#3. Hard to Stop

When you eat fat, the natural, weight-regulating body mechanisms don’t appear to work properly: Research carried out by much respected Andrew Prentice of the Medical Research Council at the Dunn Nutrition Unit in Cambridge has recently made two interesting discoveries about how our bodies react to fat when we eat it. First, he believes that, because most people’s body-fat stores are so large (over 100,000 calories’ worth of fat on an average woman’s body), when we eat fat the body doesn’t ‘notice’ and therefore doesn’t send out the normal signals of appetite being sated. Whereas if you eat carbohydrate, then because the body’s carbo stores are low- about 1,000 calories’ worth – the body quickly notices that it is being bombarded with, say, double the quantities it can store and sends up an ‘I am full’ message to the brain. His second discovery revealed that when we eat protein, carbohydrate or alcohol, our body metabolism speeds up and begins to burn off extra calories. But when we eat fat, it doesn’t.