obesity is not a calorie problem, it’s a regulation problem
Strategic Health Intelligence Session for Senior Leadership at Danone - explore our corporate options here.
Most conversations about weight are still stuck in calories. And at this point, it’s limiting how we think about the problem entirely.
Because weight is not primarily about discipline.
It’s about regulation.
Last month, I was invited to sit down with senior leadership at Danone to explore novel ways of addressing our obesity pandemic.
I chose to explore how to address the obesity pandemic from a regulation angle - what I like to call: satiety engineering. We went over the different phenotypes driving weight gain. Because obesity is merely the symptom of a broken system. If we want to change the trajectory we need to understand the system we are trying to fix. What actually drives appetite, energy, and fat storage? This may seem obvious in writing, yet we are not doing it in reality. Rather we are trying to override the system - white-knuckle it through - and it's not working very well.
You cannot willpower your way out of a broken biology. That's just not how biochemistry works.
At the core of it are biological signals:
GLP-1, insulin, cortisol, leptin, dopamine.
These are the mechanisms that determine whether you feel in control - or not.
And they are constantly shaped by things most people underestimate:
Sleep
Stress load
Timing
Nutrient status
Environment
When that system is working, behavior feels easy. When it’s not, people start blaming themselves. We feel like failures.
This is also why we’re seeing such a strong response to GLP-1 right now.
Not because it “solves” weight, but because it regulates appetite at the level that actually matters.
And when that shifts, people feel it.
The noise stops. There is less friction. Finally life feels stable.
Ahhh, a sigh of relief.
And that feeling is where things get interesting. Because people don’t adopt strategies based on facts.
Even though I’ve always believed that facts should outweigh feelings - in reality, that’s not how people operate. Myself included. People adopt based on felt experience.
Facts may not care about feelings, but the opposite is equally true: our feelings rarely care about facts.
If we don't FEEL GOOD, we are not going to do it for very long. Discipline is a finite ressource and it only makes sense to use when strategically using it to go up a mountain, where you will eventually reach the top and can chill out for a bit. If there is no ending in sight, we will give up. And why shouldn't we. No one wants to feel like crap forever. Feelings are our experience of this life, and it needs to feel good at some point, otherwise there is just no point.
The problem is, most can’t distinguish between what works short term and what actually holds long term.
So if the foundation is off, you can’t rely on how something feels. That’s where it gets nuanced, and where most people drop off. They default to what feels good now, or what’s easiest to understand. Which is human. I get it.
But this is exactly where the responsibility also shifts: The practitioner, the company, the product - has to understand both sides:
What the consumer needs to feel
and what actually creates long-term results.
Most only deliver one or the other.
Take something like Bulletproof coffee.
Debated, criticized, picked apart - and still, it spread fast. Certainly not because everyone agreed with it, rather because people tried it… and felt different.
Calmer.
More focused.
Less hungry.
For some, it was the first time their system actually felt stable.
And that experience outweighed everything they had been told before. Because at the time, the dominant message was still low-fat.
Low-fat yogurt, low-fat dairy, low-fat everything.
Not because it worked better for satiety, but because it was the narrative that won: count every calorie. Within the professional space, the picture was more nuanced. A lot of clinicians knew fats - including saturated fats - played a role in metabolic stability. But that nuance didn’t make it into public recommendations.
I’ve seen how strong that narrative pressure can be.
I once had an article pulled because I refused to write that low-fat dairy was better for blood sugar regulation - because it just isn’t. The irony of being told by a non-health trained journalist what I should write in an article as a trained clinician is mind-boggling. Imagine if I reversed the roles and doled out writing advice to a journalist. I don’t think it would land well. And it shouldn’t cos God only knows how many typos I make.
Anyway, my point being: when people suddenly felt better doing the opposite of what they’d been told, they didn’t question it. They followed it.
Once the body feels a shift, the argument is over.
It worked because for a specific group of people - especially those who are more cortisol- or insulin-driven - it creates a noticeable shift:
More stable energy
Less hunger
Sharper mornings
And once someone feels that difference, something changes.
They don’t just adopt the habit. They start trusting the person behind it - on everything.
Because someone finally got their felt experience.
…Someone gets us.
…Someone cares.
this is how healthy and unhealthy attachment forms across the board by the way. We as humans easily become deeply addicted to when someone finally “gets us” or “sees us”. every person working in sales knows this. this can be used for good or bad.
From that point on, it’s no longer about evaluating every claim. The physiological experience has already done the convincing - for better or worse depends entirely on the foundation behind that first felt experience. This is how many trends and influencers work - they get one thing right and then it often ripples into messy territory.
We like to think decisions are rational, but they’re not.
Even at the highest levels, most people are still strongly guided by how something feels in their body. Not just what they understand intellectually.
This is also why generic approaches to weight keep failing: they ignore the fact that the same outcome can be driven by very different regulatory systems that have broken.
In the discussion with Danone, we looked at four primary drivers:
Stress-driven
Reward-driven
Insulin-driven
Circadian-driven
Same result on the surface. Different biology underneath. Now many of these overlap, but if we don’t address 2-3 of these drivers, we will fail. Regardless of working with obesity from a practitioner angle or product development.
If we don’t identify which regulatory system we’re working with, we’re relying on willpower to fill the gap. And that’s where most strategies break.
If regulation can be influenced directly - what is the role of food going forward?
Because the shift is already happening.
From fuel → to regulation.
From calories → to control systems.
And the interesting part isn’t whether this will change the industry. It’s how quickly different players understand what’s actually driving behavior. Because in the end, it’s not just biology.
It’s the combination of biology and perception.
What people feel
becomes what they believe
and that shapes what they do next.
That’s the layer most people miss. And it’s the one that quietly determines what works, and what doesn’t.
For those operating at a high level, this isn’t just a health conversation: it’s a performance variable.
And once you start looking at it that way, the strategy changes. You don’t want to spend mental energy forcing basic decisions. You want that capacity available for what actually matters - the next level of your work, your thinking, your life.
Food should support that. Not compete with it.
The session ended with one of the senior leaders exclaiming: "This is a disruptive way of thinking in our industry!". And isn't that the point - if we want to avoid repeating the trials of the past, we need to disrupt our way of attacking a problem to create new outcomes.
