What if one of the variables in human weight control was activity response to caloric restriction?
Ok, so that's not too speculative. We know obese humans decrease activity when they diet. This is one reason that, in a nation of very cheap calories, so many Americans are obese. When these people diet, they are put into an involuntary lethargic state.
It's a behavior that makes lots of evolutionary sense. Throughout most of human history these people would have been survivors of famine. We can call them The Survivors.
But what if there's a distribution across the population? What if there are people who respond to caloric restriction with increased activity? That makes a sort of Darwinian sense too, particularly if you think of humans as group selected Big Brain Bees (BBBs). Think of these people as Foragers, they roam from the Hive looking for new options. In todays world, some of them are anorexics, but mostly they're just slender.
I am positive that if I knew the scientific literature on obesity, and I knew the right search terms, I would find articles exploring this model. It feels plausible that there's a range of responses to calorie restriction -- from Survivors to Foragers and everything in between.
Of course feelings are the fount of grant proposals, not of science. This is, however, a testable hypothesis. So it could turn into science.
There are implications for drug discovery. If this model were correct, the magic obesity pill would convert Survivors into Foragers. So pharmas should be looking for Foragers to study ...
