Contemporary Authors

• The Secret Life of Fat: The Science behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You W.W. Norton & Co. (New York, NY), 2017

1. The secret life of fat : the science behind the body's least understood organ and what it means for you LCCN 2016027841 Type of material Book Personal name Tara, Sylvia. Main title The secret life of fat : the science behind the body's least understood organ and what it means for you / Sylvia Tara, PhD. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : W.W. Norton & Company, [2017] ©2017 Description xiv, 235 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm ISBN 9780393244830 (hardcover) 0393244830 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER QP752.F3 T37 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Book Homepage - http://thesecretlifeoffat.com

  UNDERSTAND YOUR FAT
  THEN BEAT IT
  Fat is our most misunderstood body part, which is why it can be so tricky to lose weight. Discover its mysteries in The Secret Life of Fat and then send fat packing! Order The Secret Life of Fat today, to receive an exclusive gift package from Dr. Sylvia Tara.

  Buy The Secret Life of Fat on Amazon Buy the secret life of fat on barnesandnoble Buy the secret life of fat on indiebound Buy the secret life of fat at walmart Buy the secret life of fat at bam buy the secret life of fat at biggerbooks buy the secret life of fat at powells starburst

  This book by Dr. Sylvia Tara addresses important concepts related to the development, prevention and treatment of obesity… This book will be a very interesting read for lay people interested in fat and obesity, as well as for many in the scientific community-I really enjoyed reading it!
  Carl Lavie MD
  Author of "The Obesity Paradox"
  Prev Next

  The secret to losing 20 pounds? You have to work with your fat, not against it. You may not love your fat, but your body certainly does. In fact, your body is actually endowed with many self-defense measures to hold on to fat. For instance, fat can use stem cells to regenerate, increase our appetite if it feels threatened, and use bacteria, genetics, and viruses to expand itself.

  How can you succeed against odds like that? By using the latest scientific research.

  The Secret Life of Fat brings together cutting-edge research with historical perspectives to reveal fat’s true identity: an endocrine organ that, in the right amount, is critical to our health. Sylvia Tara expertly illustrates the complex role genetics, hormones, diet, exercise, and history play in our weight, and sets you on the path to beat the bulge once and for all.

  Don’t get upset about an expanding waistline, get informed!

  Looking to lose 10 pounds in the next 24 hours?
  Sorry, we don't make promises we can't keep.

  Sign up for our email list and you'll learn the FACTS about weight loss. Join now and we'll even send our guide of the 6 things successful dieters do - for free!

  Read my latest posts

  January 17, 2017
  Before You Move Your Muscles, You Have to Move Your Mind

  January 6, 2017
  On Point – NPR Interview

  January 6, 2017
  The Mysterious Virus That Could Cause Obesity

  READ MORE ON MEDIUM »

  Special Bonus – Order today and break the cycle
  When you order The Secret Life of Fat today, you’ll receive an exclusive gift package from Dr. Sylvia Tara:

  Early access to Chapter 5 of the book, “Fat Fights to Stay On You”
  A Free Download of Dr. Tara’s “Proven Weight Loss Tips”
  A Book Plate with Sylvia’s signature to put in your copy of the book
  Access to Sylvia’s Guide of the 6 Habits of Successful Dieters
  Step 1: Order the Book

  Head to one of the trusted retailers below, and order your copy of The Secret Life of Fat.

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  Step 2: Claim Your Gifts!

  After ordering your copy of The Secret Life of Fat, follow the link below to enter your purchase number and details! There, you’ll have access to your gifts absolutely FREE!

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• W Norton Co - http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Author.aspx?id=4294992133

  Sylvia Tara
  Sign up for the monthly New Releases email.

  By signing up you agree to W. W. Norton's privacy policy and terms of use.
  Sylvia Tara holds a PhD in biochemistry from the University of California at San Diego and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She was a consultant with McKinsey & Company and has worked at the world’s largest biotechnology companies. Tara lives in the Los Angeles area.

  BOOKS BY SYLVIA TARA
  Book CoverThe Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You

  This groundbreaking work of practical, popular science reveals that fat is much smarter than we think.MORE

  ===

  The Secret Life of Fat
  THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE BODY'S LEAST UNDERSTOOD ORGAN AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR YOU
  Sylvia Tara (Author)

  Sign up for the monthly New Releases email.

  By signing up you agree to W. W. Norton's privacy policy and terms of use.
  Overview | Formats

  This groundbreaking work of practical, popular science reveals that fat is much smarter than we think.

  Fat is an obsession, a dirty word, a subject of national handwringing—and, according to biochemist Sylvia Tara, the least-understood part of our body.

  You may not love your fat, but your body certainly does. In fact, your body is actually endowed with many self-defense measures to hold on to fat. For example, fat can use stem cells to regenerate; increase our appetite if it feels threatened; and use bacteria, genetics, and viruses to expand itself. The secret to losing twenty pounds? You have to work with your fat, not against it. Tara explains how your fat influences your appetite and willpower, how it defends itself when attacked, and why it grows back so quickly. The Secret Life of Fat brings cutting-edge research together with historical perspectives to reveal fat’s true identity: an endocrine organ that, in the right amount, is critical to our health. Fat triggers puberty, enables our reproductive and immune systems, and even affects brain size.

  Although we spend $60 billion annually fighting fat, our efforts are often misinformed and misdirected. Tara expertly illustrates the complex role that genetics, hormones, diet, exercise, and history play in our weight, and The Secret Life of Fat sets you on the path to beat the bulge once and for all.

  BOOK DETAILS
  Hardcover
  December 2016
  ISBN 978-0-393-24483-0
  6.4 × 9.6 in / 288 pages
  Sales Territory: Worldwide including Canada, Singapore and Malaysia, but excluding the British Commonwealth.
  OTHER FORMATS
  Book CoverThe Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Bodys Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You
  Paperback
  ENDORSEMENTS & REVIEWS
  “Finally, a book that sheds some light on understanding body fat—specifically, its role, why it is so difficult to fight, and how it works differently for different people… This genuinely enlightening book will be a revelation to those engulfed in self-blame and shame about their weight.” — Publishers Weekly

  “For years we presumed that body fat is just a depot for energy, but current science is proving that it is actually the largest endocrine gland in our body. This enigmatic organ conveys many paradoxes and surprises; depending on its location, color and genetic makeup it might be either dangerous or protective. Sylvia Tara dove deeply in science of fat and adeptly explains it all in this fascinating book.” — Osama Hamdy, Medical Director of the Obesity Clinical Program at Joslin Diabetes Center and author of The Diabetes Breakthrough

  “Body fat is so much more than a passive calorie storage depot, as Sylvia Tara brilliantly shows. Read The Secret Life of Fat to make friends with this misunderstood and critically important organ.” — David S. Ludwig, MD, PhD, Professor, Harvard Medical School and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Always Hungry?

  “You can outsmart your body fat, but first you must understand it! With the right lifestyle, eating, and exercise approach you can lose weight and keep it off. Learn how in this engaging and informative masterpiece.” — Michael Dansinger, MD, MS, founding director of the Diabetes Reversal Program at Tufts Medical Center in Boston

  “Dr. Sylvia Tara addresses important concepts related to the development, prevention, and treatment of obesity. This book will be a very interesting read for lay people interested in fat and obesity, as well as for many in the scientific community—I really enjoyed reading it!” — Carl Lavie, MD, author of The Obesity Paradox

  “Like comfort food for anyone carrying around a lifetime of guilt for eating an extra cookie.” — Carol Saline, Hadassah Magazine

  “Powerful… [Tara’s] research and insight is deeply perspective-shifting.” — Melissa Wuske, Foreword

  “[Tara] ably combines an accessible explanation of how the body’s metabolism works with a clear survey of the latest research on obesity. [The Secret Life of Fat] should have wide appeal, not only to those fighting the battle of the bulge.” — Kirkus

  “Biochemist Tara gives readers the skinny on fat in a lively discussion that incorporates sumo wrestlers, a bloated diet industry, [and] genetics… Readers will discover that, regardless of body size and shape, fat does some heavy work on our behalf.” — Tony Miksanek, Booklist

  ALL SUBJECTS
  Health > Diet
  Science

• Science to Live By - http://sciencetoliveby.com/about-sylvia-tara/

  About Sylvia Tara
  sylvia_taraSylvia Tara holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from The University of California, San Diego and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

  She was a healthcare management consultant with McKinsey & Company, and has worked for the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

  After an extended battle with fat, Dr. Tara became fascinated with its resiliency and embarked on a mission to better understand it. This book is the culmination of years of research and interviews with physicians, patients and leading scientists. The Secret Life of Fat will forever change how you think about this misunderstood organ.
  ===

  The Secret Life of Fat
  Fat is an obsession, a dirty word, a subject of national hand-wringing, and our least understood body part.

  The Secret Life of Fat brings together historical perspective and cutting-edge research to reveal fat’s true identity: an organ that is critical to our health. Fat triggers timely puberty, enables our reproductive organs, strengthens our bones and immune systems, affects brain size and may even extend our lives. Fat is so critical, in fact, that nature has endowed it with many means to fight for its survival despite our numerous attempts to rid ourselves of it.

  Fat can affect our metabolism when threatened, redirect blood supply to itself, decrease our hormone levels and even control our thoughts. Fat is so important, that our stem cells can create it independent of what we eat—a function that has been preserved for our most important body parts. How we get fat is more interesting still. Bacteria in our bodies will affect how fat we get, as will our gender, genetics, age, dieting history and even contagious viruses. That’s right—fatness may be contagious!

  Although we spend $60 billion annually fighting fat, our efforts are often misinformed and misdirected. Written in a style that is both entertaining and enlightening, The Secret Life of Fat shows how we can finally control our elusive adversary by knowing it better.

  Order The Secret Life of Fat now on Amazon

• WBUR - http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/01/09/secret-life-of-fat

  A New Book Dives Deep Into Fat — And Why Our Bodies Love It10:48
  Play
  January 09, 2017Share
  Sylvia Tara, author of "The Secret Life of Fat." (Courtesy Joshua Michael Shelton)closemore
  Why do our bodies hold on to fat despite diets? How can genetics, microbes and even viruses affect how much we weigh?

  Sylvia Tara (@SylviaTaraPhD) explores those questions and others in "The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means For You," and joins Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson to talk about the book.

  Interview Highlights

  The cover of "The Secret Life of Fat," by Sylvia Tara. (Courtesy W.W. Norton & Company)
  The cover of "The Secret Life of Fat," by Sylvia Tara. (Courtesy W.W. Norton & Company)
  On periods in history when fat wasn't hated

  "There was a time in U.S. history where fat was actually quite loved and valued. After the Civil War, there was poverty, and there was destruction, and food was hard to come by. And those who had fat were considered privileged and beautiful, and people tried to look like they had fat. And it wasn't until later, until the economy got a little bit better, food was more available, people started gaining weight again. And that's where there were some warnings from military, from business, from politicians about the nation's growing girth."

  On what made people fear fat

  "It used to be only the select few could afford to have it. Then all of a sudden, when everyone's getting it, people just got a little bit wary of that, that it's now catching on with everybody. And it created a little bit of an echo chamber, this worry about fat — I mean even doctors previously had thought fat was not so bad, and they actually advised fat for helping with contagious disease, helping with nervousness. And it all just changed when it got to be where a lot of people could have it.

  "And what happened then is that another voice in the chorus against fat happened to be businesses, entrepreneurs, hucksters who saw this great way to sell all kinds of gimmicks to people who were afraid of fat now. Odd things came in — the tapeworm diet, where people would ingest tapeworm eggs so that the tapeworms would siphon off calories, Fatoff, reducing soap that was supposed to melt fat under the skin. There was all kinds of ways to make money. And the advertising of these products became another really strong voice in the chorus against fat, to the point now where we have multi-billion dollar corporations going at this, we spend $60 billion or more on the fight against fat — more than we spend on the war on terror. I think if we're going to spend this much money on fat, we're going to target weapons against it, we have to really understand this enemy that we're fighting, and fat is much more than just a reserve of calories. It's actually quite sophisticated."

  "Fat is vital to life, and because fat is so important, nature tries to protect it." Sylvia Tara
  On fat's role and importance within the body

  "Fat is actually an endocrine organ. It produces a number of hormones in our body that our body needs. One of these that's really important is leptin, and leptin has vast effects within our body. I mean, fat is tied to brain size, to brain health, it's tied to strong bones, it's tied to our reproduction system and conception, even. And so when people lose too much weight, women particularly... they actually can't reproduce. Fat is vital to life, and because fat is so important, nature tries to protect it. And through leptin, again, one of the effects is leptin has a very strong, direct link to appetite. So when we have a good amount of leptin, we feel pretty satiated, and our metabolism's pretty strong. But when we lose fat, because fat produced leptin, we lose leptin, too. And with lower leptin, our appetites shoot through the roof, our metabolism gets lower, and in that way, fat fights, our bodies fight to keep fat on us, to get it back."

  On her goals in writing the book

  "Part of what I'm hoping to do with this book is just help people identify... take away some of the fat shaming, the guilt around fat. It's not just sloth and gluttony, there's a number of ways we get fat. There are genetics, there are viruses, there are bacteria, gender plays a role, and our hormones play a role, and you have to consider all of these things when you're trying to lose weight. You might not be eating more than your neighbor, but you might have more fat, and don't feel guilty — it's not because you're failing at your diet, it's because you have to understand your fat."

  Book Excerpt: 'The Secret Life Of Fat'

  By Sylvia Tara

  Excerpted from THE SECRET LIFE OF FAT by Sylvia Tara, PhD. Copyright © 2017 by Sylvia Tara. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

  This segment aired on January 9, 2017.

• The Urban Monk - https://theurbanmonk.com/the-secret-life-of-fat-with-sylvia-tara/

  The Secret Life of Fat with Sylvia Tara
  JANUARY 13, 2017 BY TAMARYN JOHNSON

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  Fat Facts You Didn’t Know
  Think you know about fat? Think again! This is fat as we have never encountered it before. Dr. Sylvia Tara PhD presents us with astonishing information about fat that everyone needs to know in order to truly take their weight and health into their own hands, naturally.

  Fat Is An Organ
  Fat is so much more than an annoying by-product of too many donuts, contrary to popular belief. Likewise, losing it is not just about counting carbs or increasing your weekly exercise. Yeah, that got our attention too! Fat is a metabolically active organ: it produces hormones, tells the fat in your blood where to go, responds to the toxins in your environment and even controls the way you think about food. Bit scary, right?

  Discover Your Unique Best Diet
  Dr. Tara stresses that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to fat loss. If we really want to lose weight and be healthy, we must be our own guinea pigs. Experimentation, documentation and keeping an open mind will get you much further than the next explosion of diet pills onto the market ever could. She also highlights that there could even be bizarre outside influences that you may need to take into account…such as a virus transmitted by chickens that could lead to increased weight gain as we age!

  Fat Is Your Friend
  Landing one jaw-dropping truthbomb after the next, Dr. Tara helps us understand that fat is not only a fact of life, but a highly necessary one. Lusting after a bikini body may not be the best way to think about your health goals (even though we are ALL guilty). Being honest with yourself and thinking realistically is the way to go. Do you really need to lose those last few pounds? Or are you competing with Vera Wang models again?

  Even Though We Don't Value Fat In Our Bodies, Nature Is Trained To Protect It. - @SylviaTaraPhD via @PedramShojai
  Interview Notes From The Show:
  – Hey welcome back to the Urban Monk. I am live in studio, yay, real people, with Sylvia Tara, who is local as well, and so welcome, welcome, welcome.

  – Thank you.

  – You are, there’s a book called The Secret Life of Fat. I’m really excited to talk about this because she went on a journey to discover what all the stuff is about with fat. And so you are a researcher by trade. Give us a little bit of your background.

  – So yeah, I’m a scientist by training. I have my PhD in biochemistry. I studied actually neurology, an Alzheimer’s degree as a graduate student. I then got an MBA and I went to the business side of biotechnology and the business side of science, and I’ve been there for probably around 16, 17 years now. And I became very interested in fat just because I gain it actually quite easily, and my fat acts a little bit differently than other people’s do. I gain easier, it’s a little softer, I don’t get rid of it very easily, and I had this experience of going on diets where I would lose a few pounds, not much more. Sometimes I could even gain weight on a diet, and I got really tired of this and I thought, I have to understand fat once and for all. I have to know why it’s acting this way, why my fat acts differently, and I went on a five year mission to research fat. I pulled a lot of scientific articles, about over a thousand, researched dozens of researchers around the world about what they were finding out about fat. And what I found out was so astounding that I decided I’m gonna capture it all in the book and share it with everybody.

  – It took five years. You interviewed the who’s who.

  – [Sylvia] Of the who’s who.

  – You went through all the pub med–

  – [Sylvia] Yes.

  – And we talked about this offline right before we got going. It’s like there’s so many of these young, 23 year old meatheads talking about, here’s what you gotta do to lose weight. It just doesn’t apply to everybody.

  – Right.

  – So what have you found?

  – What have I found? Well the first thing to really know about fat is that fat’s not just fat, it’s not just sitting there. It’s not just a reserve of calories, and you don’t wanna get rid of all of your fat. And this was the most surprising thing to me, is that fat is actually an endocrine organ, meaning that it makes hormones and it releases them into your bloodstream and it has a vast impact on a lot of different organs in your body. For example, fat affects your immune system. If you get too low of fat, you’re not as strong with your immune system. Fat affects reproduction. Women with too low of a body fat actually can’t conceive, they can’t get pregnant. You can’t even go through puberty if you don’t have enough fat. Our brains are linked to fat, brain size, brain weight, it’s linked to how much fat we have. So through the hormones it emits, fat’s having a great impact on our body and because fat is so important, nature wants to protect it. So even though we don’t value our fat, we wanna get rid of our fat, nature doesn’t, and our bodies don’t. And fat has ways to fight back, and this is what people really need to know. It’s actually a very clever organ inside of us. So through one hormone it makes, leptin, fat can affect our satiation, our appetite, and it affects our metabolism. So we have normal levels of fat, we’re pretty satiated overall and our metabolism is strong. When you lose fat you lose leptin, and with less leptin your appetite really increases, your metabolism goes lower. You get a preoccupation with food, and in that way, fat is fighting to come back. Nature’s trying to protect fat, trying to keep it at the set point that we have. So the effect doesn’t really go away, as far as people can tell. It’s been studied for up to six years, and people have that effect for six years. So anyone who has yo-yo dieted, lost some weight, they actually have to eat less, fewer calories than someone who is naturally at that weight to begin with because their metabolism is affected, probably around 22% fewer calories than someone naturally at that weight to begin with. So really fighting obesity, fighting fat, it’s a life-long endeavor. Losing it is not easy and staying at that weight will take chronic effort.

  – Well yeah, and as witnessed by the gajillions of people who are dieting every day of their lives. It’s hard. Okay, so we have this thing called visceral fat, which is bad, I think we can all agree it’s bad, yes?

  – Yes, it’s bad, the fat that’s underneath the stomach wall, nestled next to your internal organs. It tends to get very crowded, it gets inflamed, it sends out inflammatory signals, and that interferes with insulin and insulin-signalling. And it’s that type of fat that’s really linked with cardiovascular disease and diabetes and a number of different health issues. There’s subcutaneous fat, that fat that’s right under your skin. That is a healthier fat deposit, away from your belly. There’s all kinds of other fat. There’s brown fat, right, that’s another type. Brown fat’s very interesting. Instead of storing energy it’s burning energy, and so we have brown fat around our heart, around our neck, around our spine. And then there’s a newly-discovered beige fat that can turn brown, and it turns brown when we exercise, that’s a stimulator for that, and even cold exposure. So we have fat all over. There’s fat in our brain, myelin, which I’m sure you know is wrapping parts of our nerve cells to help signal conduction, primarily made of fat. So really fat is a critical component of your body and there’s different types.

  – So too much of a good thing? Sounds like the era that we’re in. So we have good fats. I was telling you before we even started the show, I actually feel better wearing about five, 10 extra pounds. You know, when I was under 10% body fat I was a little, just a little more anxious, a little bit more hungry all the time. I just wasn’t as settled, and you know I just, I’m very at ease having a couple of extra pounds on. So it’s less sightly I guess, but I don’t care because I can still beat guys up and down the basketball court. So at what point does it matter? At what point does it become pathology? At what point do you have to worry? I know for men they say if your waist goes past size 40, there’s always those numbers people throw around.

  – It’s very different for everybody. There’s the case of sumo wrestlers that I write about in my book, and these are people who are 300 and 400 pounds. And metabolically they’re healthy, believe it or not, and it’s because they exercise seven to eight hours a day. And what that does really is it increases another hormone that fat releases is adiponectin. When we exercise, actually fat will increase more adiponectin. And adiponectin, it’s a guide for fat in your blood. It tells it to come home, come home to fat. It helps clear your blood and puts circulating fats in subcutaneous fat tissue. And so because of all the exercise they do these sumo wrestlers are actually quite healthy. They don’t have metabolic disease at least.

  – Because the fat in the bloodstream is the real dangerous side effect.

  – Yeah, and that’s where if you let it roam around your blood, it’s gonna deposit in other places. It will deposit in your heart, it will deposit in your liver, places it’s not really supposed to be. You want your fat to be in fat tissue. In fact there’s some genes were people are predisposed to having more fat cells, and they thought they would be less healthy. Well what they found, they’re more healthy, because their blood is very clear. It’s just a sign that their bodies are clearing fats out of the blood and they’re putting them in subcutaneous tissue. So you know, it depends on where your fat is. If it’s a lot of visceral fat that’s going to be more of a problem. But fat in itself is not necessarily a sign of health. That being said I’m not promoting obesity with my book. I think that is an issue not just for metabolic disease, but for your bones and the stress on your body. But I think 10 extra pounds like you say you have, I think that’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as your fat’s in the right place.

  – So that’s the question. A, okay, where is fat in the right place? How does one determine that? Like do I go to my doctor and say hey, what’s my visceral fat versus my straight fat? Like how do I know this?

  – So one way to test for visceral fat is you lie on your back and you look at your belly. And when you’re lying down if your belly is still protruding like this, then that’s probably visceral fat under your stomach wall. If it flattens when you lie down, then you’ve probably got subcutaneous fat there and it’s not as bad. So that’s one way to test for visceral fat. You can see where it is too on your profile. If it’s more in your hips, your thighs, your buttocks, that’s safer deposits to have. You might still wanna reduce it just for the way you look and how you feel about how you look, and those are different issues than where is it really dangerous fat for your body or not.

  – Okay, so if it’s dangerous, it’s dangerous, and you’ve gotta do something, but as we mentioned earlier, for you weight loss is very different than it is for me, which is very different for, say, Sean or Laura. Everyone in this room as a different kind of set point.

  – [Sylvia] Right.

  – Age, genetics, all of it. So how does one look at weight loss, given this milieu, right?

  – Yeah, well I think it’s a number of things. Any diet, anything you do, it has to work for you biologically. Your body has to feel good with it, it has to work for whatever biological profile you are. It has to work for you psychologically. There might be things you want to eat or refuse to eat, and they can’t be in your diet profile, and it has to work for your lifestyle. Some of these very complicated diets where it’s special ingredients, you have to shop, you have to prepare, it’s not gonna work for someone who is busy. All those things really have to come together for you, and depending on where you are in your life and with your body, you know, if you’re middle-aged you’re going to diet very differently than someone who is 22 and has tons of testosterone and growth hormone that’s burning up fat all the time. So figuring out where on the spectrum you are, there’s a number of things. One is, how is your health? Do you have metabolic disease? Do you have to get rid of some fat? Get rid of dietary fat and make sure you exercise so that it’s deposited in the right place. What size do you really need to fit into? Part of it’s just being realistic about the goal. Do you really have to look like you did at 22? Do you really have to look like a bikini model or an athlete? And just being realistic about where it is you belong. I think that will help too. I do think the diet industry gives us unrealistic goals and unrealistic promises. You’ve heard so much about eat this and lose 10 pounds, do this and lose another 20 pounds, and if you do you’ll look like this, and they put this up. It is a great way to sell diet books. It’s something everybody wants and is led to believe they should have, but in truth, your lifestyle, your level of fat in your diet have to work for you in so many ways. And like we said, you can be 10 pounds, 15 pounds over and it might not be the end of the world for you.

  – Your overall health markers are fine. Let’s talk about resting versus active metabolic rate. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of research on that. If your RMR drops and it’s lower, you’re not metabolizing as well, if your VO2 Max doesn’t get there, so I’d love for you to just kinda tease this out a little bit because this is where the ex phys guys really hang their hats, right? It’s just getting it to that fat-burning zone, living there, just kinda staying there to maximize the fat burning.

  – Yeah, you can, and again it depends on how much fat you want. If you’re really a body builder, you’re performing, you want very low fat, all those things are gonna be important for you. To be honest I don’t go into that level of detail when I diet. What I have learned and I really like is intermittent fasting, I find works really well. That’s a way to extend the growth hormone release and burn fat. It also releases testosterone and other things that you get, you know, from overnight, and exercise is a very good way to do it as well. So HIIT, high, uh–

  – [Pedram] Intensity Interval Training.

  Fighting Fat Is A Lifelong Endeavor. - @SylviaTaraPhD via @PedramShojai

  – Thank you for that, yeah. So that’s another one where you can burn a lot of calories really in a short time, and certain exercises, like strength-building exercises, actually release growth hormone and testosterone and help you burn some fat. Long bouts of aerobic exercise will help as well to release growth hormone. So I’m not actually as technical on it as that. I don’t feel like I have to be, but I think if you’re really competing and you want 8% body fat or something like that, then you would want to into that level.

  – And that’s different math. So we mentioned HIIT, we mentioned intermittent fasting. These things have become very vogue, right? And I know people that have very challenged adrenal profiles that are water fasting, and their blood sugar is not that stable and so, and at some point it starts to be a law of diminishing returns. It’s like you’re to minimize calories but you’re elevating cortisol. So let’s talk about cortisol and what it does.

  – Okay, so cortisol is a stress hormone. Having too much of it is linked with visceral fat, you have more fat. It gets in the way of other hormones as well, which is an issue. A lot of things we do in our life release cortisol. Driving in traffic releases cortisol. So I don’t know if it’s realistic to say I’m gonna try to really minimize cortisol. We have stress in our life. But what you said about fasting and being right for people, again, that’s where the psychological and does this diet work for you socially, for your life work for you as well? It works for me and that’s because I don’t like to be so careful about what I have to eat. I’m not gonna someone who eats only 20 ingredients and won’t eat anything else. I find with intermittent fasting I can more or less eat what I want around lunchtime, maybe a snack at three, and as long as I don’t eat I don’t accumulate fat. So if it stresses you out though, and talking to other trainers who advocate intermittent fasting, they say the same things. Don’t do it, if this isn’t right for you, don’t do it. There’s a lot of other ways you can diet and eat that hopefully don’t produce that kind of stress. So another method is you take smaller meals during the day. If that works for you, that’s fine. I work and I’m busy, that doesn’t really work for me. I like to eat, be done, but that’s another way to spread it out. You can do fasting at different times of day. Skip your morning, skip until lunch and then eat at night if you need to. So I think the diet has to work in all dimensions and if one is causing stress, it’s too hard to be on, clearly it’s not going to work for the long term.

  – And that’s usually where we’re at, is people will diet, get to a goal or not, and then be like, look at me, here’s my selfie, and then go back to life as normal because you can’t live that way, so it’s unsustainable. So you know, it’s like, oh man remember back in 2002 I looked so damned good!

  – [Sylvia] Yeah.

  – What good does that do if you can’t live there? So let’s talk about some sensible approaches. Caloric restriction, how much calorie counting is necessary?

  – Yeah, that’s a good question, especially with all the talk about fat and the satiation factor of fat, and so that was always given a lot of calories on the calorie count but it’s not so bad to eat it anymore. So I think, again it depends on your body type. It’s hard to say for anyone. I know for me, I do a very low-calorie type of diet, so it’s usually around 1200 calories or lower, and that seems to work for me. And I think the way to take it is you do your own analysis, treat it like you are a scientist. You have a spreadsheet, this is what I do. I have a spreadsheet. I write down what I eat and when, about how many calories, and I have an idea of the protein and carbohydrate content. And I use that over time to hone that, and I could notice what was making me gain or making me retain weight versus when I could lose weight. And I did this for months at a time. This is how I honed in onto fasting really works because I could see when I ate later in the day, after six or seven, I didn’t lose weight and I would gain weight. I also noticed there’s some things I can eat and it doesn’t bother me, I don’t gain weight. It’s supposed to make me gain weight, I can eat chocolate, surprisingly, and I actually don’t gain weight off chocolate. I could have a cookie and I will gain a pound and a half the next day. And so these things, it’s very different for everybody. In fact there’s very good research that came out of Israel at the Weizmann Institute, where Eran Segal did this study where he had people eat various foods. He would test their blood for a blood sugar spike. And he noticed some people could eat a muffin, some people have liquor, and they were fine. There was no blood sugar spike. Other people couldn’t do that, their bodies would react. So that’s where the individualization of a diet is really important. What works for me, I could give people my formula, but I’m hoping not everyone has to do it as hard as I do, has to be as restrictive as I do. I think you just have to hone in, what diet works for you? The more you know about what’s in The Secret Life of Fat, what I’m hoping it allows people to do is tailor a diet plan for what works for them. So if there’s a certain diet you like but you’re not losing weight, the knowledge that’s in the book hopefully helps you figure out why that might be, why you’re gaining more, where you are in your life, and what things you can do to ratchet back and make that diet work. Oftentimes it’s to do with, you know, carbohydrates, it has to do with sugar, it has to do with the time of day that you eat and just how much you’re eating in general.

  – Which means you have to kind of step in and be accountable for your own life, and so the challenge with most of these diets is, tell me what to do. Just tell me what to do, oh that worked or it didn’t work, I’m a winner or a loser, and it’s a very binary system and it’s very disempowering. So you’re actually asking people to think, how dare you? Oh my goodness! So when I hear this, I know that there are a lot, so you’re saying okay, so bringing up growth hormone, bringing up testosterone are also ways to bring up metabolic rate, burn more fat, make you more efficient.

  – [Sylvia] Right.

  – And so immediately what I hear is, especially where we live, all these Newport Beach doctors that are like, “I got testosterone!”

  – Ah yes, yes.

  – Right, it’s like, don’t worry about it. I have this injectable that’s going to, so let’s talk about what that does to the cells and what that does to us then having to be dependent on external testosterone supplementation.

  – First thing I’ll say about that is it’s a viable source.

  – It works.

  – Right, if we’re gonna use diet pills or we’re gonna do bariatric surgery, well then hormones are just another way of medical intervention around your weight. It does work, and in fact I write a couple profiles of people who’ve taken it and the results they have is pretty good. It is not sustainable for the long run, because after awhile the risk-benefit profile doesn’t really work. They start to have some health risks as you go on with age and you still take those. There’s also ways to do it naturally, and that’s what I opted for. And living in Southern California, I’m always tempted to walk in and get a dose of growth hormone or some such thing and not have to worry about it.

  – It’s around every corner, yeah. The nail spa has it, you know, it’s everywhere.

  – Right! But really, I chose for some pretty harsh exercise, and I feel it, I feel different. If I do strength type of exercise, strength-building exercise three times a week, my energy is really high, right? Libido is even higher, and the things, I can feel that there’s a difference in my hormone profile. So it’s expensive to use hormones in that way. If you go to a clinic there are some risks to doing it. There are ways to naturally do it. But I think if people get to a stage where they’re overweight, it’s really hard, and they want a medical intervention, there’s all kinds of things you can do and hormones are one type of those things.

  – So the elephant in the room is stress, because I know people that will go get testosterone and still aromatize and have higher estrogen and higher DHT and not really be reaping the benefits there. Stress is really hard to not have in a conversation around weight. What did you find with cortisol? What did you find with stress?

  – Yeah, so stress, I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t know that we avoid stress in our lives. I mean, if you’re raising kids or you have a job or you’re paying your bills, whatever it is, we have stress. I think stress does really factor into our self-control and willpower, and I do write about that. Managing stress, people who have chronic stress, they tend to eat more and they have less self-control. You do not manage stress as well when you have an overwhelming amount. In fact there was an article in the New York Times where candy sales went really high around the recession. In fact, every big company was losing money except for candy companies, they were actually selling. So people want to give into stress. You know, clearly if you can reduce some stresses in your life or even learn to manage stress better, that’s gonna help you through. I know even though I’m careful, if I really have a deadline, if I’m going up against something or I’m high-stress, I’m not as careful those times as I am in other times. The other way to do it is if your stress goes up and down, is you might give in while you’re around a lot of stress, you know, just get back on it right afterward. And this is one of the things successful dieters do very, very well, is that they tend to not go off their diet much ever, not on holidays or ever. I have a tip in there for the five tips of successful dieters, but that’s one really strong component. They have really strong willpower. It becomes habit. And that’s another thing you can do. The more you ingrain something, the more you do it every day, it becomes non-stressful. It’s now a habit and you’re not thinking about it as much. So it’s hard at the beginning, but the chapter on willpower I think will help because there’s ways to make stress less. One is temptation bundling, where if something is hard to do you pair it with an activity that’s really fun to do. And people going to the gym, they had them go to the gym a number of times and they were allowed to have a novel of their choice, an audiobook of their choice. And other people, they were allowed to go freely one group, and one group it was restricted, they could only have that novel if they worked out. And the group that could only have it when they worked out, they actually lost more weight, they stayed at the gym more, and they actually opted to continue doing it afterward. It was that much of a lure for them to do this. So try that, try pairing good with bad. Give yourself a break. Chronic stress is much harder. If you actually put in fun, engineer fun into your life and release a little stress it’ll help you with the ebbs and peaks and just help you get a break from constant stress.

  – What about, there’s a lot of new information coming out, a lot of old information coming new, around using heat, like hormesis and things that are kind of stimulators. They get the body to kind of react and get into kind of a safe crisis mode, to then, I don’t know if that was in the fat literature, if you looked at any of that.

  – I haven’t, what I did look at was cold exposure.

  – [Pedram] Which is a hormetic stressor as well.

  – Okay, which is producing brown fat, then getting your brown fat active, and that’s actually turning some of your beige fat into brown as well. So that’s one of the things that’s used, in fact there’s all kinds of fun things going on with brown fat now, even injecting brown fat into white fat to try to get it to take and burn more calories. So yeah, some of that I looked at, and I think those are interesting and probably work and can maybe even replace exercise at some point if you just get enough of those stressors and get your fat to get active.

  – How much of it is sedentary lifestyle? I mean, it’s hard. We’re sitting right now. It’s hard to not sit in the world we’re in, like I’m on a plane tomorrow morning. I can’t walk around.

  – Yeah, now that’s a big factor for your health overall. I know so many benefits to exercise. It’s not just the amount of fat you have, it’s how much brown fat your get, how much lean muscle and lean mass that you get, in addition to the hormones that exercise produces. It’s probably something that ages us, is being very sedentary, because we have hormone decline naturally with age and then even more so because we’re not moving. And so we have an unnatural life. It’s certainly not the way it was intended to be. We were probably supposed to be walking around and exercising more, but it means you have to be more disciplined about putting exercise in. Even after I get off a plane I will go to the hotel gym and I’ll work out. And so we have this artificial life where we’re sedentary for 12 hours, and then we have a really, really active space for one hour or an hour and a half while you work out. You just have to engineer that in. It’s the life we have and it’s not gonna change.

  – Yeah, it’s really hard to change. I know people that, like, moved to Montana, but not everyone can get to do that. Montana doesn’t want everyone, right? And that’s also a big piece of it. You know, I do a lot of travel, I try to stay as active as I can, hotel rooms and all that. You just take a hit by slowing down your metabolism, you take a hit by not having access to the foods. I mean, you get salad most places nowadays, but what have you found for successful dieters that has been a habit that has been kind of consistent across the board with busy people?

  – Yeah, so I think what busy people do, the fasting approach actually works quite well and I know a lot of people who do that. They’ll just not eat very much during the day and they’ll go home and have a dinner with their spouse or something like that. But for really busy people, it is putting in exercise, having a routine as much as you can. It gets disrupted all the time because we travel and we have deadlines and presentations and things like that but every one of them that I know, they fit in at least three times a week they’ll do an hour of exercise. That keeps them quite active. They’re very good about staying away from too high of carbs. They’re educated, they’re more educated about fat in their body and the foods that they’re eating and that seems to work. Some of them, they’re just more attentive to it, so when they see their weight creeping up, they’ll quickly pull it back into order. For a lot of people it gets to a point where they see a picture of themselves as a trigger that causes them to be really serious about their weight. They see a picture and they look very heavy, heavier than they ever have in their life. There might be a diagnosis, something like that happens, or they just get to a point where they don’t want that. To me that happened more or less, there were just clothes hanging in my closet, they were a smaller size than I was at the moment and I thought this is a now or never moment. They’re either going to fit me again or I’m going to throw them away.

  Exercising Keeps Fat Out Of Your Blood Stream. - @SylviaTaraPhD via @PedramShojai

  – [Pedram] They gotta go, right.

  – They gotta go! Life’s not forever, and I have to make a decision about where, how in control do I wanna be? Do I want these to fit? And so it’s a similar moment with, I’m going to get back in control. I want those to fit and that’s the life I want to have. So it’s kind of a control over your life, feeling empowered to take on your fat, and when you feel that and it becomes important to you, you have a whole different motivation in your life. There’s a lot of controversy over food companies and are the acting responsibly with the groceries we see in the grocery store? I have a little bit of a different take on that. I think once you have the motivation to lose weight, you’ll go into the same grocery store and you’ll pick the foods that help you lose weight and stay in shape. The Cheerios and Trix are always going to be there. In fact if you go to Whole Foods, the kind of Holy Grail of healthy food and–

  – It’s filled with junk food.

  – You could get fat at Whole Foods! So the foods always going to be there.

  – Gluten-Free fat.

  – Yeah. And so it has to start with the motivation. You have to have a strong desire to keep the weight off and most people I know who stay that way, they do, either for they wanna look a certain way, they wanna be healthy. They have good control on their behavior and they can make decisions on the food they’re going to eat. And I think that is really the key for people who are busy, you know, professionals or whatever your story is, that’s the way you really stay on it. You have to have the motivation first.

  – The old story of the thirsty man who starts to dig a well and then doesn’t hit any water, so then starts over here and starts over here, that’s what I feel like a lot of these diet plans do as well. People don’t give them enough time to become a habit, to become a lifestyle, so it’s like, you know, the click-bait marketer said that if I do this crap I’ll lose 10 pounds in 10 days, and here I am, I’m only down three pounds, forget about it. So how much consistency and just kind of staying the road and understanding that it’s a long game is important in this?

  – That is really an important point, and that’s a lot of what I write about in The Secret Life of Fat. In fact, The Secret Life of Fat is best as a companion to a diet than it is a diet book unto itself. It’s like, first understand your fat, now try a diet and hopefully you’ll understand why it is or is not working for you. Because what you just said about it, you might lose weight slower, that’s the story of my life. I always lose weight slower. It takes me a lot longer to lose it. It’s because of where I am, right? It’s because of my genetics to some extent, it is probably because of the microbiome issue, and it’s because of age and the hormone level that I’m at. I’m not going to lose weight like a 25 year old is going to lose weight, and so again, having realistic expectations. Where are you in life biologically, right? There might be reasons you are losing slower than somebody else. You know, a woman will never lose as much weight as a man. Testosterone’s a major fat burner. One great study where they had people, men who exercised three times a week and those who didn’t, but they took testosterone supplements. The ones who took testosterone supplements had lost more weight and gained more muscle mass than the ones who were exercising. So hands down, you guys are gonna lose weight more. All those different components have to come in. When you start a diet, understand your fat, understand the body, understand the ways we’re getting fat, and that will help you stay on a diet. Hopefully it helps you after a few months if that’s not working, understanding why not and why it might not be a good diet for you. What I have learned from talking to dieters and talking to some physicians, too is that it’s harder. Some people take very drastic measures, and so much of the diet literature tells you that you’re not supposed to have to do that. This is supposed to be easy, you’re supposed to be full all the time and if you’re not, you’re doing something wrong, you’re not following the plan right. The truth is, not everyone can do that. Some people have to be hungry. Some people have to really restrict longer, they have to exercise more. Luckily we do reset after awhile so if you’re able to stay on that for some months it does get easier with time. The habits form and your body gets used to it, but these one size fit all diets, they just, they don’t work. It makes for great selling of diet books, it’s an easy message, you can get it out there, you’re making these promises, people want something easy. But it doesn’t do a lot for really solving obesity and overweight, and we see that. We spend 60 billion dollars a year in the U.S. on trying to fight fat and we’re not really winning, and it’s because a lot of these easy tricks just don’t really work.

  – No, well, it’s a great business. Arms dealers need wars, right? That’s the dark side of the health industry. The other dark side is almost every health guru I know, not almost but, but a lot of them, male and female, they’re all taking testosterone. Do my diet, look like me, right?

  – Yeah, that’s right.

  – So there’s a lot of that kind of dirty laundry that people aren’t talking about, is that they’re on hormone replacement and then, you know, they gotta stay on it and they get all the problems and the fall-out. It’s really, it’s not pretty, so what we wanna do is just bring on this conversation for normal people who are tired of the crap, right? There’s a lot of talk about obesogens and so the endocrine disrupting hormone compounds that are found in household cleaning products, XYZ. What’d ya find?

  – That’s a great story, and I do cover that in The Secret Life of Fat. So obesogens, especially proestrogen, the mimic estrogen in a way, and when we get too much of that our body produces a protein called sex hormone binding globulin, and that clears out the proestrogen. The problem is that it also clears out testosterone, too. And so we have less testosterone, we are burning less fat and we get heavy. I tell a great story of a man named Jerry, who, he was a thrill-seeker, a thrill-seeker athlete, and he used to jump out of helicopters and just have this great exciting life. He came into a doctor’s office and he was just feeling down. He had gained weight. Even though he ramped up his exercise he was gaining some weight. And through a series of tests the doctor noticed that he had proestrogen in his blood, and they had to go through his life, a whole life questionnaire. He had recently gotten married and his wife was cooking hot food and putting it into plastic containers, and plastic has some of these proestrogen and obesogens in it. And then he was taking it and microwaving it in the container the next day, so he was getting a lot of BPA and different things in his blood that was affecting his metabolism. He changed to glass containers and he started feeling better. He started losing weight again. He was able to go out bungee jumping and do all the things that he does. So in large amounts they can have an effect. And you know, some of the cosmetics, some of the parabens, the preservatives in there, certain plants, plastics, pesticides, all these have that in, so you do have to be careful about how you’re making your food, how you’re treating it, and what you’re eating. But it’s pretty interesting.

  – But so here’s what I’m hearing right now. This is what people in our live audience and people that are listening are going to be hearing selectively, is, oh, proestrogen, I’m going to swap out my Tupperware and then all of the sudden all my problems go away. It’s like, no, you probably still need to exercise, eat right. You know what I’m saying? It’s like, oh there’s the one thing, and it’s kind of the everything is what I’m hearing. You have to have a comprehensive approach.

  Fat Itself Isn't Bad. We Need TO Stop Shaming Ourselves - @SylviaTaraPhD via @PedramShojai

  – You have to. You have to think of all different components of what’s making you gain weight, especially as you get older because there’ll be more of them in your life as you get older. Stress, we talked about a lot, we’ve talked about hormones, we’ve talked about just how life changes, and that’s what’s different about The Secret Life of Fat. A lot of these books, they’re very one-dimensional. So much is low-carb, right? If you haven’t learned by now, you know, carb is something that actually makes you gain weight through insulin, and that’s kind of an old story. There’s so much more to it than that, and this is very comprehensive. It takes on not only insulin, but it takes on the different hormones. It takes on the bacteria that we’re getting, even viruses we’re getting, the genetics of fat. And just how fat behaves in itself, what fat is in our body, and it’s not just sitting there, it’s not just this empty reserve of calories. It’s doing things, it’s active, it’s metabolic, it has hormones, it knows how to fight for its survival, it knows how to control our thoughts about food, even, through leptin, it is clearing our blood of adiponectin, sorry, clearing it of fats through adiponectin, and so it’s very complicated, it’s very sophisticated. There’s other ways we get fat. Think of all these things if a diet’s not working for you, if you have stubborn fat, if you’re just feeling frustrated that you’ve tried a bunch of things and they’re not working. Once you know all this though, there’s not a substitute for the work, right? You still have to watch what you eat.

  – [Pedram] Sorry.

  – Yeah, but at least you’ll know why things aren’t working and you can ratchet up or down depending on what it is you’re finding out.

  – You mentioned a couple things that I think are just starting to surface, or at least in the popular literature starting to surface, is the role of bacteria and virus. Fascinating. Let’s get a little bit of that.

  – All right, so we’re surrounded by bacteria. From the time we are born we start getting bacteria on our skin, in our gut, and any kind of opening that we have in our body. And so, they have a function. We actually have more bacterial cells than human cells in our body, so we’re more bacteria than we are human in some way. They have a, it’s a symbiotic relationship, so in our gut they actually help us extract calories out of our food, they help us digest things that we normally could not. And depending on the microbiome you have, you might be getting more calories out of your food versus less. So a bowl of cereal, it might say 100 calories for the bowl, but depending on what you’ve got in your gut, you could be getting 120 or you could be getting 80 calories out of that. The good news is that it can change. It’s not static. So when we eat different things, if we eat a lot of fats and carbohydrates we have one type of microbiome, which means a collection of bacteria in our gut. If we start eating a lot more fruits and vegetables and fiber, we have a different kind of microbiome. And it’s that microbiome, that’s with fruits and vegetables, that actually is more of a leaner profile of microbiome, so it’s associated with more leanness. So we can change it. So it’s almost like fat begets fat. It’s like the more of the high-calorie fats that you eat the more your microbiome extracts all that out and puts fat on you, versus when you’re eating more fibrous foods that are hard to digest, even bacteria can’t necessarily get at it and extract those calories, and that tilts towards a more lean kind of profile of microbiome in your gut.

  – But if you, okay, so if you start to shift the math and you start getting more, you know, fruits and vegetables in your diet, you start gaming towards more of those bacteria, then when you eat fat are those bacteria as efficient at breaking down that fat? So they help with the fat absorption as well, or are they just like, hey, we’re on this side of the fence, we don’t know what to do with you?

  – We have a spectrum of bacteria, you never just have one. In fact, the more diversity you have, that’s also associated with leanness, a great diversity of bacteria. And so you’ll always have the ones that can do fat, but as you get more fibrous, those ones that like fiber and deal with fiber, they’re going to grow. And those types of bacteria are associated more with the lean profile, the lean body type. But viruses are another interesting thing and I touch on this, is that I think this really worries people because viruses are harder to control. But viruses associated with fat have been known about for a long time. So in mice, canine distemper virus caused fat, and that’s been known about since the 80s andvirus causes fat in chicken. They found one that causes it, it seems to be correlated with humans as well, it’s Ad-36, and what they find is people who have ever had this virus have a three or four-fold greater risk of obesity than people who haven’t had it. And so this virus, the way it works is it actually produces more fat molecules, and it produces more fat cells. And I actually profile somebody who had this virus, he tested positive for having carried it, struggled with his weight a lot, and he’s one of the people who’s a little bit like me, can’t eat very much. He calls himself not part of the eating world, he has to really restrict his calories, he has to exercise a lot, more than most people around him, and he’s like a six foot one guy, right, who has to run and do a lot of things. So the little critters that are all over the world, we accumulate them, they come onto us, and they affect how we metabolize food, they affect what we do with fat when it comes in or how much fat we even create. And all these things you have to know about to understand why you might be getting more or less fat than somebody else.

  – Yeah, well, and the plot thickens, right? We’ve got a question that Sean’s been waiting on from our audience, go ahead.

  – So I have one from Weston. He says, “What was the most surprising case study “from all of your research that you did?”

  – Yeah, that’s a good one. I think it probably was the Randy character with the virus. That was a really interesting one. So he had gotten scratched. The story is that the man who started to really elucidate Ad-36 and what it does to the body was actually from India, and he noticed this in chickens, that chickens were getting really fat after they got this virus called SMAM-1 in India. And he got, he was an obesity doctor and he got so interested in this he decided to quit his practice and just research this full-on. He decided to come to America because that’s really where the research was happening at the time. He started looking for the SMAM virus, they didn’t have it in America. He got the Ad-36 virus, it seemed to do the same thing, and through a lot of obstacles he was able to get the virus, research it, and during this time he’s researching it there’s this man Randy who’s struggling with his fat the whole time. He had grown up in the Midwest and he had gotten scratched by a rooster when he lived on a farm, and about around that time he started noticing he was really hungry all the time and that he was gaining more weight than he did in the past. They had these parallel lives for awhile with one doing the research on the virus and the other one getting fatter and fatter and not knowing what to do, and they finally intersect because one of his doctors, Randy’s doctors, learns about this research going on at University of Wisconsin and sends Randy to this doctor. His name is Nikhil Dhurandhar. And they finally test him and they find he’s positive for this virus. After he learns this, life starts to make sense to Randy. He’s like, this is why. This is why I gain weight–

  – Damn rooster!

  -You know, it’s not just me, I’m not just this loser, like there’s reasons for this, and he learns about set points, he learns about all the biology around fat, and it empowers him. He finally realizes what he has to do, that he has to just exercise in droves and he has to eat a lot less than other people, and he gets his life under control in a way, but he understands that this is a change that happened in his life, and this is probably the reason why he’s got such a higher risk of obesity, and he’s just gotta work at it much harder than anyone else.

  – And this isn’t a virus that you can just annihilate. It’s something that kind of stays with you, so there’s no cure for this virus.

  – That’s right, I mean there could be a vaccine in the future to prevent it, but the people who have it–

  – [Pedram] Carry it.

  – Yeah, they carry it. And it’s not, it might not be that rare. I think there was one study done with 1500 people and they found that around 20% were positive for having carried the virus.

  – Are these people who have probably a history of, say, rural agricultural, you know, life? Or is it not necessarily just out of chickens?

  – Not necessarily. In fact, the transmission from chickens to humans is not completely known, it’s not totally studied yet. So whether Randy got that from the rooster or not, it’s not completely verified. These people, it was actually done in the Air Force. It was a study in the Air Force personnel. They took 1500 people, they tested them for the virus, and they followed them for 10 years. Over the 10 years people who had tested positive had gained more weight than the people who weren’t by about three or four-fold. And so it does have an effect on your life and the ease with which you gain weight.

  – How do you test for the virus? Is it common?

  – No it’s not. It’s actually, it’s not a commercially-available test. I think Richard Atkins and one of the doctors that I write about has this test but you have to, it’s cumbersome. You have to give them the blood sample, they’ll test it and send it back, but it’s not widely available right now.

  – If you do have it then the same kind of general immunology hygiene that applies to anything applies, which is do things that keep your immune system healthy so your viral load is controlled and all that, but at the end of the day, you’ve got it.

  – Yeah, and it’s not completely known how it’s transmitting. So, you know, can you get sneezed on and get fat? No one really knows. Is it like getting a cold? It’s not the end of the world, so I don’t want to scare people into thinking oh my goodness, I might get obesity from a virus! If you have it, you just, you work a little bit harder, that’s all, and you have to be aware that you have it, be careful. One of the most important things I learned in the book, as I wrote the book as well was that getting fat is much harder than never being fat, right? One is that once you lose fat, your metabolism is lower, you seek food more, you’re eating about 22% fewer calories than before that. In a way it’s like cancer. Like once you have a tumor, you’ve gotta throw a lot of things at it to get it to go away. It’s always wanting to come back. And so even if someone tested positive for a virus, it means really don’t gain weight, be very careful, watch it all the time. Once you gain it, you know, coming back is much harder than just never having had it to begin with.

  – Yeah, anyone who has gained weight can pay testament to that. You know, after your 20s, all bets are off. It’s way harder to lose the weight, so it’s much easier to avoid gaining it, absolutely. I love this conversation. I think that it’s a sensible, refreshing one, and it’s not like you’re in here, you know, kind of snapping your suspenders, saying I’ve figured out my super diet, just follow my thing. It’s hey, you gotta think about it, you gotta know what’s up, and you have to rationally understand what your odds are against whatever, and then you have a tool to then go into whatever dieting regime that you need for you. So I really appreciate that, that’s great perspective.

  Educate Yourself About The Food You're Eating. - @SylviaTaraPhD via @PedramShojai

  – [Sylvia] Great, thank you, thanks.

  – The book is called The Secret Life of Fat and you’re a PhD, Doctor Sylvia Tara, who lives locally here. And I think that this is the kind of research that needs to be done. It’s just kind of like that non-partisan, I’m looking at this for myself, not some company getting me to research their stuff.

  – Yeah, I know it’s very comprehensive. I hope people get a lot out of it.

  – Wonderful, thank you so much.

  – [Sylvia] Thank you.

  – This has been great. Let me know what you think in the chat threads, and I will see you next time. Check me out at TheUrbanMonk.com. Let me know, wherever you’re listening, give me some comments.

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sylvia-tara-143559/

5/9/17, 3)48 PM
Print Marked Items
In Defense of Fat
Robin Marantz Henig
The New York Times Book Review.
(Jan. 8, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: p23(L). From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Henig, Robin Marantz. "In Defense of Fat." The New York Times Book Review, 8 Jan. 2017, p. 23(L). PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476848956&it=r&asid=29d642cef3cdb546d3b70e824e91037d. Accessed 9 May 2017.
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The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the
Body's Least Understood Organ and What It
Means for You
ProtoView.
(Jan. 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Ringgold, Inc. http://www.protoview.com/protoview
Full Text:
9780393244830
The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You Sylvia Tara
W.W. Norton
2017
235 pages
$26.95
Hardcover
QP752
Tara, a biochemist who has worked at biotechnology companies, describes the science behind fat. She considers why some people can stay thin more easily than others, how fat works, why food affects people in different ways, and why fat is harder to control with age. She discusses the role and importance of fat in the body, research discoveries about it, and harmful effects; the roles of bacteria and viruses, genes, and gender in influencing fat; and solutions to fat control, such as exercise, diet, and willpower. ([umlaut] Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You."
ProtoView, Jan. 2017. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478231095&it=r&asid=d827e534b526cf98ca091245f63b53c4 Accessed 9 May 2017.
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The Secret Life of Fat; The Science Behind the
Body's Least Understood Organ and What It
Means for You
Melissa Wuske
ForeWord.
(Nov. 28, 2016): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
Sylvia Tara; THE SECRET LIFE OF FAT; W. W. Norton & Company (Nonfiction: Health & Fitness) 28.95 ISBN: 9780393244830
Byline: Melissa Wuske
Fat is not the antithesis of health, as this insightful book shows. The Secret Life of Fat by Sylvia Tara takes a fresh look at a taboo.
The word "fat" is so often associated with succinct, negative labels like bad and gross. But Tara shows that that's not the whole story of this bodily organ -- even the thought of it as an organ rather than a near-parasite is a revolutionary shift. Beginning from the question "Why is it easier for some people to stay thin than others?" Tara investigates the biology of fat and its vital purposes in the body, from reproduction to immunity; then she examines the genetic, dietary, and other types of influences on body fat; and finally, she offers powerful yet commonsense strategies for managing fat for health and well-being.
While this research and insight is deeply perspective-shifting, solutions are a bit less surprising, though they're empowered by new understanding of what works and, more importantly, why it works. The result is well rounded; no fad diets here. The Secret Life of Fat equips people with the knowledge and strategies they need not only to achieve physical health but also to pursue it in a mentally healthy way.
Tara's expertise in biochemistry, and her lifelong struggle to stay thin, give the book a balance between authority and friendliness. Her voice is engaging as she shares her research. The pace is quick without sacrificing depth or clarity; the book requires no in-depth background knowledge in science or health. Tara uses popular references in the introduction but, for the most part, allows this important and relevant topic to hook people on its own merit.
The book offers a refreshingly balanced view of fat: not all bad by a long shot, but certainly not the-more-the-merrier, either. This approach will appeal to health- and body-conscious people who want deep understanding more than they do easy answers. It will also prepare dietitians, physicians, and other health professionals who want to better equip those in their care to be healthy.
The Secret Life of Fat proves that fat is far from lazy and, by showing that fat is not the antithesis of health, gives hope for workable path to well-being.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wuske, Melissa. "The Secret Life of Fat; The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means
for You." ForeWord, 28 Nov. 2016. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472703257&it=r&asid=1c488d3ffa7b297fdf418a2e339d7ae2.
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Accessed 9 May 2017.
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The Secret Life of Fat: The Science behind the
Body's Least Understood Organ and What It
Means for You
Tony Miksanek
Booklist.
113.4 (Oct. 15, 2016): p7. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Secret Life of Fat: The Science behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You. By Sylvia Tara. Dec. 2016. 288p. Norton, $26.95 (9780393244830). 613.
Blubber. Flab. Even fat's alternative names sound disgraceful. Adipose is surely the most scorned, obsessed with, and misunderstood tissue in the human body. Billions are spent battling it. Yet fat is positioned somewhere between friend and foe. Biochemist Tara gives readers the skinny on fat in a lively discussion that incorporates sumo wrestlers, a bloated diet industry, genetics, and leptin (the satiety hormone). Fat is an organ and a component in the endocrine system with multiple functions: storing energy, releasing hormones, facilitating puberty, generating heat, and providing insulation. Tara explains that too much fat is linked with lots of health problems (diabetes, heart disease, even cancer), and she covers methods of controlling fat, including exercise, proper eating, intermittent fasting, and managing your microbiome. She summarizes current adipose research; for example, "infectobesity" is the theory that some viruses and bacteria can cause excess fat production. Tara emphasizes the importance of keeping body fat in a normal range and appreciating adipose for its physiological worth. Readers will discover that, regardless of body size and shape, fat does some heavy work on our behalf.--Tony Miksanek
Miksanek, Tony
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Miksanek, Tony. "The Secret Life of Fat: The Science behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means
for You." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 7. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771169&it=r&asid=334cd773a2a7bd627c2ef283dcced3a4. Accessed 9 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468771169
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Tara, Sylvia: THE SECRET LIFE OF FAT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 15, 2016): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Tara, Sylvia THE SECRET LIFE OF FAT Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $28.95 12, 27 ISBN: 978-0-393-24483-0
Americans spend more money on the war against fat than the war against terror. As Tara writes, "we are indeed a nation at war with a body part."After the birth of her second child, the author, who has a doctorate in biochemistry and has served as a consultant for major biotech companies, struggled to hold her weight in check with a combination of diet and exercise in order to pass what she describes as the "skinny jeans" test. From her adolescence, dieting and exercise had become an obsession but not a solution, and Tara was on a roller coaster, losing extra pounds on a starvation diet and then gaining them back just by eating dinner. Her professional training fueled her determination to find out why she gained weight while her friends, who ate more and exercised less, remained thin. Examining a variety of scientific studies, she made a surprising discovery. Experiments revealed what she calls "the obesity paradox," which showed how fat plays an important part in maintaining our overall health. While obesity is a contributing factor to heart disease, the survival rate after heart failure is better for people with "a higher body mass index and higher fat." Tara also discovered new reports suggesting the possibility that obesity is the result of a viral infection. Ongoing research has identified people with an antibody to the virus who gained significantly greater body mass over a 10-year period. Researchers have also found that fat stores stem cells, which play a vital role in replacing bone, muscle, and cartilage in the body. For Tara, this provides a convincing explanation of why there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of maintaining a healthy weight. The author ably combines an accessible explanation of how the body's metabolism works with a clear survey of the latest research on obesity. A book that should have wide appeal, not only to those fighting the battle of the bulge.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tara, Sylvia: THE SECRET LIFE OF FAT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466329150&it=r&asid=7fa9d2332c69cd478d1b15a648563b38. Accessed 9 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466329150
about:blank Page 6 of 8
5/9/17, 3)48 PM
Sylvia Tara: THE SECRET LIFE OF FAT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 15, 2016): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Sylvia Tara THE SECRET LIFE OF FAT Norton (Adult Nonfiction) 28.95 ISBN: 978-0-393-24483-0
Americans spend more money on the war against fat than the war against terror. As Tara writes, “we are indeed a nation at war with a body part.”After the birth of her second child, the author, who has a doctorate in biochemistry and has served as a consultant for major biotech companies, struggled to hold her weight in check with a combination of diet and exercise in order to pass what she describes as the “skinny jeans” test. From her adolescence, dieting and exercise had become an obsession but not a solution, and Tara was on a roller coaster, losing extra pounds on a starvation diet and then gaining them back just by eating dinner. Her professional training fueled her determination to find out why she gained weight while her friends, who ate more and exercised less, remained thin. Examining a variety of scientific studies, she made a surprising discovery. Experiments revealed what she calls “the obesity paradox,” which showed how fat plays an important part in maintaining our overall health. While obesity is a contributing factor to heart disease, the survival rate after heart failure is better for people with “a higher body mass index and higher fat.” Tara also discovered new reports suggesting the possibility that obesity is the result of a viral infection. Ongoing research has identified people with an antibody to the virus who gained significantly greater body mass over a 10-year period. Researchers have also found that fat stores stem cells, which play a vital role in replacing bone, muscle, and cartilage in the body. For Tara, this provides a convincing explanation of why there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of maintaining a healthy weight. The author ably combines an accessible explanation of how the body’s metabolism works with a clear survey of the latest research on obesity. A book that should have wide appeal, not only to those fighting the battle of the bulge.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sylvia Tara: THE SECRET LIFE OF FAT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466551400&it=r&asid=aa05e547f187f8d44b95676e77819f2c. Accessed 9 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466551400
about:blank Page 7 of 8
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.
The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the
Body's Least Understood Organ and What It
Means for You
Publishers Weekly.
263.33 (Aug. 15, 2016): p65. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You Sylvia Tara. Norton, $28.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-393-24483-0
Finally, a book that sheds some light on understanding body fat--specifically, its role, why it is so difficult to fight, and how it works differently for different people. This debut book by biochemist Tara takes a hot topic and explores every avenue regarding the causes of obesity: genetics, microbes, lifestyle, race, gender, and so on. Although an incredible $60 billion was spent in the U.S. in 2014 battling fat, Tara posits that fat is actually a critical organ with an essential role to play in the endocrine system. She frankly describes her own struggles with weight, which led her to realize "we are not all created equal, at least when it comes to fat." Peppered with individual case studies, the book meticulously explains why fat isn't "one size fits all," particularly in terms of dieting. Tara recommends persistence as the main tool for dieters, combined with a diet "customized for you biologically, psychologically, and socially." This genuinely enlightening book will be a revelation to those engulfed in self-blame and shame about their weight. Hopefully, individualized weight loss will become the way of the future, leading to effective new treatments for those desperately seeking them. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You."
Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 65. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444586&it=r&asid=0d864aacac9e9d88b6a329eeedc35235 Accessed 9 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461444586
about:blank Page 8 of 8

Henig, Robin Marantz. "In Defense of Fat." The New York Times Book Review, 8 Jan. 2017, p. 23(L). PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476848956&it=r. Accessed 9 May 2017. "The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You." ProtoView, Jan. 2017. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478231095&it=r. Accessed 9 May 2017. Wuske, Melissa. "The Secret Life of Fat; The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You." ForeWord, 28 Nov. 2016. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472703257&it=r. Accessed 9 May 2017. Miksanek, Tony. "The Secret Life of Fat: The Science behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 7. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771169&it=r. Accessed 9 May 2017. "Tara, Sylvia: THE SECRET LIFE OF FAT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466329150&it=r. Accessed 9 May 2017. "Sylvia Tara: THE SECRET LIFE OF FAT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466551400&it=r. Accessed 9 May 2017. "The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You." Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 65. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444586&it=r. Accessed 9 May 2017.

• NY Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/books/review/secret-life-of-fat-sylvia-tara.html?_r=0
  Word count: 1070

  s Fat Really All That Bad? A Biochemist Explains.
  By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIGJAN. 2, 2017
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  THE SECRET LIFE OF FAT
  The Science Behind the Body’s Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You
  By Sylvia Tara
  235 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95.

  Maybe it’s because we all just slogged through a presidential campaign rife with body-shaming that I was so bothered by the fat phobia that permeates “The Secret Life of Fat.” It bills itself as a science book that will make you appreciate fat’s central role in keeping the body humming as it “secretes essential hormones, . . . keeps us safe from disease, and may even help us live longer.” But too often the author, Sylvia Tara, reveals herself to be seriously uncomfortable with fat — especially when it ends up on her own hips.

  Her interest in the subject began when she and her friend Laura went to lunch together after exercise class. Tara had spent most of her life on a diet, and she watched in amazement as willow-slim Laura actually finished her salad (Tara always brought home half of hers), and was amazed that Laura’s typical dinner was “what her kids were having,” steak or tacos or “whatever.” Tara’s typical dinner was the other half of her lunch salad.

  “I was fed up with watching everyone around me eat more, choose food indiscriminately, exercise sporadically, and yet have less fat than I did,” she writes. “There must be something more to weight gain besides ‘eating right’ and exercising.”

  Continue reading the main story
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  Continue reading the main story

  There sure is. There is the protein leptin, which fat cells secrete to suppress appetite. And the hormone ghrelin, secreted primarily by the stomach and with the opposite effect, making a person ravenously hungry. There are imbalances in the various microbes in your gut that lead some people to extract more calories from food. There are various genes that help determine your tendency to gain weight, such as a gene variation that makes you crave high-calorie food, or another that makes it harder to benefit from exercise.

  There’s also a good side of fat. It secretes adiponectin, which removes glucose, fat molecules, and toxic lipids from the bloodstream. Adiponectin helps explain why it’s possible to be fat and healthy. Doctors label it the “obesity paradox.” But it’s only a paradox if you accept the conventional wisdom that it’s the excess weight itself that is a health risk — rather than the bad habits, poverty and stressful lives that often accompany the excess weight.

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  Biology explains why it’s so hard to keep off the weight once you’ve lost it: People who are at a particular weight because of dieting metabolize food differently than people who are at that same weight naturally. “Somehow, the remaining body fat of the reduced-obese,” Tara writes, manages “to survive on fewer calories than before, as though it had found another means to thrive.”

  But while learning about the myriad ways fat manipulates our bodies in order “to preserve itself” might lead to the conclusion that we should all just adopt good health habits no matter what we weigh, Tara has a different bottom line. Even after everything she finds out about the resiliency of fat, she comes away with the firm conviction that obesity is all about willpower — and that weight loss is the ultimate goal.

  So about three-quarters of the way in, “The Secret Life of Fat” turns into a hard-core dieting book, with lengthy passages quoting internet weight-loss gurus like Karron Power and Mark Sisson, and a jaw-dropping description of Tara’s own quest to lose 30 unwanted pounds. Her program involves restricting her intake to no more than 1,000 calories a day, exercising for 30 minutes daily, and eating only between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. to assure herself a 17-hour fast every day. (She’s already told us that “intermittent fasting” releases fat-burning hormones overnight, though what’s recommended is usually a 16-hour fast for women, 14 hours for men. Later in the diet she lengthens her fast, holding off breakfast until 10.) She goes to bed every night fantasizing about club sandwiches and pizza.

  A number of hellish months later, she has lost the weight she wanted to. “I win,” she crows. “Fat has conceded territory on my body. My skinny jeans are back on. It took a battle of wills but it is done.” I can’t help wondering what she’ll be saying a year from now, after the book tour is over.

  If Tara had stuck to the science, with information about how fat can be a “benevolent friend when it functions properly,” this might have been an enlightening book. (Though then I would have felt compelled to point out how her endnotes are inadequate for anyone who really wants to follow up on some of her citations.) But as a weird hybrid of popular science and extreme how-to dieting advice, it’s harder to judge. Especially when the author herself ends up with an attitude toward her own fat that is no more sophisticated or nuanced than the one with which she started out.

  Correction: January 22, 2017
  A review on Jan. 8 about “The Secret Life of Fat,” by Sylvia Tara, misstated the bodily source of the hormone ghrelin. It is secreted primarily by the stomach, not by fat cells.

  Robin Marantz Henig is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Her most recent book, written with her daughter, Samantha Henig, is “Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?”

  A version of this review appears in print on January 8, 2017, on Page BR23 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: In Defense of Fat. Today's Paper|Subscribe

• Kirkus Reviews
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/sylvia-tara/the-secret-life-of-fat/
  Word count: 409

  THE SECRET LIFE OF FAT
  The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means For You
  by Sylvia Tara
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  KIRKUS REVIEW
  Americans spend more money on the war against fat than the war against terror. As Tara writes, “we are indeed a nation at war with a body part.”

  After the birth of her second child, the author, who has a doctorate in biochemistry and has served as a consultant for major biotech companies, struggled to hold her weight in check with a combination of diet and exercise in order to pass what she describes as the “skinny jeans” test. From her adolescence, dieting and exercise had become an obsession but not a solution, and Tara was on a roller coaster, losing extra pounds on a starvation diet and then gaining them back just by eating dinner. Her professional training fueled her determination to find out why she gained weight while her friends, who ate more and exercised less, remained thin. Examining a variety of scientific studies, she made a surprising discovery. Experiments revealed what she calls “the obesity paradox,” which showed how fat plays an important part in maintaining our overall health. While obesity is a contributing factor to heart disease, the survival rate after heart failure is better for people with “a higher body mass index and higher fat.” Tara also discovered new reports suggesting the possibility that obesity is the result of a viral infection. Ongoing research has identified people with an antibody to the virus who gained significantly greater body mass over a 10-year period. Researchers have also found that fat stores stem cells, which play a vital role in replacing bone, muscle, and cartilage in the body. For Tara, this provides a convincing explanation of why there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of maintaining a healthy weight. The author ably combines an accessible explanation of how the body’s metabolism works with a clear survey of the latest research on obesity.

  A book that should have wide appeal, not only to those fighting the battle of the bulge.

  Pub Date: Dec. 27th, 2016
  ISBN: 978-0-393-24483-0
  Page count: 288pp
  Publisher: Norton
  Review Posted Online: Oct. 5th, 2016

• Royal Society of Chemistry
  https://www.chemistryworld.com/review/the-secret-life-of-fat/2500148.article
  Word count: 371

  The secret life of fat
  Philippa Matthews BY PHILIPPA MATTHEWS4 JANUARY 2017

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  Sylvia Tara
  Blink Publishing
  2016 | 256pp | £9.99
  ISBN 9781911274001

  Buy this book from Amazon.co.uk

  The Secret Life of Fat
  In The secret life of fat Sylvia Tara deconstructs the science of fat in our bodies, and finds that it’s far more complicated than you would believe.

  Fat plays an important role in many systems, from the production of hormones to strengthening our bones, and is not just a squishy layer on our bodies, but a functioning organ that keeps us alive. However, the body’s reliance on fat for many normal functions means that the body is very good at clinging on to it. Tara explores the chemical processes involved – and what happens when things go wrong.

  Each chapter focuses on a different mechanism in our bodies that involves fat. Interviews with important figures in the field and the stories of their patients are woven into the narrative. This makes the book easy to read – I devoured it in two sittings – but it doesn’t feel dumbed down at any point. The final chapters of the book provide strategies to help tackle weight gain, which offsets the sometimes disheartening message that our bodies naturally cling to fat. The book is well researched, with an extensive bibliography of papers that lend it credibility.

  This is not a diet book. It doesn’t make promises, and there are no easy steps. This is a review of what science has discovered about fat, written for a popular audience. It aims to help us understand how our bodies work and how we can work with them, rather than following fad diets and fitness regimes to lose weight fast.

  Tara has very personal reasons for writing this book, which she lays out in the introduction, but her writing in the scientific portions is unbiased. Nutrition is a very emotive topic, but this book is based in scientific fact and is a refreshing change to the conflicting advice and opinions about food that we are subjected to every day.

• Forward Reviews
  https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/the-secret-life-of-fat/
  Word count: 481

  The Secret Life of Fat

  The Science Behind the Body's Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You

  Reviewed by Melissa Wuske
  November 28, 2016

  Fat is not the antithesis of health, as this insightful book shows.

  The Secret Life of Fat by Sylvia Tara takes a fresh look at a taboo.

  The word “fat” is so often associated with succinct, negative labels like bad and gross. But Tara shows that that’s not the whole story of this bodily organ—even the thought of it as an organ rather than a near-parasite is a revolutionary shift. Beginning from the question “Why is it easier for some people to stay thin than others?” Tara investigates the biology of fat and its vital purposes in the body, from reproduction to immunity; then she examines the genetic, dietary, and other types of influences on body fat; and finally, she offers powerful yet commonsense strategies for managing fat for health and well-being.

  While this research and insight is deeply perspective-shifting, solutions are a bit less surprising, though they’re empowered by new understanding of what works and, more importantly, why it works. The result is well rounded; no fad diets here. The Secret Life of Fat equips people with the knowledge and strategies they need not only to achieve physical health but also to pursue it in a mentally healthy way.

  Tara’s expertise in biochemistry, and her lifelong struggle to stay thin, give the book a balance between authority and friendliness. Her voice is engaging as she shares her research. The pace is quick without sacrificing depth or clarity; the book requires no in-depth background knowledge in science or health. Tara uses popular references in the introduction but, for the most part, allows this important and relevant topic to hook people on its own merit.

  The book offers a refreshingly balanced view of fat: not all bad by a long shot, but certainly not the-more-the-merrier, either. This approach will appeal to health- and body-conscious people who want deep understanding more than they do easy answers. It will also prepare dietitians, physicians, and other health professionals who want to better equip those in their care to be healthy.

  The Secret Life of Fat proves that fat is far from lazy and, by showing that fat is not the antithesis of health, gives hope for workable path to well-being.

  Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the author for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

• Live More Prudently
  http://prudently.com/2017/03/secret-life-of-fat-book-review/
  Word count: 349

  Secret Life of Fat – Book Review
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  The Secret Life of Fat – Sylvia Tara, PhD

  I remember going to a slim nutrition student in law school who thought she understood the struggles of major weight due to her own 15 or so pound weight loss. Unlike that incident you can tell Sylvia Tara has legitimately struggled with her weight throughout her life.

  The Secret Life of Fat begins with Dr. Tara’s personal observations on weight and how she noticed throughout the years that certain individuals could eat pretty much whatever they wanted. The mystery of how this could be leads her into a career examining the science behind fat and obesity.

  The book itself is very well written and easily understandable. The meat of the book covers most of the ways fat differs from a traditional strict CICO/Eat Less Move more dogma. I don’t believe I ran into any new concepts, but if you haven’t read about Leptin//Setpoint issues, obesity viruses, aging and obesity, insulin then you could greatly benefit from reading this book. It also pulls it all together very well if you’ve been reading about these concepts in varying and sundry places.

  I did get a feeling from the author that she still at least internally views the weight conundrum as at least partially self control/moral issue. I did note that she would describe researchers as thin as though emphasizing they were credible sources due to their physical appearances.

  Also, I really didn’t get a lot from the back section of the book that dealt with sustaining suitable weight loss. It’s fairly standard stuff which seems nihilistic in the face of the new data. The author incorporates some intermittent fasting, but stills seems committed to riding the CICO/eat less move more train.

  The book is available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble .

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  March 10, 2017 David Sandy
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• Discover Magazine
  http://discovermagazine.com/2017/march/secret-life-of-fat
  Word count: 3425

  Home»March»The Secret Life of Fat
  FROM THE MARCH 2017 ISSUE
  The Secret Life of Fat
  Changes in our DNA can determine much more than the battle of thick versus thin.

  By Sylvia Tara|Monday, February 06, 2017
  RELATED TAGS: PERSONAL HEALTH, NUTRITION
  69
  DSC-D0317_01
  Kenary820/Shutterstock
  It was a breezy Friday evening in the fall in San Diego. I was a biochemistry Ph.D. student out to dinner with friends after a full week of research, classes and teaching. I’d had a strong interest in biology since grade school, particularly in how the body malfunctions and the inventive ways we treat it. The idea that tiny molecules affected our health, thoughts and quality of life was fascinating to me.

  Keeping my fat in check had never been easy, and I watched my weight closely. On this day, like every other, I had counted my calories since the morning. I ate a painstakingly balanced combination of grains, proteins and vegetables. I abstained from anything fun — no sugar, carb-heavy snacks or alcohol. I had run for 40 minutes, and lifted weights. As I sat down to dinner with my friends, I held steadfast — I ordered a small salad and water. My friend, Lindsey, ordered a beer and burrito and devoured it all.

  That seemingly trivial event changed everything for me. Lindsey was 4 foot 11 inches and probably about 95 pounds. She never went to the gym. She drank sugary lattes and indiscriminately ate fast food. She worked in the lab all day like me, and hunched over a computer in the evening. Yet somehow this petite woman was able to pack in a large steak burrito, with beans, rice, sour cream, guacamole, cheddar cheese all wrapped in a flour tortilla, and then down a beer as if all this were nothing unusual. She had no guilt afterward, no appearance of worry, she made no comments about feeling sick after eating it or how she would need to run on the treadmill the next morning. Nothing.

  I felt as though nature was cackling in my face. This was one of the moments in my life that made me realize that we are not all created equal, at least not when it comes to fat. Just as some people are taller, or produce more sweat, or grow more hair, there are some who simply produce more fat than others. And one of those people happened to be me.

  The Thrifty Genotype

  We have all come to accept that our genes determine everything from the color of our eyes to the straightness of our teeth to our height, our talents, even our moods. But strangely, when it comes to fat, we tend to underestimate the effect of genetics. For the most part, fat is considered a personal failing — a punishment for lack of willpower, for eating too much, and for being too lazy to exercise and burn off those calories.

  Fortunately, science has come to the rescue by showing the many ways genes influence fat. This avenue of research is still new, since we have only recently begun to decode the mysteries of the human genome, but studies are emerging every year.

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  Pima Chief Antonio Azul led his tribe in the late 1800s, an era before Western food supplemented their diets.
  Massacres of the Mountains: A history of the Indian wars of the Far West/Jacob Piatt Dunn/harper & Brothers/1886
  A good example of how our genes can determine fatness is the story of the Pima Indians who crossed the Bering Strait from northern Asia and settled in the Americas approximately 30,000 years ago. One population of the tribe settled near the Gila River in Phoenix, Ariz., and another kept migrating south, making their home in Maycoba, Mexico. The Pima sustained themselves by tilling dry soil to grow squash, corn, beans and cotton, and by hunting small animals and other game. This lifestyle provided them a natural, well-balanced diet, and required them to get plenty of exercise.

  What worked against the Pima, however, was drought, which occurred several times each century, destroying crops and reducing animal populations. Famine would follow and only those who could withstand long bouts of hunger managed to survive. The Pima endured these conditions for millennia, and geneticists believe that, over time, their bodies evolved a “thrifty genotype” — a set of genes that enabled them to subsist on very few calories by increasing the efficiency of their metabolism and storing as much energy as possible as fat.

  For centuries, this genetic adaptation helped to maintain the population. Then, during the mid-19th century, the fate of the two Pima settlements in Phoenix and Maycoba started to diverge, with fascinating consequences. The Arizona Pima started encountering Caucasian migrants in 1850 as they made their way to California in search of gold. The Pima assisted the weary travelers, offering food and protection. The outsiders, feeling welcomed, started staking claims along the Gila River, on which the Pima depended to irrigate their farms.

  DSC-D0317_03
  By 1908, a book of medical observations on the Pima and other Southwest tribes noted increased obesity incidence, and included this image of a Ute woman.
  Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 34 Plate XXII/1908
  With the ongoing gold rush in California, more settlers arrived, and the new farmers and ranchers started diverting water and land from the Pima. Tensions arose, eventually leading the U.S. government to resettle the Native Americans on a reservation, though the Pimas’ new land didn’t include surrounding hunting lands or water rights to the Gila River. Without sufficient water for their farms, the Pima faced starvation.

  The government offered food assistance starting as early as the 1930s. It included Western foods such as milk, bacon, cheese, canned meats and dry cereal, as well as flour and lard that the Pima used to make deep-fried bread. The lives of the Native Americans no longer included farming or hunting, and they became more sedentary. Some started to work in nearby factories, and others joined the armed services. Increasingly, they were introduced to the American lifestyle, and the Arizona Pima started gaining weight — lots of it.

  The encroaching obesity among the tribe was noticed by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) in 1963, while they were doing an area survey. The rate of obesity and diabetes in the Arizona Pima was so high that the institute established research programs focused on the group to understand why.

  The institute measured the health of the Arizona Pima every two years. Since 1965, tribe members have voluntarily undergone physical examinations specifically looking at weight, height, body mass index (BMI) and factors for diabetes. The population of overweight Pima Indians was found to be more than three times higher than the U.S. national rate. The Arizona tribe also had drastically higher rates of diabetes. Yet Caucasians living nearby at the time led a similar lifestyle without the same ill effects.

  The NIDDK researchers also became aware of the Pima who lived in Maycoba, Mexico. As they were genetically similar to the Arizona Indians, the researchers wanted to know if both groups had the same health problems.

  Shedding the Guilt

  Eric Ravussin of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, based in Baton Rouge, La., was one of the first scientists to make the trek to Maycoba, high in the Sierra Madre. Ravussin remembers, “There were no paved roads. There was nothing there — no electricity, no running water, nothing. No one had cars.”

  It took researchers eight to 10 hours using a four-wheel-drive vehicle through the rocky terrain to get to the village. The Maycoba Indians still farmed and rode bicycles in lieu of driving cars. For the most part, they maintained the rural lifestyle followed by their ancestors. As a result, the Maycoba Indians were far healthier than their Arizona counterparts.

  Compared with the Maycoba population, the Arizona Pima obesity rate was 10 times greater among the men, and three times for the women; diabetes was five and a half times higher among the tribe in Arizona. Clearly, the newly modernized lifestyle was taking its toll.

  2_DSC-D0317_04
  This Pima family was photographed around 1900 outside their adobe home in Arizona.
  Granger NYC
  The tale of the two tribes illustrates the genetics of fat at work. The Pima would not have survived the frequent famines through the centuries without evolving their thrifty genotype. However, in the modern time of plenty, their genes are a liability, leading to high rates of obesity and diabetes compared with other races.

  Eventually, analysis of DNA from the Pima suggested that they have variations on certain chromosomes that are linked to fatness. Thanks to their genetic inheritance, their bodies are storing away calories, anticipating a famine that never comes.

  We can’t change our genes, but science is learning that we can influence how they affect our health. And, as the Pima prove, there may be extra measures we need to adopt to accommodate our genetic peculiarities when it comes to fat. If we can’t lose all the excess weight we’ve stored, at least we can shed some of the guilt associated with it.

  Amped-Up Metabolism

  Claude Bouchard conducted some of the first studies showing that genes affect fat. After getting his Ph.D. in population genetics and physical anthropology in 1977 from the University of Texas at Austin, Bouchard returned to his native Quebec and started a laboratory at Laval University where he and his staff began studying obesity.

  Bouchard, now at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, and his team executed two foundational studies that upended the understanding of genetics and weight between 1986 and 1990, before the Human Genome Project was completed. The first study showed that our propensity to gain fat, and where the body stores it, are influenced by genetics. Bouchard put 12 male identical-twin pairs on a diet of an extra 1,000 daily calories above their normal eating pattern for 84 days. As he expected, the young men put on a significant amount of weight — the average gain was 13 percent. Bouchard observed that related twins were three times more likely to gain the same amount of total body weight, fat percentage and subcutaneous fat — fat just beneath the skin — than unrelated test subjects.

  For a weight-loss experiment, Bouchard again isolated male identical twins in a research unit for four months. First, he measured the exact calories needed for the twins to maintain their current weights. He then imposed a standardized exercise routine of two hours per day, ultimately inducing a calorie deficit of 53,000 per person over the duration of the study.

  As the twins slimmed down from exercise, Bouchard looked at body weight, lean mass and fat distribution and found the amount of energy burned during exercise was also influenced by genetics. If one twin burned 80 calories compared with 100 burned by a comparator group during a workout, then the other twin would likely suffer the same metabolic shortcoming.

  DSC-D0317_05
  Fat cells, or adipocytes, form an insulating layer that stores energy. Most of each cell's volume is a large liquid droplet.
  Steve Gschmeissner/Science Source
  Bouchard found that our genes influence our resting metabolism, fat mass, percent of fat and abdominal visceral fat, and cholesterol levels. He and his colleague Angelo Tremblay discovered one important exception, though — a vital piece of information for those seeking to control their weight. They found that when subjects performed vigorous exercise, genetics didn’t matter as much. Bouchard’s definition of “vigorous” was any exercise that caused metabolism to increase by six times or more over resting metabolism (which can be achieved by running about 4 to 6 mph or cycling about 12 to 16 mph, or doing other activities that produce rapid breathing and sweat within a few minutes).

  The lesson is clear: Once we enter a specific range of strenuous exercise, the body kicks in to lose fat, no matter what our genes want.

  Calorie Hoarding

  New technological advances are allowing for more specific investigation of our genes. For example, individuals with variations in a gene called FTO tend to desire high-calorie foods more often and have more fat as a result. This genetic variation causes an almost twofold increased risk of obesity compared with those who don’t inherit it.

  Colin Palmer at the University of Dundee in Scotland conducted one study that shows the effects of the FTO gene. He assessed almost 100 schoolchildren to see whether they carried the FTO variant gene or the normal gene. He then evaluated what the children ate by allowing them to take food from a buffet that included an assortment of fruits and vegetables, as well as higher-calorie foods such as chips and chocolate. When he analyzed what they consumed, he noticed that children with the FTO gene variant had eaten more of the higher-calorie, energy-dense foods compared with children with the normal gene.

  “They had the same amount of food, the same mass of food, it was just the higher-calorie foods,” Palmer says. Not surprisingly, children with the variant gene also had about 4 pounds more body fat. The FTO gene is thought to be expressed not only in the brain, where it increases our desire to eat fattening foods, but also in fat tissue.

  Harvard Medical School researcher Melina Claussnitzer and her team found that a single variation in the FTO gene caused fat cells that would normally become healthier beige to turn into white fat cells instead. Beige fat cells have the potential to turn into energy-burning brown fat cells when activated by exercise. But in people with the FTO mutation, fewer cells become beige and more turn into energy-storing white cells. So the result of the FTO mutations is a drive to eat higher-calorie foods paired with less calorie burning and more calorie hoarding — a challenging combination for any dieter.

  Although individuals with variants in their FTO gene have almost double the risk of obesity compared with those who do not inherit the gene, “having the FTO variant doesn’t mean one is destined to be fat. We can still control what goes in our mouths, though it may be more work for some than others,” Palmer explains.

  Heavier, Healthier

  Not all fat caused by genetics is a bad thing — and some of it may actually be protective. Ruth Loos is the director of the Genetics of Obesity and Related Metabolic Traits program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. She’s slender, with short, wispy blond hair that frames her angular features.

  Working with Bouchard, Loos grew fascinated with the genetics of fat and metabolism, and eventually went on to establish her own lab at Mount Sinai. As she set out to design her research, she noticed that many genes being identified were linked to high BMI, which simply compares someone’s weight with their height. Loos realized BMI isn’t the best measure of fatness because it doesn’t separate fat mass from lean tissue like muscle.

  In other words, if you’re a bodybuilder with only 7 percent fat but a lot of muscle, your BMI will be high, perhaps the same as that of someone who is obese with lower muscle mass.

  The good news is, unless you have one of the very rare genetic mutations that undeniably cause obesity, your genes are just one factor in your weight profile.

  Loos wanted to tease out which sections of DNA had to do with fatness, not just weight. So her team conducted an analysis of the genetic data from 36,626 individuals to see which genes were associated with body fat. From this research, Loos found that fatness was significantly linked to variations in the FTO gene and a gene called IRS1. It was already understood that FTO variations were associated with being overweight, encouraging kids to seek fattier foods, for example. But the linkage of the IRS1 gene to fat was new.

  As the team analyzed the data, they uncovered a mystery. One variation of the IRS1 gene caused lower fat in men. At first, this seemed like a lucky gene to have. But as Loos analyzed the data further, she saw that while men with this variant indeed had less fat in their arms, legs and trunk, they also had higher triglycerides — fat found in the blood — and lower good cholesterol in their blood and increased insulin resistance, all signs of ill health.

  How could this be? They were thinner than men without the variant, and thinness should lead to better health, not worse. More puzzling, this variant didn’t seem to affect women in the same way.

  Loos and her team looked further. Perhaps this adverse metabolic profile was linked to how fat was distributed. Her team reviewed measurements for subcutaneous fat, the healthier fat which sits under the skin, and visceral fat, the unhealthy fat that surrounds the organs. They found that men with one IRS1 variant (let’s call it variant A) had lower subcutaneous fat and more visceral fat compared with those without the variation.

  However, the men with variant B were fatter but also healthier. Why would the gene that produces more fat protect you against disease, Loos wondered. Slowly, she and her team pieced together an answer. IRS1 contains the code for a protein that’s involved in mediating cells’ sensitivity to insulin, a hormone that helps the body use sugar and store fats. She found that IRS1 variant A was associated with lower expression of this protein in subcutaneous fat and visceral fat. So, cells in these areas weren’t as sensitive to insulin and weren’t internalizing glucose and fats. This occurred in men much more than in women.

  In addition, IRS1 variant A was inhibiting the expansion of fat tissue. With no place to go, more fat was hanging around in the blood, causing health issues. On the other hand, those with IRS1 variant B were able to easily expand their fat tissue. So they were a little chubbier because the fats in the blood went where they belonged — into fat.

  Loos’ findings described a new kind of fat gene. Other gene variants — like mutations in FTO or the gene for leptin, an energy-balancing hormone — had been linked to overeating or fat cell type. But IRS1 was the first that was linked specifically to fat cell creation. When we don’t create new fat cells to house our circulating fats, we’re prone to more diseases. With less fat, we may appear to be healthier, but may actually be in danger of developing diabetes and other diseases.

  “Genes that increase your risk of obesity can also protect you from Type 2 diabetes [and] cardiovascular disease and give you an optimal lipid profile,” Loos says. “These are what we call the healthy obesity genes. So these individuals who had the variant to increase fatness actually were good fat storers. They store the fat where it should be stored. And it protects their liver, it protects their muscle, it protects against visceral fat. And that fat protects them against disease as well. So these [good] genes, they do exist.”

  You can undergo a diagnostic test to find out whether you have any known gene variants that are associated with obesity. If you have such a variant, are you doomed to a life of flabbiness? The good news is, unless you have one of the very rare genetic mutations that undeniably cause obesity, your genes are just one factor in your weight profile.

  In the end, daily actions matter more. How much we decide to eat, what we eat and how much we choose to exercise will, in the majority of cases, trump our genes. Fat genes like the FTO variant, however, make it harder to stay on track and keep weight down.

  “You may be genetically susceptible to become obese, but it doesn’t mean that you’re destined to become obese,” Loos says. “Genes load the gun, and environment pulls the trigger.”

• Healthy Cells Magazine
  http://www.healthycellsmagazine.com/articles/the-secret-life-of-fat
  Word count: 564

  THE SECRET LIFE OF FAT
  March 08, 2017
  (0) Add a Comment | (0) Like
  Book Review by The Bookworm Sez

  Here’s something important: your pants don’t fit anymore.

  The blame, you’re sure, lands squarely with the holidays: too many toddies, too much figgy pudding. Perhaps it’s just bad genes or, well, maybe you have no willpower. Maybe, as you’ll see in The Secret Life of Fat by Sylvia Tara, PhD, your fat is not your fault.
  Back when she was in college, Sylvia Tara came to realize that “we are not all created equal…” To maintain her “skinny jeans” frame, Tara had to nearly starve herself, while one of her classmates ate everything put in front of her.

  So unfair.

  And so fascinating. Tara began to research the subject of fat.

  It’s hard to believe that plumpness was pleasing until around the turn of the last century. Men desired zaftig women and mothers wanted chubby babies then; today, magazines use barrels of ink on weight-loss advice, countless trees have died for diet books, and the fact remains that “more than 78 million Americans are considered obese...”
  And yet, says Tara, fat “is not all bad.”

  Science tells us that there are two kinds of fats; one (white fat) hoards energy, the other (brown fat) burns energy. Even before we’re born, nature makes sure we have both – and of the former, girl babies get more than boy babies. As we grow, fat molecules specialize, so to speak, and “some… can do fantastic things.” Fat helps us think, it strengthens our bones, insulates our bodies, moisturizes skin and scalp, repairs wounds, promotes puberty, gives us fertility, and might extend our lives; while fat molecules, “collectively referred to as lipids,” do even more.

  Then we age. We become sedentary, stressed, sleepless, and fat seems to hibernate on thighs and belly. It’s “wily.” Sneaky. What can you do?

  Fat, as Tara indicates, is somewhat like Goldilocks. Too much can lead to disease and other problems. Too little can kill you. What’s needed is a just-right, somewhere in the middle. “If one is healthy, that’s the main thing.”

  Feeling guilt over your gut? Too much thought going into your thighs? Maybe you’re regretting that last Christmas cookie, but there’s no need for that. The Secret Life of Fat puts it all into perspective.

  Conventional wisdom is tossed out the window in this fresh, fun, but seriously heavy book on why we need fat — but not too much. Author and biochemist Sylvia Tara uses case studies, interviews with researchers, and scientific findings to explain more about this misunderstood organ, what we know, and what we don’t. There’s a whodunit here: we read about weight gone awry, and how lab-sleuths link medical mysteries to fat. And yes, there’s both good news and bad, but it’s given gently, and with hope.

  Though it does contain some advice, this is not your usual diet book. There are no recipes, no plans to follow, and no shame. If you’re trying to lose a few pounds, in fact, you might find it refreshing. You may find that The Secret Life of Fat just… fits.

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