The weight loss advice to just ‘Eat Less’ is based on the flawed premise that weight gain results from ‘overeating’. This represents the deadly sin of gluttony which ultimately represents a personal choice. You choose both what and how much to eat. Therefore, you can simply choose to eat less, and that will cure the obesity problem.

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This infuses obesity and weight gain with moral overtones simply not present in other complex medical conditions such as cancer or peptic ulcers, for example. This standard medical view frames obesity, disastrously, as a personal failing and moral decrepitude.

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If weight gain were as simple as personal choice, then simply advising somebody to ‘Eat Less and Move More’ should work. But it does not. 

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Does advising an alcoholic to ‘Just drink less alcohol’ work? Does advising a person drowning in debt to ‘Just save more money’? Absolutely not. Because these superficial ‘strategies’ do not consider the deeper reason behind the behavior. An alcoholic may be drinking too much alcohol due to depression or post-traumatic stress disorder or addiction. You must treat the underlying problem, whether with anti-depressants or social support networks. A debtor may be in their position due to exorbitant medical bill, and this must be addressed. Simply saying ‘Just save more money’ is spectacularly useless advice.

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Yet, when it comes to weight loss, we treat the simplistic and unhelpful advice to ‘Eat Less’ as a scientific inevitability. Yes, it is true that weight is gained when you eat more calories than you burn. But that is not the question. I’m not interested THAT Calories In > Calories Out. I know that already, because they are gaining weight. To solve the weight gain, you must strive to understand WHY Calories In > Calories Out. The answer is strikingly obvious.

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There's a fundamental truth about eating behavior that we all seem to ignore. We eat because we are hungry and we stop eating because we are full. Therefore, if the problem is 'overeating', then the root cause must be 'over-hunger'. So, what is hunger? Hunger, contrary to popular belief, does not arise simply because of calories. Instead, it is controlled by a number of hunger and satiety hormones. This includes insulin, cortisol, GLP1, sympathetic tone and others.

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Different foods provoke different hormonal responses and therefore have different effects on our eating behavior. Imagine you eat a three-egg vegetable omelet for breakfast that may be 800 calories or so. It will keep you full until lunch or even dinner because it is so filling. Now imagine you drank an 800 calorie Frappuccino. You’d be hungry not even ten minutes later. The difference is not the number of calories. The difference lies in the disparate hormonal responses of the two foods. This matters, because if you are still hungry, you will want more food. It simply means that some foods are more fattening than other foods. Which seems rather self-evident. Cookies are more fattening than broccoli. Brownies are more fattening than eggs.

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But this is not the end of the story because there are several different types of hunger. The physical hunger that we often think of is called homeostatic hunger and this is controlled by hormones. That’s not the only reason we eat. We also eat because it’s pleasurable or makes us feel better. This is called hedonic hunger and can be thought of as ‘emotional’ hunger. Ultra-processed foods are the key culprit in hedonic hunger and this may often lead for food addiction.

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The third main type of hunger is conditioned hunger, which is the social or environmental reason we may eat. We are conditioned (trained) to eat at certain times (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack time, before bed) and in certain places (in the car, in front of the TV, watching a movie, watching sports). When virtually everywhere we go triggers conditioned hunger, as in modern day North American society, this becomes the dominant source of hunger and over-eating.

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The Hunger Code explores how can we naturally control hunger and what has caused the 'perverted appetite' that may be behind the current, unprecedented obesity epidemic? The Hunger Code explores these fascinating topics with scientific rigor and common sense and puts forth detailed practical advice to help the reader gain key insights that may help with weight loss and regaining health.

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Jason Fung, MD, is a doctor, New York Times–bestselling author, and pioneer of intermittent fasting who developed a natural, low-carb and fasting-based approach to reversing type 2 diabetes and obesity.