SHERYL SANCHEZ will spend tonight like millions of other Americans. She’ll chat on the phone for a few minutes about the tips on how to lose belly fat fast, then curl up on the sofa to watch some weight loss channel on TV. She’ll get up and stretch, rummage through the refrigerator for a diet soda, maybe surf the cable channels again to see what else is on. It’s a night like a thousand others.
Except that tonight, motion detectors mounted near the ceiling will track her every move. Sensors will calculate, moment by moment, precisely how many calories Sanchez is burning-or not burning. Computers will even tell researchers whether those calories come from carbohydrates or fat.
Sanchez wouldn’t mind burning some fat fast. Say, 20 pounds of it. “I’m a little heavier than I should be,” says Sanchez, 28, sitting on the bed while technicians ready the cramped laboratory, called a respiratory chamber, where she’s agreed to spend the next 24 hours. “I’ve been trying to find some tips on belly fat losing ever since my younger son was born. Five years later, I’m still trying.”
She’s got plenty of company. At any given time, half of all Americans are on a losing fat diet. We spend more than $30 billion a year on weight-loss programs-and the only thing we seem to be losing is ground. The average American actually weighs eight pounds more today than in 1976. Over that time, an additional 8 percent of us have joined the ranks of the officially overweight. “It’s the fattening of America,” says endocrinologist F. Xavier Pi-Sunyer, of St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York. “And it’s putting more people at risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, even some forms of cancer.”
Why don’t burning fat diets work? Why is it so easy for some people to gain weight and so damnably difficult to lose it again? Tucked away at an outpost of the National Institutes of Health in Phoenix, Arizona, this odd hybrid of techno-wiz lab and slightly seedy motel room-bed in one corner, television in the other, Southwestern print on the wall has for a decade been at the center of research to find out. It’s not mere scientific curiosity propelling this search. It’s desperation. Doctors who treat overweight patients have come to the conclusion that patients are more likely to take off pounds and keep them off if they understand why they gained weight in the first place, something that’s awfully hard to pinpoint. Despite the hoopla last December when researchers announced they’d located the so-called obesity, or OB, gene, there are lots of reasons—both inherited and not—that people become overweight. And it isn’t always because they eat too much. Listen closely to the latest research in this field, and you’ll hear the sound of more than a few diet myths toppling.
Take Mazie Herr, for example. Herr, 60, has been overweight since she was a teenager. Five years ago, for the umpteenth time, she was signing up for a diet program at a local medical clinic when researchers invited her to spend 24 hours in the Phoenix respiratory chamber as part of a study on weight loss and metabolism. Herr agreed, and when the researchers went over the results with her afterward, Herr found out that she was a low fat burner. No matter how moderately she ate, her metabolism, handicapped in its ability to burn fat quickly, was conserving nearly every fat calorie she consumed.
“What a revelation that was,” says Herr, over a dinner of steamed vegetables and salad (dressing on the side) at a restaurant near her home in Scottsdale, Arizona. She’s an easygoing woman, quiet but deliberate when she speaks. She went on her first diet in college-ordered to lose weight before she’d be allowed to student teach. “From then on it’s been one diet after another,” says Hem “Lose weight. Gain it back. Blame myself. That old, familiar story. Five years ago I was up to 250 pounds.”
