Metabolism, Weight Gain, Diets, and the Psychology of Losing Weight

The Myth of "Slow Metabolism" and "Speeding It Up"

Where the idea comes from

The popular belief in a "slow metabolism" and "wide bones" stems from a very human wish: to find some magic pill, ancient herbal remedy, or trick that would allow us to eat whatever we want without gaining weight. The logic goes: if I eat moderately and still gain weight, it must be my slow metabolism — so if I speed it up, everything will burn away. As a straightforward mechanism, this is a myth, though there are real phenomena worth discussing around it.

Metabolism can genuinely be slowed — and it may be irreversible

While dramatically "revving up" metabolism is not possible, slowing it down permanently is proven and well documented. This typically happens to aggressive dieters — people who hate the idea of lifelong moderation and exercise and instead decide to "suffer once," crash-diet down to their goal weight, and then return to eating cake.

Such people often calculate that eating 1,000 kcal a day would take too long, so they cut to 500 kcal. They may indeed lose weight rapidly, but the price is metabolic adaptation.

The "Biggest Loser" case study

• The American TV show featured severely obese participants (170–200+ kg) who lost enormous amounts of weight through extreme calorie deficits combined with intensive supervised training (cardio and strength, three times a week).
• Researchers followed these participants and found that within about two years almost all had regained the weight, often overshooting their starting point — except those who had undergone gastric bypass surgery, which physically impairs nutrient absorption.
• Measurements in specialized metabolic chambers showed that their basal metabolic rate had dropped by several hundred kilocalories compared to the norm. Eating the same amount as other people, they gained more.

Why this happens: survival adaptation

We are living systems that constantly read feedback from the environment and adjust. At 500–600 kcal a day, the body concludes that a planetary famine has arrived and switches to maximum economy mode:

• Constant feeling of cold (less energy spent on heating)
• Deteriorating skin quality
• Cessation of menstruation in women
• Slowed or halted spermatogenesis in men

The body shuts off everything not strictly essential for survival — menstruation and skin can wait; survival cannot. The problem is that when normal eating resumes, metabolism does not bounce back.

The epigenetic explanation

The likely mechanism is epigenetic modifications — not changes in DNA itself, but "tags" attached to DNA that instruct which genes should be read actively and which should be silenced. This system normally allows fine-tuning of gene activity. In these participants, the tags appear to have locked basal metabolism into a permanently reduced state. Years of observation showed no reversal. As a result, instead of an accelerated metabolism, they got a permanently slowed one, and must now live on a very low calorie intake — psychologically punishing, since food is not merely energy but a major source of pleasure.

The same lesson applies more mildly to ordinary dieters: it is far easier to avoid gaining weight than to reverse the metabolic set-point once the body has adapted to a higher weight.

The one genuine way to raise metabolism: muscle mass

• Muscle tissue is metabolically expensive — it requires far more energy to maintain than fat cells.
• Therefore, building muscle really does raise basal energy expenditure. This is scientifically confirmed.
• However, it takes years of consistent training to build muscle and continuous effort to keep it — there is no one-time "button."
• Conversely, this explains why losing weight without exercise costs you a lot of muscle: the body, sensing famine, preserves fat (which is cheap to keep and useful for survival) and discards unstimulated muscle (which is expensive).

Semaglutide (Ozempic): Drug of the Year

Why it was recognized

Semaglutide — the active ingredient in Ozempic and similar drugs — was named drug of the year by scientific and popular science publications. Its effectiveness comes from a fundamentally different mechanism: it acts on the brain, primarily on the reward system, rather than on digestion or absorption.

How it works

• It makes food less attractive, reducing cravings — the intense desire for food.
• The effect extends beyond food: in rat experiments, animals deliberately addicted to drugs consumed less of them while on semaglutide, indicating a general dampening of reward-system-driven craving.
• This matters because only a tiny minority of people gain weight due to serious genetic metabolic peculiarities. Most simply eat a lot because food is delicious and pleasurable.
• On semaglutide, people stop finding food especially tasty, forget to eat, and lose the dopamine-driven pull toward the refrigerator. They naturally eat at or below their maintenance level.

Results

• Average weight loss of about 20% of body weight in roughly a year, without effort.
• The control group ("we'll lose weight naturally, no chemicals") lost about 2% in a year, with the usual rebound and overshoot after the experiment ended.

Origins: from a venomous lizard to a blockbuster

1. A biologist studying the venom of America's only venomous lizard species discovered a compound resembling incretins — human hormones that stimulate insulin production.
2. Interest was high because diabetes imposes a huge burden on patients' quality of life and on healthcare systems.
3. During animal studies aimed at diabetes, researchers unexpectedly noticed that the animals began eating less. The effect replicated across species and later in humans.
4. Initially applied to type 2 diabetes, the drug consistently produced this "side effect" of reduced eating — and thus weight loss. In type 2 diabetes it can drive remission or at least substantially relieve symptoms.
5. The original inventor struggled to commercialize it; large pharmaceutical companies such as Novo Nordisk later developed the analogous drug that became today's hit — one injection per week. Tablet forms exist but are less effective.

Availability and access issues

• Manufacturers quickly registered a version with different dosing for people with obesity but without diabetes.
• Since launch, semaglutide has been in chronic shortage. In countries where it can be bought outright, wealthy buyers snapped up supplies — a month's course costs roughly $1,400 in the US. Even diabetics and people with serious obesity have struggled to obtain it. Where it's covered by insurance, there still isn't enough. In Russia it was formerly available without prescription.
• For someone wanting to lose just 5 kg, there is no biochemical prohibition, but access is rationed: insurance will not cover cosmetic use. The drug's purpose is to reduce the healthcare burden and relieve symptoms in people with serious obesity and diabetes.
• Many celebrities use it; Elon Musk has publicly admitted to it, while others hide it because losing weight "by willpower" is seen as more admirable.

Side effects

• Common: severe nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, general gastrointestinal discomfort. Some people quit because of this; for many it passes; some never experience it.
• Legal claims (e.g., a woman suing over allegedly lifelong diarrhea) need individual assessment of whether causation exists.
• Long-term: no frequent, pronounced serious effects observed so far. Cancer signals appeared only in animal studies, and mice and rats are not humans. Pharmaceutical companies have no interest in concealing findings — any real signal would surface, trigger investigation, and lead to modified guidance.
• Risk balance: given the global obesity epidemic, the risks of severe excess weight currently exceed any observed risk from the drug. A week of nausea compares favorably to dying of a stroke.

"Ozempic face" and "Ozempic body"

There is no such specific phenomenon — comparable, as the speaker puts it, to astrology. What exists is rapid weight loss without accompanying physical training: skin cannot adapt quickly enough and begins to sag. This is a universal problem for anyone who loses weight from a very high starting point; many require plastic surgery to remove excess skin from arms, abdomen, and elsewhere, because natural skin elasticity has been exceeded.

Why Some People Gain Weight Easily and Others Don't

Genetics of fat distribution

• Different genetic hands are dealt: some people's genes support a metabolism that resists weight gain (sometimes with other, linked drawbacks); others preferentially accumulate adipocytes.
• Genetics also determines where fat is stored:
  • Visceral/abdominal fat (more typical for men, but also many women) carries substantially higher health risks.
  • Lower-body fat (hips, buttocks) is far less dangerous — women with very large lower bodies may live long with few metabolic problems, while someone with a modest belly may carry much greater risk.

It's polygenic, not a single gene

• Thousands of genes influence metabolism; roughly half push toward storing more, half toward spending more.
• The speaker uses a dice analogy: each person gets a random roll across all these genes. The probability of rolling all sixes (ideal metabolism) is low; so is rolling all ones (catastrophe). Almost everyone lands somewhere in the middle — this is polygenic obesity, and genes are not really to blame.
• Rare exceptions exist: known mutations, for example in leptin, cause obesity from infancy — obesity at age three. For some of these, targeted therapy exists; for others it does not.
• People who were slim in youth and gradually gained weight over decades are genetically average — their weight gain is not genetic destiny.

The genes that actually matter are about desire, not digestion

The more important genetic influence is not how we process food but how much we want food. This is a far more significant driver of weight gain than the popularly overrated "metabolism genes."

Why We Want Food So Much: An Evolutionary Perspective

Food as an absolute good

For the entire history of humans, our ancestors, and all living creatures, the average organism is hungry and preoccupied with finding food, because food is always scarce. A cow must chew grass all day; a predator hunts constantly and usually fails, occasionally succeeding. Those who treated food as an absolute good and pursued it survived and reproduced. Our brains inherited this: the sight of food triggers a dopamine surge, generating motivation and intense craving.

The modern mismatch

• We eat far more than our ancestors did.
• We move drastically less. Studies of hunter-gatherer groups such as the Hadza show they walk and run around 20 km a day and more, because food doesn't wait on your doorstep — it must be found, caught, run down, and carried home.
• Even people who consider themselves fitness-conscious move many times less than pre-agricultural humans, while eating much more.

Why evolution left us the craving but not the drive to move

Because we became too humane. Selection pressure has been removed. Previously, people who did not desperately want to grab and eat every bit of food they saw simply had lower survival and reproductive success — they had less energy, and raising offspring while carrying children and foraging was brutally demanding.

Today, both the lean, disciplined athlete and the person who cannot get out of bed due to excess weight survive and can leave descendants (including via sperm banks). Natural selection on these traits has effectively stopped — everyone survives, but some live in permanent discomfort, looking in the mirror and despairing.

Fasting was once involuntary

The advice to not eat in order to lose weight is straightforward. In the past this happened naturally — a snowstorm meant a week in the cave with nothing to eat, and autophagy (the cellular cleanup process now fashionable in wellness circles, where cells destroy components clogged with defective proteins) occurred automatically. Today people try to reproduce this deliberately through intermittent fasting schedules.

The Fundamental Arithmetic: Intake vs. Expenditure

The only rule that matters

No molecular biology is required — simple arithmetic suffices: intake must be less than expenditure. If this condition holds over a long time horizon, you will lose weight; how fast depends only on the size of the deficit. Certain incoming conditions can modulate the process slightly, but globally the rule is absolute. Conversely, if intake exceeds expenditure — even slightly — you will gain.

How ordinary people gradually become obese

Most people do not engage in "food debauchery" from morning to night. They try to hold themselves in check and don't buy and eat cake daily. Yet research shows a characteristic annual pattern:

• Through most of the year the average person holds steady or gains only slightly.
• Then come the winter holidays — in the US starting with Thanksgiving in November, in Russia the December festivities — and people eat continuously: Olivier salad, turkey, herring under a fur coat, mayonnaise-heavy dishes, washed down with champagne. Five, six thousand calories a day is easy to reach.
• The gained weight is never shed during the following year.
• The result: 1–2 kg added per year, so that within ten years a still-young person has developed obesity.

Where the Energy Goes

The purposes of food

All food does the same thing: it supplies energy and building material. Some molecules are broken down to release energy; others are used as construction blocks to build new cells, repair damaged ones, and sustain ongoing processes — breathing, digestion, heartbeat, cell renewal.

The breakdown of energy expenditure

• Basal metabolism — roughly 70% of all energy consumed. This is the cost of simply being alive: you burn energy lying down doing nothing, and a person in a coma spends approximately the same amount.
• The remaining ~30% is where we can actively intervene, and it splits into:
  • Deliberate exercise — the gym, running, cycling. Even the most disciplined non-athletes manage only a few hours a week, because this kind of intensive loading cannot be sustained for long.
  • Non-exercise activity (NEAT) — this is where the real game is played, accounting for around 15% of total expenditure. Walking, vacuuming, cleaning, taking the stairs instead of the lift. Because it is low-intensity, we can do it for hours, so it dwarfs exercise for most people.
  • The thermic effect of food — energy spent on digestion.

"Negative-calorie foods" are a myth

Celery and lard are both cited as foods that supposedly cost more to digest than they provide. Both claims are nonsense — the body never spends more digesting a food than that food contains.

The closest real approximation is protein: it has the highest thermic effect, with roughly 30% of its calories consumed in breaking it down and using it for construction. So 100 g of chicken labelled at ~100 kcal effectively delivers around 70. But this is still positive, merely reduced.

Magic Foods and Superfoods

Goji berries and chia seeds

There are no magic slimming foods. If you eat goji berries and maintain a deficit, then in a sense they "helped." Their genuine value is behavioural: if adding goji berries makes an unpalatable fat-free yogurt edible, they serve a purpose.

Important caveats:

• All dried fruit is calorie-dense. A plum or apricot shrinks during drying, but all the sugar remains — only the water that provided bulk is gone. Foods associated with health may indeed supply minerals and micronutrients while still being very high in calories.
• Dietary variety matters for sustainability. Few people can eat only buckwheat and chicken breast for years, so tools like chia seeds — which swell attractively in yogurt — help maintain a workable diet.

Diets: All Roads Lead to the Same Place

Paleo, Kremlin, blood-type, and zodiac diets

Any diet works if intake is below expenditure. The paleo diet, the Kremlin diet, points-based diets, blood-type diets, even a hypothetical "Chinese New Year" diet where dragons and rats eat differently — all of them will produce weight loss under a caloric deficit and can be sustained.

Two conditions must be respected:

1. The diet must be one you can sustainably adhere to.
2. It must not approach the basal metabolic rate — the cautionary tale of the reality-show participants demonstrates the cost of extreme restriction. Food is an important part of life, but a harsh diet makes it the defining one.

Beyond that, maintain a reasonable macronutrient balance, adequate fibre, and a calorie count below expenditure.

Intermittent fasting: a matter of personality

Intermittent fasting works — under the same condition. The real question is which approach a given person can sustain:

• Data-oriented people enjoy tracking, graphing, and calorie counting. They compare options exhaustively before buying a toaster and get genuine endorphins from analysing their own numbers. Calorie counting suits them perfectly.
• Impulsive people often do better with intermittent fasting, because a hard rule ("nothing after 6 p.m." — essentially the old Soviet advice) removes the constant negotiation and hesitation.

Vegetarianism and veganism

Vegetarianism by itself does not cause weight loss. A vegan, a raw-foodist, or anyone else will gain weight if they eat more than they spend.

• Ovo-lacto vegetarianism poses few problems — eggs and milk supply animal protein, and plant protein powders (soy, wheat) are available.
• Pescetarianism is even easier.
• Veganism is genuinely difficult for maintaining a healthy diet, and it tends to turn life into constant calculation: losing weight while still obtaining the full range of amino acids and micronutrients that omnivores get automatically.

Protein matters especially during weight loss, because otherwise the body burns muscle very actively alongside fat — and anyone training in a gym needs more of it.

Eating at night

Yes, you can eat at night, provided intake is below expenditure and you can then sleep normally. Data show the timing of eating is irrelevant if the basic conditions hold and the person feels fine. If a steak before bed means you may as well not go to sleep at all, don't do it. If it acts as a lullaby and the deficit is maintained, eat at night.

Food combining ("separate eating")

Both variants — not mixing proteins with carbohydrates, and not drinking within an hour of eating — are nonsense with no scientific support.

A simple argument: imagine our ancestors in caves separating proteins from carbohydrates. They had no concept of either. You caught a deer, you ate it. Later, with agriculture, people ate herbs and fruit with no separation whatsoever. Food combining does not accelerate basal metabolism or promote weight loss. Drinking during meals is actually beneficial, because it contributes to satiety.

"Can I just eat chocolate if I stay in deficit?"

Documented cases exist — bloggers and fitness people have lost weight eating only McDonald's hamburgers. Technically it works. But the practical problem is severe:

• If you consume your entire daily allowance in one sitting at breakfast — cakes, pastries, Coca-Cola, fries — you face the rest of the day extremely hungry, and will very likely break.
• Stomach-wall stretching is a satiety signal. Mechanoreceptors report distension to the brain. If you eat 800 calories but the stomach stays empty, the body reports hunger anyway. Volume matters, and water helps create that volume, bringing satiety sooner and heading off thoughts of dessert.

Sugar, Fructose, and Fat

How bad is sugar really?

Sugar is genuinely harmful in large quantities: cardiovascular disease risk, diabetes, weight gain, and insulin spikes that destabilise the insulin system. But attitudes have recently become calmer — there is no need to faint at the sight of a sugar bowl.

• WHO recommendations for daily simple sugars are modest and easily exceeded.
• Best practice is to avoid heavily processed food and pure sugar.
• But if you're a guest, everyone is eating cake, and you have calories left — eat the cake. If your overall lifestyle is healthy, one slice will not instantly produce an arterial plaque "the size of a dog."

Fructose is not healthier

Fructose is not better than glucose, and in some physiological respects may be worse. Chemically, sucrose consists of joined glucose and fructose residues — so when you eat the demonised table sugar, you are already eating fructose. This is science-flavoured marketing, and unless you have diabetes, the primary consideration should be total calories.

Marketing traps

• "Healthy" snack bars made of nuts, honey, and dried fruit are calorie bombs. Nuts are genuinely rich in unsaturated fatty acids, but very energy-dense — a small handful, not a bag.
• Whole "healthy eating" aisles are marketing constructs. The people in white coats in advertisements are not experts; a marketer's expertise is in maximising profit. Read the label with your own eyes — everything you need to know is there.
• Sugar has a million names, like Voldemort. Marketers avoid writing "sugar," "glucose," or "sucrose" because consumers fear those words, and instead write "agave syrup," "wild honey," or "contains no sugar." It is the same substance.
• Sour gummy bears contain no less sugar than sweet ones — citric acid simply masks it, yet people believe sourness signals healthiness.
• Ice cream requires extra sugar precisely because cold dulls taste sensitivity. Frozen milk without heavy sweetening tastes bad.

Apple versus cake

An apple is preferable to cake for concrete reasons:

• It contains a great deal of fibre alongside fructose.
• It swells and fills the stomach.
• Weight for weight, the apple provides fewer calories and less sugar.
• The fibre slows sugar absorption, whereas cake delivers an unrestrained glucose spike followed by an insulin spike.

Green versus red apples

Sweetness does vary by variety — some cultivars are better suited to baking precisely because they are sweeter — so one apple may beat another in total sugar. But if you are within your daily calorie budget and you love red apples and dislike green ones, eat the red apple. This only matters if you're eating 3 kg of apples a day.

Smoothies and liquid calories

Smoothies masquerade as healthy and are frequently very unhealthy. Blending strawberries, banana, and milk at home while counting the calories is one thing; ordering a "super-duper" smoothie at a bar where they add 100 ml of agave syrup for flavour is another. This is simply liquid calories.

One golden rule that already helps many people enormously: never drink your calories. Food should be eaten, not drunk, because in liquid form we can consume orders of magnitude more. Try eating 50 g of sugar by the spoonful — then drink a cola and you won't even notice.

The Real Conspiracy: The Demonisation of Fat

An authentic case of a conspiracy

Most conspiracy theories describe things that don't exist, but this is a documented exception. Producers of sweet drinks and sweet products effectively bought scientists, who conducted studies where — with statistics adjusted slightly — the effects of fat appeared worse than the effects of sugar. These publications were then promoted.

The scheme unravelled because other, honest researchers were simultaneously finding no terrible consequences from high fat consumption, while observing a very serious association between large quantities of simple sugars and cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes. The whole affair has been described repeatedly, including in scientific journals.

Fat is necessary

Fat is not something you eat and immediately die from. It is required — particularly by women, but by men too — because:

• Hormones are synthesised on a fat basis.
• Cell membranes, including those of nerve cells, contain fat.

Quantity should follow WHO recommendations, but the permissible range is wide — ketogenic diets exist at one extreme. The real questions concern what accompanies the fat (a pile of sugar, for instance) and whether it is heavy animal fat like lard, of which one cannot realistically eat much anyway.

Fat-free products

They are neither harmful nor beneficial in themselves — read the label. A fat-free yogurt with 100 g of sugar added to make it palatable is not worth buying; one without excessive sugar is a fine choice, and flavour drops can be added.

Fat is not bad in itself, but it is extremely calorie-dense, so it warrants caution:

• Use a non-stick pan or a spray instead of pouring 10 ml of oil.
• Save the fat allowance for olive oil on a salad, where you actually taste it. The frying fat under a piece of meat goes largely unnoticed, whereas olive oil makes salad leaves pleasant enough that you eat more of them — and they supply fibre.

Water, Toxins, and Other Wellness Claims

The "eight glasses a day" rule

Picture a cave dweller measuring out eight glasses of water when glasses did not yet exist. There is no necessity to drink any specific quantity. Particularly absurd is the rule that soups, coffee, and tea "don't count" — why not? And why exclude cucumbers and fruit? Some people drink very little because they get water from soup and large quantities of fruit.

"Removing toxins"

This is an excellent method for improving the financial wellbeing of those who provide the service — entire clinics do it.

• Toxins are real, but they are poisons. Eat arsenic and you will probably die; arsenic is toxic. Eat a death cap mushroom and you'll receive plenty of toxins and die. "Toxin" is a synonym for "poison."
• The vague "toxins that must be flushed out," along with the equivalent concept of "slags," are a relatively honest method of extracting money from the population.
• There is nothing to flush out, and some of the flushing methods are highly creative. In certain cases, so-called conventional medicine will have difficulty treating you after a visit to such a clinic.

Detox retreats

"Detox" means the same thing. The genre is highly recognisable: a retreat, obligatory yoga, some form of ancient multi-generational wisdom, a practitioner in natural-fibre clothing, and incense — otherwise the detox apparently isn't sufficient. If, during the retreat, you are not consuming drugs but genuinely eating less and moving more, that is excellent. Just understand that this — not a miraculous mango-and-spinach cocktail — is the source of any effect.

Weight loss via parasites

A once-popular method. Scientifically, if you are heavily infested with parasites — say a three-metre beef tapeworm — you probably will lose weight, because there is an additional eater living inside you. This belongs to the same category as every other shortcut: an attempt to find a way to keep eating as much as before and still not gain.

Practical Calorie Counting: The Unavoidable First Step

Why there is no way around it

There is no escaping the "disgusting" business of counting calories, which for some reason horrifies everyone. The logic is simple: if you don't know how much you currently eat, nobody can tell you how much to eat in order to lose weight. All people are different, and basal metabolism differs from person to person. No internet calculator — even one that factors in activity level — actually knows who you are.

The two-week baseline experiment

1. Download a calorie-counting app. There are a million of them; different ones work better in different countries.
2. For one or two weeks, change nothing. Keep your habits exactly as they are and simply add the step of logging everything.
3. Everything that goes into the mouth goes first onto the scales and into the app. This includes the three crisps, the small sweet, the food finished off after the children, the spoon licked while cooking, even the dog food picked at. We tend not to count these — but the body counts them, because they are all incoming calories.
4. Weigh yourself every morning after using the toilet and before applying makeup, so as not to add anything extraneous, and watch the trend.
5. Average over the week, not the day. One day you visit friends, the next you work all day, so daily figures vary wildly.

Eating out

Restaurants are the hard case. Carrying small portable scales (they weigh perhaps 20 g and fit in a handbag) may make you look like a freak, but the question is "chrome trim or actually getting there" — you are in an experiment. Restaurants dislike customers weighing food, partly because a menu may claim 250 g while the plate holds considerably less (as in the old joke: "How many grams in a kilogram?" — "850." — "You can start work tomorrow.").

Restaurant figures inevitably carry a large margin of error — yesterday's chef, Serge, loves adding extra butter; today's chef, Fedya, thinks butter ruins the taste and swaps the radish for potato. So you must work from hospital averages: all mayonnaise-based Olivier salads are roughly equivalent, but you still need to know the weight. Even so, it is far better to get out the scales and measure than to stuff yourself like a rubbish bin with whatever some man in a restaurant decided to give you.

It doesn't last forever

Experienced healthy-eaters learn to estimate weight and calorie content by eye and eventually stop logging. You simply memorise that a breakfast of a certain size plus a lunch of a certain size, plus sport, keeps you within range.

The shocking result

Experiments consistently show that people underestimate what they eat by 400–600 kcal or more when judging by eye. You think you're eating 2,000 and you're actually eating nearly 3,000 — while barely moving. It is unsurprising that at a modest height this leads directly to accumulation, and not because "the bone is wide." The advice is simply to be honest with yourself: our biological robot works the way it works.

Setting the Deficit

Once you know your real intake:

1. Go to an online calorie calculator — not the simplest kind. Use the more sophisticated ones that account not only for BMI but also activity level, age, and similar factors, to estimate maintenance, gaining, and losing intakes.
2. Compare with reality. If the calculator says 2,000 and you are indeed eating 2,000 but still gaining, cut 100 kcal.
3. Keep counting. You cannot cut 100 kcal and then stop counting — otherwise how would you know you cut them, or how much you are eating now?
4. After one or two weeks, check the trend from daily weigh-ins. If nothing has changed, cut another 100 kcal, until the weight genuinely starts moving down.
5. Then try to hold there — and this is where the problems "with the head" begin.

Metabolic and Behavioural Adaptation

The body fights back

Many dieters don't know this. They calculate their 1,700 kcal, and for the first week it works — then the weight stalls completely. This is adaptation. The body reasons: "This idiot owner-brain has lost his mind and isn't eating. He wants to kill us. We must defend ourselves."

Defence mechanism one: reduced activity

Shown repeatedly in research and well established: people who are losing weight unconsciously begin to move less. You suddenly want to sit down; where you once enjoyed walking instead of taking the bus, now you want the bus and have no desire to walk at all. You have to force yourself and monitor it deliberately — a step-counting watch is genuinely useful, because it lets you see the decline you would otherwise not notice.

Defence mechanism two: increased appetite

The body then thinks: "That's not enough to beat this stupid brain-carrier — let's turn his appetite up." On a calorie deficit, cravings intensify: you want that cake or that slice of pizza far more than when you were eating more. These are protective systems saying "Go back, you're making a mistake."

Why this is physiology, not just psychology

This is a crucial point. People assume the pull toward forbidden food is purely psychological and that they can overcome it by talking to a psychologist or reading a book. But once you understand it is physiology, rooted in the reward system that regulates all these desires, it becomes clear that willpower alone is insufficient. You must:

• Know in advance that it will happen, so there is no disappointment.
• Know how to fight it and keep it within bounds.

If you believe it is only childhood trauma to be discussed away, it will not go away. It happens at the level of our hardware — the body is saving you from the starvation you have inexplicably decided to inflict on it.

The long-term picture

Unfortunately, almost all research indicates that full recovery of the pre-diet state does not occur. People do lose weight and stay slim for life — such people exist — but you need to understand what awaits you. The way to cope is to increase the component we can actually play with: the roughly 15% from everyday movement (plus around 20% with the gym). In principle you can lose weight without leaving the sofa purely by cutting calories, but you will not endure such a low intake. If you raise overall activity, you can afford more food and still not gain.

Motivation and the Discomfort Problem

The complaint

"From today I'm on a diet, counting calories, restricting myself" — and immediately comes rage, a ruined mood, an overwhelming urge to eat, and constant preoccupation with food. There is no pleasure in restriction whatsoever.

First: accept that there will be no pleasure in restriction

A defining problem of modern people is total immersion in comfort. We sit indoors in comfortable temperatures where a waistcoat or cape is merely decorative; sitting in a cave at +7 °C would be rather less pleasant. We are entirely unprepared for discomfort, and even the slightest discomfort triggers ferocious protest in a comfort-accustomed limbic system, plus an urgent desire to do something to make it stop.

Yet nothing has changed since cave times: achieving anything meaningful requires prolonged work bound up with discomfort — whether that is a target weight, career achievements, something in relationships, improving at drawing, or reaching competitive times on a bicycle. During that work you are not lying on the sofa collecting fast endorphins from likes, series, or YouTube; you have to strain. On any long journey you will meet discomfort, and if you don't accept that, you will not complete the journey. You have to be able to say: the day is over, I want to lie down, but I haven't hit my step target, so I'm getting up and going for a walk — because I'm a human being with a large goal to pursue.

Motivation comes from lack, never from abundance

From the brain's evolutionary standpoint, if you have everything, sit still — don't waste calories, because replacing them is slow and troublesome. Motivation is only allocated when something is acutely missing.

• On shortened working weeks and abundant free time: this is an illusion. The most accurate depiction of that situation is the film Idiocracy — people will fill free time with fast endorphins from computer games, series, alcohol, drugs, and social networks.
• Applied to body positivity: the therapeutic intent is understandable, but the brain does not issue motivation when everything is already fine. It issues motivation when it recognises a deficiency — wanting to be attractive, wanting to appeal to a chosen person. If you conclude "this will do, and everyone must love me unconditionally," there is no motivation to act. The idea of unconditional love and comfort is lovely, but our biological computer works differently.

The Two Actors in the Head

The illusion of being in charge

When we make decisions we labour under the illusion that "we" — our rational part, the prefrontal cortex — are the master of our word and our decisions. This is a serious error. There are two relatively independent but intertwined actors in the head.

The prefrontal cortex

The newest evolutionary part of the brain, emerging in mammals and flowering in primates. Thanks to it our ancestors built civilisation and outpaced every other species on the planet. Excellent thing — but it is not what governs our everyday decisions.

The limbic system

Before the frontal cortex there was no empty space: other brain regions, including decision-making ones, existed for hundreds of millions of years, and living creatures managed decisions perfectly well without any frontal cortex.

The limbic system handles emotions and is a simple binary mechanism: like / dislike.

• You try something, get a dopamine sensation, and next time you see it dopamine is released — the neurotransmitter saying "Repeat, repeat, it'll be great." It creates the feeling of wanting something badly enough to act and overcome obstacles to experience it again.
• With negative emotions, stress hormones — cortisol, adrenaline — are released, driving us to flee the source of trouble quickly, or to fight it.

Why it worked in caves and fails now

In the cave environment, everything that produced positive emotions was unambiguously good for survival, because evolution has one goal: reproduction and the propagation of genes across generations. We may dislike this, we may be childfree, but we run on the hardware evolution produced.

• Positive stimuli: food (unambiguously positive), water, safety, everything connected with sex, and children.
• Negative stimuli: danger, unpleasant things requiring effort, fear, horror — concentrated negatives we rarely encounter today but met regularly in the world of caves.

Then the frontal cortex invented civilisation and confused everything. Today's pleasurable stimuli act on the same limbic system but have the opposite meaning — they obstruct our long-term goals. Worse, the pleasant stimuli we invented often exceed in power anything found in nature.

The sugar example

There has never in the history of living beings been a stimulus as concentrated as a sweet. Where could our ancestors have obtained sugar?

• Fruit, primarily — but in northern latitudes fruit is available perhaps three months a year.
• Even the sweetest tropical fruits are nowhere near as sweet as any pastry from any coffee shop.

So when the brain meets a pastry it meets something it never encountered in nature; there was no selection for resistance to large quantities of sugar. A glucose–sucrose hit lands and the brain thinks: "Extraordinary — what a useful thing, so many calories in one place." Sugar signals fast, immediately available calories requiring no lengthy digestion, an unambiguous good from the brain's perspective.

We have invented ten thousand such super-stimuli that mercilessly exploit our unfortunate limbic system, which is honestly trying to do us good. Seeing something good, it makes us want more of it. It does not know that this is YouTube, or social networks, or — heaven forbid — addictive drugs.

Why "I want to be beautiful" fails as motivation

That is the frontal cortex talking — and even it is hesitant ("I don't know whether it's motivation or not"). We watched Hollywood films with beautiful figures and thought that would be nice. The limbic system does not light up for that at all, especially when it sees a cake and understands that a great deal of pleasure is available right now. Protecting us from wasting energy on obviously unprofitable actions, it says: "Cake — please, come through. Gym — sorry, meaningless waste of time." Until we understand this and learn to create for ourselves conditions resembling those of the caves, which supplied real motivation, we will not achieve our large goals — and it is precisely those goals that deliver genuine, high-quality pleasure and a quality life, plus the awareness of being a person who achieved something.

Strategies for Outwitting the Limbic System

Rule zero: acceptance

Recognise that your brain works this way and it will not change because you read a book, watched a YouTube video, or spoke with a psychologist. The hardware is what it is; a new brain will not grow because you watched a new video. This is acceptance not in the sense of "love me as I am," but in the sense of "I will not change." Some infuriating people eat whatever they want and stay slim, and some have no difficulty postponing a seven-minute pleasure in favour of long work. If you are not one of them, live with that knowledge and work with it.

Strategy one: avoiding temptation

Suited to cases where we want to stop doing something that gives the limbic system fast pleasure but is not good for us long term.

The principle is extremely simple, and once you grasp it the solution is obvious — yet most people object: "Why shouldn't I go into the biscuit aisle? I'll just tell myself I no longer like biscuits" — and then walk straight into the shop with the biscuits. Guess the outcome.

If something reliably overpowers you, remove it from physical accessibility. Sooner or later you will yield. The mechanism:

• In the morning you get up rested and full of energy. There is a cake in the fridge; you say no, I've decided, healthy life, no fast carbohydrates.
• Work distracts you; you don't think about the cake.
• You come home in the evening tired, having quarrelled with your boss and read the news. Your mood is ruined, stress and many negative sensations accumulate, and compensation is required — the brain always sees to that.
• And you know that in the fridge is your favourite cake, guaranteed to deliver a great many delicious, pleasant emotions.

Now run the same scenario with no cake in the fridge: you simply don't eat it. This applies to everything — food, social networks, series, alcohol. Use the frontal cortex to guarantee non-encounter, because if you don't meet the temptation, you don't want it; if you meet it, you want it, and then you must fight the limbic system, negotiate with it, and waste time on pointless mental chewing gum.

Strategy two: controlled external compulsion

Suited to the opposite case: when we need to start doing something necessary that we don't want to do — most typically work, and above all sport.

The myth of "finding your sport"

The claim that you will find a sport you love and then fly out of bed each morning is false. There is no rule in God's office allocating everyone a suitable sport — skates for you, bodybuilding for you, and off to Africa for the third. Joy in movement is indeed one of our programmes (we had to be motivated somehow to seek food that was always twenty kilometres away), but people experience it in wildly differing degrees, and for some the aversion far outweighs the joy. It is excellent if you enjoy your sport — but if you don't, the answer is not to turn into a potato on the sofa.

How avoidance actually plays out

The limbic system says no. The frontal cortex fights it for a while and quickly loses. Then a cognitive dissonance trick follows: we dislike having failed and lost to our ancient limbic system, so we immediately scavenge the environment for any convenient explanation that says "it wasn't me who failed":

• The weather is terrible, travelling to the gym would be awful.
• Better still, a slight headache — and doctors say you mustn't exercise with a headache (they say nothing of the sort).

And so something happens every single day. Meanwhile we know a colleague, perhaps even more senior, who somehow manages the gym three times a week and for whom these circumstances never seem to arise. A mystery.

Uncontrolled external compulsion

This is when circumstances arrive and there is simply no alternative. At work it is the deadline: people sit around doing nothing, taking endless smoke breaks, and then the deadline lands and everyone works through the night (in journalism, "putting the issue to bed"). There exists an emotionally negative circumstance of sufficient magnitude that you know things will genuinely go badly if you fail — and here the limbic system switches from enemy to ally, taking fright and issuing plenty of motivation. People work all night even at an advanced age because the consequences would be dire.

This method works but is unreliable:

• You can't supply a deadline for every story.
• There's no guarantee you'll cope. A deadline is severe stress; you may break, fail, miss the issue, and lose your job.

Controlled external compulsion — the better version

Here you use your own frontal cortex to construct circumstances in which you are obliged — or better still, unable not — to do the thing you need to do but don't want to do. You remove the limbic system from the decision-making process entirely, because the decision is now made by circumstances that have fallen on you and to which you must submit.

Why this works: we are extremely good at submitting to circumstances. We all imagine ourselves internally free — recent events have shown we are somewhat mistaken about ourselves — but this is evolutionarily normal. Those who charged at a bulldozer or a mammoth remained there along with their genes; submission to circumstances is written into the genes that survived. The secret is therefore to create those circumstances for yourself.

Controlled External Compulsion in Practice: Trainers, Groups, and Dogs

Why gym memberships fail

A gym card looks like an excellent deal — a three-year pass, daily access, a couple of hundred roubles a session. But when the question is put to a lecture audience — "Raise your hand if you have ever bought a gym membership and never once gone" — the hands go up. Simply buying access changes nothing, because the membership creates no obligation at any specific moment.

Why a personal trainer works

Hiring a personal trainer — the canonical example, usually met with the complaint that individual sessions are expensive — is a deliberately constructed circumstance that removes the decision from the limbic system:

• Someone is waiting for you. You cannot simply not turn up; cancellation requires notice a day in advance, whereas the urge to skip arrives on the morning itself.
• The familiar pattern — announcing in the evening that you will definitely train in the morning, then wanting ten times over to claim illness — is defeated because a person is already expecting you.
• Crucially, the limbic system switches sides: it does not want to break a social agreement, so it now works in your favour rather than against you.

The social-animal argument

This is not a quirk but a deep evolutionary feature. Humans have no claws, no special teeth, cannot fly, cannot really swim — we are rather poorly designed animals who survived thanks to two things: