I think Belke’s explanation is offbase, as a lot of evolutionary explanations are. Don’t get me wrong; I believe in evolution. I just think that speculating about how a mechanism evolved doesn’t tell us much about what is happening in our bodies and, more important, how we can harness it.

I think a better explanation is Gary Taubes’ hypothesis that obesity is a disorder by which most energy is funneled to storage rather than to metabolism. In other words, in obese people, most calories are stored as fat, leaving the rest of the tissues without enough energy to function properly. This causes both excessive fatigue (and therefore reluctance to exercise) and excessive hunger) and therefore overeating. According to Taubes, the cause of obesity is consuming the wrong type of calories (fuel like carbohydrates that are more prone to storage), and the cure is cutting back on the storage form of calories. Once that cure is undertaken, cells have more energy, and exercise becomes possible.