Shortform note: Fatty liver occurs in two varieties: alcoholic fatty liver disease (AFLD) and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). The disease progresses through four stages, becoming increasingly severe until it culminates in cirrhosis, a serious condition of liver scarring and failure that can cause jaundice, brain fog, nausea, and weight fluctuations. Studies on rodents have shown that high fructose corn syrup causes fatty liver; however, a 2021 study on pigs, a larger mammal, found that a four-week diet of 60% fructose did not induce fatty liver.) Meat and Dairy Also Stimulate Insulin Liraglutide (also called Saxenda) and semaglutide (also called Wegovy) are weight loss medicines that work by making you feel fuller and less hungry. They're taken as an injection. Your doctor or nurse will show you how to take it.

The best way to achieve this is to swap unhealthy and high-energy food choices – such as fast food, processed food and sugary drinks (including alcohol) – for healthier choices. Treating children living with obesity usually involves improvements to diet and increasing physical activity using behaviour change strategies. Why are behavioral interventions effective? Laurette Dubé, a lifestyle psychology and marketing researcher at McGill University’s Faculty of Management, notes that our environment is currently one in which ubiquitous, sophisticated marketing efforts prey on our need for sensory gratification as well as our vulnerability to misinformation. In addition, the poor eating and exercise habits we observe in our friends, family and colleagues encourage us to follow suit. In essence, behavioral interventions seek to reconfigure this environment into one in which our needs for information, gratification and social encouragement are tapped to pull us toward healthy food and exercise choices rather than away from them. “When we are getting the right messages in enough ways, we have a better chance of resisting the urge to eat more than we need,” Dubé says. Modern epidemic: For millennia, not getting enough food was a widespread problem. Nowadays obesity is a global burden that affects one third of Americans. Another third are overweight.

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If these strategies today sound like well-worn, commonsense advice, it is because they have been popularized for nearly half a century by Weight Watchers. Founded in 1963 to provide support groups for dieters, Weight Watchers added other approaches and advice in keeping with the findings of behavioral studies and used to bill itself as a “behavior-modification” program. “Whatever the details are of how you lose weight, the magic in the sauce is always going to be changing behavior,” says nutrition researcher and Weight Watchers chief science officer Karen Miller-Kovach. “Doing that is a learnable skill.”

The Chief Medical Officers recommend that adults should do a minimum of 150 minutes moderate-intensity activity a week – for example, 5 sessions of 30-minute exercise a week. Something is better than nothing, and doing just 10 minutes of exercise at a time is beneficial. But the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which looked at the impact of salt reduction for the population in 2013, said the government’s strategy could lead to 20,000 fewer heart deaths each year.Avoid fad diets that recommend unsafe practices, such as fasting (going without food for long periods of time) or cutting out entire food groups. These types of diets do not work, can make you feel ill, and are not sustainable because they do not teach you long-term healthy eating habits. According to recent research, there’s little relationship between obesity and the amount of dietary fat you consume. Studies have found that saturated fats, long thought to cause heart disease, may actually have a protective effect on obesity since they’re highly satiating. In addition, Fung advises avoiding refined vegetable oils, such as canola, soy, and corn, as well as trans fats, such as margarine. Each has been linked, respectively, to inflammation and heart disease.