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It is unlikely that this is the first book about weight loss that you have ever read. We are surrounded by people who are selling weight loss books with techniques that do not work. Most of those books try to explain why their method works better than all the others. This book is going to take a very different approach to helping you lose weight. It is going to start by examining weight loss theories and techniques that we can prove are incorrect. To enable us to be better judges of weight loss claims, it will be helpful to review research that disproves many of those theories, an approach which is rarely taken in diet books and scientific literature. Since we want to know what does work, studying what does not work may seem to be a strange place to start. However, it will keep us from wasting our efforts pursuing incorrect ideas and we can have the greatest degree of confidence in this information.

The experts do not agree as to why the prevalence of obesity is increasing, but many of us remain convinced it is our own fault that we do not lose weight. However, there have been quite a few stories over the years of popular diet gurus who themselves have struggled with weight gain and its related diseases. If even the most educated medical experts in our society are having a hard time discovering why weight gain occurs, despite over one hundred years of efforts, why should anyone be surprised by the difficulty of losing weight?

For one hundred years, we have been testing techniques that lead to weight loss while spending relatively little time examining countries where people do not get fat. As we will see, many of the things we think of as causing obesity in the United States do not produce it in other countries. Fats and carbohydrates are often blamed for obesity. Numerous experiments on low fat and low carbohydrate diets have been tried, but few studies have examined whether all populations with high fat or high carbohydrate consumption have a high prevalence of obesity. Performing this research would allow the process of elimination to be used to narrow down the possible causes of weight gain. This method is common in social sciences like economics, but it has received less attention in the biological sciences, which favor controlled studies. However, researchers have spent a long time on the obesity problem without solving it. A new approach is needed.

Our strategy will be to follow the advice of the great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” This book will use the process of elimination to remove the impossible—the factors that do not explain the rising prevalence of obesity. Once we eliminate those, the remaining changes in our diet and environment must contain that which causes weight gain and obesity. Now let us begin our search!

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