How Your Brain Controls Your Weight

How Your Brain Controls Your Weight

Randy Seeley at YWM2015 Randy Seeley opened the educational program for the fourth annual Your Weight Matters National Convention by diving into neuroscience on Friday. With exceptional clarity, he explained how your brain controls your weight — just like it controls your body temperature and your breathing.

And just as you can temporarily stop your breathing for only a short time, he explained how your brain takes over when you start messing with your weight. Through a complex system of hormones such as leptin and melanocortins, the brain regulates body weight with astonishing accuracy. Food restriction can cause temporary changes in weight. But over the longer term, the brain brings the body back to the same weight it had before food was restricted.

So if the brain is so good at this, why is everyone’s weight drifting up? Increasingly, it’s becoming apparent that our food is acting in some ways like a hormone that serves to reset the body’s target weight. It’s not so much the calories in the food, but the composition of the food that can affect signals to the brain that regulate body weight.

In a reference to weight bias that is so prevalent and especially prevalent in people are personally unaffected by obesity, Seeley said:

When I lecture on this subject, I encounter lean people who have a hard time accepting this information. They want to take credit for being lean. They need to spend some time cleaning rat cages in my lab.

Folks who have lived with obesity and enjoyed the benefits of successful treatment have learned about obesity the hard way. Obesity has more to do with biology than virtue.

Click here for the slides from Seeley’s presentation and here for his recent overview on this subject in Science. For interviews with Seeley, click here and here.

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August 15, 2015

4 Responses to “How Your Brain Controls Your Weight”

August 15, 2015 at 7:53 am, Sue said:

If weight is governed by brain and self-regulating, how did Seely manipulate things to get some rats fattened up.
- August 15, 2015 at 3:48 pm, Ted said:
  
  Thanks for your question, Sue. The best short answer is the passage in the article above that says:
  
  Increasingly, it’s becoming apparent that our food is acting in some ways like a hormone that serves to reset the body’s target weight. It’s not so much the calories in the food, but the composition of the food that can affect signals to the brain that regulate body weight.
August 18, 2015 at 2:35 pm, Dexter Xcress said:

Our food is patented as a pesticide and has glyphosate in it and on it, since 1994.

Monsanto Chemical owns the patent rights to about 85% of our nation’s food supply and controls the chemical cocktails that are in the food. It’s called GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and besides built-in pesticides that eliminate natural plant derived sulfurs that are vital for our digestion, weight and health.

They also have a chemical cocktail in the food to make us crave it. Since 1994, obesity and cancers are off the charts. I started eating organic and went from “morbidly obese” to a BMI of 21.

You are totally correct that it’s what’s in the food that is causing most of America to be obese and unhealthy.
- August 18, 2015 at 4:40 pm, Ted said:
  
  Thanks for sharing your thoughts, though I can’t say I agree with your ideas about the “chemical cocktail.”