Truth makes you fat!

Truth, semen, e-mail, TV, lack of sleep, and AC make you fat - but not necessary in this particular order. Fruits make you fat. The air we breathe makes us fat. Apparently everything makes us fat, including fat. Apart from the obvious don’ts like deep fried thingies, seminal fluid (a tablespoon of semen contains 25 calories and 150 mg of protein, 11 mg of carbohydrates, 6 mg fat, 3 mg cholesterol, 7% US RDA potassium and 3% US RDA copper and zinc) and debaucheries with fondue French cheeses and Spanish wine, we have a new palette of fattening enemies.

Experts say AC and heating keep us where we should not be, in a “thermoneutral zone”, which is a temperature range where we don’t have to regulate our body temperature. When our bodies are above or below this zone, we increase the amount of energy we spend which decreases energy stores, such as fat. So basically, we fool our bodies that the temperature is a comfortable 22C instead of an excruciating 40C and accordingly, the body stops sweating, burning calories and consequently, staying thin.

And as insane as it might seem, some advance the idea that the lack of sleep makes you fat. How? Well, is quite simple, really. When you are tired you don’t have enough time to exercise so you are tempted to over eat to compensate, in order to gain energy. Moreover, the lack of sleep disrupts one of our hunger hormones (leptin and ghrelin), which can make us fat. Researchers at UCLA claim that poor sleep causes increased ghrelin and decreased leptin during the day, which doubly increases your appetite when you don’t get enough sleep.

Not thinking about leptin and ghrelin, Timothy Dumouchel sued the cable company, claiming it made his wife fat, gave him a liver disease and turned his children into lazy monsters. Tim claimed that if the programs were fewer and lousier, his wife wouldn't have been tempted to watch the TV all day long and thus exercising less, his children would have studied more and he wouldn’t have picked up on his old habits of smoking and drinking.

Oh, by the way, did you know that the email (and, by extension, blogging and social networks) makes you fat? That is without doubt a no-brainer. Instead of running up and down those stairs in the business building to spread the juicy gossip, you prefer to update your Facebook status or to push the send button. If you are worried about your waistline, next time try going down the stairs to the hot chicks at HR from the 3rd floor.

We all know which are the habitual enemies: fat food, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, faulty genes, contraceptive pills, cold medication (a sachet of Fervex contains 11.7 g of sugar, so 7 days of flu x 2 sachets/day deposit 163.8 g sugar on your rollerblader butt), diet beverages (aspartame makes you crave for real sweets), being stressed, a fat partner, sugary beverages, quitting smoking, this and that and the other. What is it to be done? Well, for starters break up with your boyfriend, turn off the AC, and sleep yourself to death. Or you can try this innovative and highly speculative hypothesis, which was not verified enough as I only lost 10 grams or so since I started writing it.

The good news is that lying keeps you in a tiptop shape. You now obviously wonder why your co-worker is so damn thin! Here's why. Stats claim that the most common lie in the world is considered to be “I’m fine” as most people would rather lie about how they feel at the moment. Lying, as in oral or written deception in communication, takes way too much energy of a person, as it involves creativity and mental stimulation, if we let aside the obvious immorality of such practice. We are not talking about how indecent is to lie, as lying is, as Nietzsche said, a condition of life. But when someone is lying (imagination), he needs to remember the details of his lie (memory), and follow it up, eventually, invent new details (creativity). Unless you have a subarachnoid hemorrhage in your frontal lobe, which would turn you into a chronic confabulator, the above mentioned processes involve some heavy thinking, and we all know the brain requires a tenth of a calorie per minute, just to stay alive. To produce the neurotransmitters, neurons extract 75% of the sugar glucose (this is why you seem smarter after gulping down a Mars) and 20% of the oxygen in the blood. The frontal lobe of your brain is where your thinking takes place, so if you are joggling with big questions (the chicken or the egg? Mars or Venus? Atheism or Religion? Why am I here? and similar) you need to bring on the sugar. It is an avalanche effect. The more you lie, the more you have to work to keep your lie alive, and that requires a lot of mental energy, hence you burn more calories. So we might conclude that a liar that strenuously works to keep up with his concoctions might have more chances to stay fit than someone who is telling the truth (of any kind subjective, relative, objective, absolute, coherent, correspondent or kripkean). Hence, the truth could be illegal and certainly is immoral but one things is sure: it makes you fat. Oh, by the way, you look wonderful today!