. Anyway, the theory is, block angiogenesis, and the tumor dies) think they've stumbled onto a drug that will stop the growth of blood vessels to fat cells, causing them to die, and, you guessed it, go away. They've only made it work in mice -- they took normal mice, fattened them up to twice their body weight, then gave them this drug -- within thirty days, the mice lost something like 30% of their body weight without any dietary changes. It would be three to five years before we saw any human clinical trials, should it appear to prove effective in humans.

Silly man!

You know how to reverse obesity. Less calories in and exercise more. [/sarcasm]

This is just a pathetic bullshit excuse posed in order to make folks feel good who eat like hogs, spend their days and nights as couch potatoes, then expect to have bodies that look like the statues of the younger Greek gods and goddesses.

Get real. The only thing that reverses obesity is consuming fewer calories each day than your body actually consumes, and working your asses off -- literally -- either in physical labor or at a fitness center.

Otherwise, you fat-ass folks will find yourselves staring pathetically at your mirrors, looking exactly like a famous and nasty painting that hangs in the Chicago Art Institute. It's title is:

"That Which I Should Have Done But Did Not Do."

You all know I'm right about this. So get off your asses and on your feet. Head for the gym for a daily workout in place of the daily pigout.

That way, we'll all be around to argue with one another on Dean's World in our old age.

And don't feed me (or even worse, yourselves) about "glandular disorders" that keep you obese. The only glandular disorder that keeps you fat is in the gland that fills your skulls.)

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Willfull ignorance is still ignorance, Arnold.

There is no treatment for obesity more proven to fail than "eat less and exercise more." It doesn't work any better than trying to cure lung cancer by quitting smoking. You might as well prescribe bleeding out the bad humours, the failure right is so astronomically high.

Pathetic excuse? My ass. You can believe what you want to believe, but once you decide to ignore research then what you're asserting is a matter of your religious faith.

Dean, on this matter, both Rosemary and I are right, and you are wrong. You know perfectly well that each pound of body weight comprises 3500 calories. And you know equally well that getting rid of excess weight, i.e., fat, is simply a process of using up through physical work or exercize more calories than your body is consuming in fuel, i.e., food.

Maybe some biochemical compounds can speed up metabolistic processes in humans. But what works for rodents may be unproductive or counter-productive for humans. In any case, I will believe this when I see it working on the general population, not just on rats and chickens.

If you are obese, it probably began for you at the very age your body stopped growing. Typically, this was some time in your late teens or very early 20s. Before then, your metabolism typically ran at a higher rate and you could eat more and get away with it.

But since that time, in a process as insidious to the human body as soil erosion is to prime farmland, your body probably has acquired an excess of as little as 10 calories per day. That is enough to cause you to gain one pound per year. So that by the time you are 65, some 45 years later, you already are 45 lbs overweight, and therefore obese. For some of you, it involves lugging around 250-275 or more lbs of guts and their attendant great shields of body fat, on frames frequently not greater than 6' 2" in height. In other words, gross obesity. Unhealthy, because you and everyone else knows that if you continue lugging around all that fat, you are a walking corpse. Or maybe a walking corpse who can deal out fancy but nonetheless false rationalizations for a self-inflicted deadly physical condition.

One of the things I learned to do when I decided to stop conducting myself like an asshole was to stop lying to myself. In other words, no excuses for drinking, smoking or overeating, taking care of teeth, paying bills on time, bullshitting my women, and all the rest.

I've got no idea whatsoever what you look like. For all I know you could be as slim as Colin Farrell. Or you could be as heavy as an aging horse. Maybe to you it's only an intellectual exercize, this stuff you write about magic solutions for those who want to eat all they want and still skinny down. I hope for you that's the case. But you know as well as I do that if you don't take serious care of your own body, life becomes painful, loathsome and brief.

As for religious belief, you know perfectly well that I have no more of that than you do. I only believe things based on empirical fact. And miracle diets to me hold no more water than notions of prophets walking on water, saviors being resurrected from the dead, and the rest of that phantasmagora.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

To all who have commented or intend to comment in this thread - as Twain said, "It's not the things you don't know, it's the things you know that just ain't so!"

Dean-

I agree with Arnold...

You can dream your fat ass all the way to the bank- but, you'll still be fat.

I am a 'carb junkie'(even my 1300 to 1500 cal/day diet consists of 65-70% calories from carbs a day). I am also 39 yrs old, 6' 165 lbs.(down from 210 lbs. when I graduated from HS -21 years ago)

If you desire to lose weight---Eat between 10-11K calories a week. 30 minutes of aerobic exercise a day. Weight training to build muscle mass 3 days/wk.

You will lose between 1.5 and 2 lbs. a week.

Repeat as necessary.

Regards Scott

Let's see. In one corner, we have Arnold, who tells us that medical science will never solve the problem of obesity, and that the only way to become fit is to eat less and exercise more, forever and ever, amen.

In the other corner, we have medical science, which has brought us uncountable miracles ranging from SSRIs to non-surgical heart valve replacement to LASIK, and without which many of us would be dead right now or suffering significantly diminished quality of life. They seem to think they can beat obesity, and moreover, whoever does it first stands to become fabulously wealthy. Just this century, there already have been several very promising developments in this avenue of research.

Is anyone seriously betting against medical science in this match?

We evolved as hunter-gatherers who had to work hard for our food. But our lifestyles have changed long since, and soon it will finally be possible to change our bodies to match, rather than having to slavishly imitate the inconvenient vestiges of our old way of life. A new chapter in human evolution is about to be written, and I for one can't wait. Solving obesity is just going to be the beginning, really. In a thousand years, the human race will almost certainly be a different species from the one it is now.

Arnold: You missed the fact that the lovely Rosemary was being sarcastic. She no more believes in the kindergarten science of "one pound of fat equals 3500 calories" than I do. Because it's bunk, bogus, nonsense, not just out of date but was never reliable in the first place.

The belief that obese individuals may become nonobese and stay that way by simply eating less and exercising more is the biggest myth in medical science today. It belogns right alongside preventing tuberculosis by "avoiding swamp gas" or bleeding out bad humours.

The science simply does not support your hypothesis; your belief stands completely outside of medical science and must therefore be considered a matter of faith, like faith in witchcraft or some other damn foolish superstition.

Scott: I'm not surprised you believe the same thing as Arnold. And, like Arnold, I will tell you that your belief is clearly a religious one since the science does not support your hypothesis and never has. What you are preaching is quack medicine, and indeed it is a piece of advice that in many cases makes fat people fatter. You dont' believe me? You don't have to. But don't pretend that your view is anything other than your own irrational gut belief, becuase that's all it is.

If we come up with a treatment for obesity that becomes available to every obese person, I would predict that some will use this treatment successfully.

Others will stay obese because their obesity fills other needs for them. For instance, I believe there are women who use body fat to keep men away from them. I believe there are people of both sexes who use their weight to rebel against societal norms.

I think there are even people who will increase their caloric intake to the exact degree necessary to maintain the weight they've become accustomed to.

I do not believe this is a straightforward physiological phenomenon.

My bet for you, Little Miss A., is that people who choose to remain obese will be a small minority.

Testing on the psychology of fat people over the last few decades has routinely failed to show evidence that they suffer from mental problems or lack discipline any more than the normalweight population does--though they tend to have lower self-image problems, most especially the women. But I would hesitate to suggest that the low self-image caused the obesity rather than the other way around.

The typical pattern of obese people is depressingly familiar: a long, slow creep upward, punctuated by periods of making "permanent lifestyle changes" that routinely fail to alleviate the obesity, punctuated by brief periods of intense diet and exercising that leaves the patient at or near normalweight status for a few months, perhaps as much as six months to a year---and then the weight comes back on, often at a frighteningly fast pace, as the obese patient gets tired of being hungry constantly. And every iteration of this cycle causes their fat stores to accelerate and their metabolisms to become more efficient, with an end result that they usually wind up fatter than before they started their last round of "permanent lifestyle changes."

If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, you would think that, by now, those who absolutely insist that obesity is a simple matter of thermodynamics would start to recognize at some point that their beliefs are quite insane, for in the entire history of medical research on obesity, not one study (not one study anywhere, at any time) has shown that the "eat less and exercise more" treatment to be an effective long-term treatment for obesity.

Not one, not anywhere, not ever.

But the cycle I described above, of a long slow crawl toward heavier and heavier, punctuated by brief periods of temporary weight loss--that's been documented and confirmed in study after study for decades.

We have a need to believe that obese people have psychological problems--but no study's ever confirmed this even though it's been tried. We also have a need to believe that they lack discipline, but talk to researchers and medical practitioners in the field and they'll tell you that most people actually have more discipline and willpower than the average population does.

People who insist on using thermodynamics to explain all this are guilty of childish pseudoscience, for the research does not and never has borne theor hypothesis out. Yes, heavy caloric intake and sedentary lifestyles produce obesity, and regular activity and careful eating habits can prevent obesity. This is quite true. If you avoid smoking you will probably avoid contracting lung cancer, too.

But something goes haywire with the human metabolism when body fat goes beyond a certain point; the body starts to resist weight loss, increase metabolic efficiency, and change its response to food. Insulin and glucagon responses alter, blood sugar control goes awry, estrogen and testosterone levels shift, the hypothalamus starts acting differently, the chemical pathways by which fat stores are mobilized become sluggish---there are a whole host of biochemical issues here that go far beyond simple thermodynamics.

But if people don't want to look at the research, if empirical data means nothing to them, then they'll just believe whatever they want I suppose.

Er, I meant to say "... they'll tell you that OBESE people actually TEND TO have more discipline and willpower than the average population does."

Talk to the average fat woman who is over 100 pounds overweight, and ask her to document how many pounds she's lost in her lifetime. Many will be able to quickly tally up totals well beyond a thousand pounds--20 here, 40 there, even 70 or 80 now and then, in a constant vicious cycle involving weeks or months of constant hunger and cravings, followed by a final breakdown of the will to go on that way and a frighteningly fast regain of it all.

And the standard advice that this is becuase they aren't making "permanent lifestyle changes?" That's already well out of date and unsupported by the research, for these "permanent lifestyle changes" make no more difference than crash diets do except that when done right they do seem to arrest obesity's progress--i.e. a little weight comes off and weight stabilizes. But for actually getting back down to normalweight status and staying there? The research on that is as abysmal as any other weight loss regimen.

Does anyone ever wonder why Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers refuse to make public any statistics on the success vs. failure rate of their clients? They've been refusing for decades. They'll tell you their programs work for "those who sincerely try it," they'll trot out the 1% or so who are actually successful---and encourage the hordes who try their method and fail to blame themselves.

I don't know a single fat person who isn't miserable carrying around all that extra weight, and I don't know a single one who hasn't made very sincere efforts to get it off only to find themselves tired and spiritually exhausted by constant hunger.

If insanity is constantly doing the same thing and expecting a different result....

I'm certain that we're less than twenty years from discovering what causes obesity. I tend to think that someone will discover the gene (or combination of genes) that controls the insulin cycle. With this knowledge, we'll be able to moderate the insulin-blood sugar-hunger cycle.

The world my children and their children will inherit is very exciting. I think it certain that by the time my son is my age, cancer will be largely beaten. I remember a time, only 20 years ago, when a diagnosis of leukemia in childhood was a tragic death sentence. Now it's curable at a very high rate.

Obesity will be beaten.

Arnold makes the mistake that, sadly, even doctors and those pseudoscientists known as nutritionists make, assuming that every human body works the same way. I've seen people who eat endless amounts of junk food and get next to no physical exercise whatsoever not gain an ounce. On the other hand, I've reduced my caloric intake dramatically and exercised far longer than 30 minutes per day and had it do nothing until I changed WHAT I ate (and actually, once I ate the right food, it didn't matter how many calories I ate, as long as I exercised, I still lost weight).

That notwithstanding, it would be nice to have a little help to keep my altogether-too-metabolically-efficient body in shape.

Well, to be clear, we have a pretty good idea what causes obesity: excess caloric intake and a sedentary lifestyle. Although ia certain percentage of people will get obese even with heavy activity and moderate caloric intake, most people who live lives filled with hard manual labor and thinking of three meals a day as a luxury will not grow obese.

The real trick with understanding the problem of obesity is realizing that once you've gone past a certain point of overweight, it becomes almost inhumanly difficult to reverse. Then it's no longer a question of how you got there, but how you got out. (Again I repeat, if smoking cigarettes give you lung cancer, does that mean that stopping smoking will make the cancer go away?)

Many obese people manage to get back down to a normalweight status, but almost none of them manage to stay that way, and almost all who try it wind up on a vicious cycle of weight loss followed by weight regain that exceeds their earlier losses.

I give you this interesting challenge: the next time a doctor tells you that if you just eat less and exercise more you can lose all your excess body weight, ask him exactly how many of his obese patients he has successfully treated and brought down to permanent normalweight status. Don't let him equivocate with "well, the ones who really tried it..." nonsense, either. Just say, "Exactly how many obese patients have you personally managed to get down to non-overweight status, and kept them there, Doctor?"

Odds are you will get one of the following responses:

1) A dirty look
2) "Well, let me tell you about this one guy..."
3) "Well, okay, none, but...."

I say again, if insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, then.......

Dean, most of what you have written on the topic of obesity are a lot of rationalizations. In other words, excuses that fat people offer up to explain why they do not lose body weight, get down to a weight level justified by their height and bone structure, and stay that way. I think this is because such people do not have the self-control and will power to overcome their own bad habits.

I am not nearly tall enough to justify the more than 215 lbs that I weighed in October 2002. With use of hydrochlorothiazide (25mg/day), a diuretic that shrinks excess water out of one's body, I reduced my weight to about 210 lbs by early June 2003. Then, an examination showed I had high LDL chloresterol levels as well as high blood pressure.

Right then and there, I added Zocor (10 mg/day), the simvastatin drug that reduces blood fat levels and increases HDL levels, along with an aspirin per day.

In addition, I regularized and expanded my 7 day/wk 365 days/yr physical exercise levels to four miles brisk walk (60 minutes) per day.

Perhaps more significantly, I began serious dieting for the first time in my 70 years, and stuck with it. I replaced salt entirely with a potassium chloride taste-alike (NoSalt). I reduced my caffeine intake from about 6-7 cups of coffee/day to 3 cups/mixed coffee and de-caf/day. And no more slugging down soda pop by the can load; cold water works just fine.

Above all, I stopped eating junk food of all kinds anywhere and anytime it struck my fancy. Carbohydrates for me are now mostly history, along with fats. My wife shares a light breakfast with me, comprising a shared sweet roll and a shared coffee/de-caf. Lunch typically is a one-dish meal, or a piece of beef/chick/fish with salad. Dinner is a lighter meal, with lots of fresh fruit, yogurt, no-salt cottage cheese, etc.

My weight has now varied in the 175-179lb range for most of 2004. The urine and blood chemistry analysis reports I get back from our local Group Health Cooperative not only make me and my wife feel good, but I feel physically better than I have for the past 30 years or more. Because the last time I had weighed 175-179 lbs was around 1974-1975.

(I had given up inhaling smoke in 1972, and quit using tobacco products altogether a few years later. As for drinking, I have never averaged more than about 1-3 bottles of beer per week or some equivalency in plum brandy or somesuch. Alcohol for me is an occasional treat and not a daily beverage.)

I hope to work off another 10-15 lbs and get down into 160s or lower some time during the next 12 months. And I know that if I accomplish that, it will be solely because I willed it into being.

There is no magic to any of this. No genetic re-engineering. No fad or starvation diets. Above all, no self-excusing bullshit about why fat people tend to remain fat. All of it is nothing more or less than a matter of self-control and will power, upon which all self-control is based.

Maybe, Dean, a combination of diet and exercise doesn't work for you. Maybe it doesn't work for many other people, either. Whether you stick to a diet and exercise routine is up to you when nobody else is watching. For you or anybody else who may lack the degree of self-control necessary to accomplish getting rid of one-sixth of your body mass in less than a year, and keeping it off, then you have my sympathy.

But never my empathy. Because I do have self-control and will power, and I expect to use them for the purposes for which nature intended, as long as I can walk, think and react.

And I know it has worked for me, and since my wife and I started using a fitness center on a daily basis more than eight years ago, we have watched all this work for hundreds and perhaps thousands of other men and women of all ages whom we have watched in action.

For the rest of you, if you are fat and want to be fat: Start by abandoning the numerous pitiful rationalizations and other excuses you have seen on this blogsite article. If you are fat, it truly is your fault, and your's alone. Therefore, do something about NOW. Stop waiting for miraculous cures that might or might no make up for a lack will power sufficient to overcome your slavery to self-indulgence. And forget about suing McDonald's. There's no pianos chained to your asses which keep you from walking away from such places.

Or remain obese until your heart pops from the daily overwork of pumping your blood supply through so many extra miles of blood vessels, all lined with chloresterol-based fatty deposits which makes the heart work harder than it was designed to do.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

A few more considerations about obesity.

1) About falsely comparing smoking/lung cancer with overeating/obesity.

If you get lung cancer, you are already a walkig corpse in most cases. But if you stop smoking in time, you greatly lessen the odds of getting lung cancer.

Obesity, however, is a condition, not a disease. And yes, if you reduce your food intake sufficiently, and start a daily regimen of physical labor or working out, you will lose weight. You can say whatever you want about caloric intake and metabolism budgets, but I have used my own body as an example, and it certainly has worked for me.

2) The real problem, as I see it, is that most fat people, including the grossly obese, give up without half trying. Or they psyche themselves into believing that physical exercise and dieting are a form of self-punishment rather than self-redemption. I say again that the problem of obesity typically is more in your brain than in your abdomen.

3) My family has a foreign perspective, because my wife is a European and because we have lived outside the USA for an extended period among people who work to support themselves and who cannot afford to eat like gluttons. People in most other cultures that we have visited have lives that may be poorer in material possessions, but conditions compel them to take better care of their own bodies.

Part of the problem here is that this is the first society in human history that is literally killing itself through gross corpulence caused largely by overeating the wrong kinds of foods, and finding ways to avoid physical activity. My wife Stefi, who comes from Croatia, a relatively poor slavic country in eastern Europe like your wife's Polish family, tells me the problem here is that America has no social control and therefore no social stability. Of course, many of us would argue that lack of social control is precisely what America is designed to be all about. But there are insidious prices to be paid for all the uncontrolled self-indulgence.

We have the best medical and dental care on the planet in this country. But American life spans already are growing shorter than in some other countries, and childrens' teeth are rotting right out of their mouths here while they are still teen-agers, because of the daily does of soda pop and other sugary concoctions. Consequently, we need more and more expensive medical and dental care, largely in attempts to recover from self-induced conditions such as obesity, candy rot of childrens' teeth, and the psychological loss of self-esteem that creeps into your life as you become fat, wrinkled, semi-toothless, smelly, aged and ugly.

4) To be certain, metabolism does not work the same in every body. And nobody wants to be starved on a concentration camp diet in order to get down basically to skin and bones. But don't say that careful dieting and physical exercise will not cause most people to lose weight, because that is not true. And don't say that simply because you lose weight you are doomed to regain it, because that is not true either.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

I adhere to William Sheldon's typology: ectomorphs (thin), mesomorphs (muscular), endomorphs (fat) -- and the various permutations of the three.

Well, SMA, I started out back as a baby as a perfect example of a chubby but muscular little mesomorph. Then, during the WWII years and up to about 1952 when I was 18, I was sort of an ectomorph. The US Army made me a mesomorph again. Then all those long calorie-accumulating years eating gold old Italian sausage sandwiches with hot gardinera, plus loads of southwestern green chili, turned me into sort of an endomorph.

Now I'm working my way back to ectomorph city. But I'll settle for an old age as a mesomorph if it makes all the women at the fitness center swoon.

Who said mind over matter doesn't work, as opposed to where there's a will there's a way?

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI