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Innovation in Learning

A A ENGLISH IN VIDEO

Diet obsession
Lesson code: EVM3-NIK8-E8SF UPPER INTERMEDIATE +

1 Before you watch

Match the underlined words to their definitions below:

1. Overeating usually leads to weight gain.

2. Dieters use willpower to control their eating.
3. Obesity is usually caused by a sedentary lifestyle and a diet high in fat.
4. Millions of people face starvation every day because they don't have any food to eat.
5. Paul went on a food binge and ordered everything on the menu.
6. Many people died during the famine.

a. a period of excessive and uncontrolled eating

b. a situation in which many people do not have enough food to eat
c. eating excessively
d. suffering or dying from extreme lack of food
e. the ability to control yourself with your mind
f. the state of being extremely overweight

What do you think leads to weight gain? How do you think people can successfully lose weight?

2 Listening and Watching

You are going to watch neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt talk about whether dieting works. Watch the
first part of the talk (up to 07:25) and put T (True) or F (False) next to each statement below:

1. As her New Year's resolution, the speaker decided to go on a diet.

2. The brain tries to control how much a person should weigh.
3. In the past, people did not need to lose weight because food was less available.
4. If you stay at a high weight for too long, the brain will decide that this is your normal weight or `set
point'.
5. It is easier for a person's set point to go up than to go down.
6. People who try to control how much they eat with willpower are less likely to be overweight than
people who eat only when their bodies are hungry.
7. People who diet are more vulnerable to food binges.
LE

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Diet obsession
Innovation in Learning

A A A A ENGLISH IN VIDEO

3 Listening and Watching 2

Watch the second part of the talk (from 07:25) and put T (True) or F (False) next to each statement
below:

1. Only one healthy habit is enough to significantly decrease the risk of death for obese people.
2. If obese and thin people live a healthy lifestyle, the risk of death for obese people will be higher.
3. If obese and thin people live an unhealthy lifestyle, the risk of death for obese people will be higher.
4. Most people who diet regain the weight after the diet is over.
5. Eating only when you're hungry can help you lose a lot of weight.
6. In the US, 80% of 10-year-olds have been on a diet.

4 Phrasal verbs
Look at the following sentences from the talk. Then complete the definitions below with the infinitive
form of each underlined phrasal verb.

a. It's good that you don't have to remember to breathe when you get caught up in a movie.
b. Now you can try to change the temperature in your house by opening a window in the winter, but
that's not going to change the setting on the thermostat, which will respond by kicking on the furnace
to warm the place back up.
c. I'm not saying you need to learn to meditate or take up yoga.
d. A lot of weight gain boils down to eating when you're not hungry.
e. I am so much more relaxed around food than I have ever been in my life. It's like aliens have taken
over my brain.
f. You can take control of your health by taking control of your lifestyle, even if you can't lose weight and
keep it off.

1. something : to start becoming involved or interested in an activity

2. something: to be the main reason for something
3. something : to take control of something
4. something: to become completely involved in something
5. something : to stop something from developing
6. something : to cause something to become operative

Now, answer the questions:

1. Have you taken up any new hobbies or interests lately?

2. What can people do to keep off the flu in winter?
3. Has your computer ever been taken over by a virus?
4. What activities do you get caught up in?
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Diet obsession
Innovation in Learning

A A A A ENGLISH IN VIDEO

5 Grammar -- Conditional and hypothetical structures

Look at the sentences from the talk and match them to the situations below

1. If you do lose a lot of weight, you become hungry.

2. If you stay at a high weight for too long, probably a matter of years for most of us, your brain may
decide that that's the new normal.
3. If that weight loss had been due to a long famine, that would be a sensible response.
4. If diets worked, we'd all be thin already.
5. I wish someone had told me that back when I was 13.

a. a hypothetical situation in the present (second conditional)

b. a hypothetical situation in the present that results from a hypothetical situation in the past (mixed
conditional)
c. a possible situation in the future (first conditional)
d. a regret about something that happened or didn't happen in the past
e. a situation that is always true (zero conditional)

What is the structure of each conditional? What words are possible instead of `if' in zero and first
conditional sentences? What is the structure of the third conditional (hypothetical past situations)?
Which modal verbs are possible instead of `will' and `would'?

6 Practice -- Hypothetical past situations

Work in pairs. Look at the hypothetical past events below. Give a third or mixed conditional sentence
beginning with `If ...' For example:
1) If the Internet had never been invented, I wouldn't be able to use email. (MIXED CONDITIONAL)

1. The Internet was never invented.

2. The Internet was invented 100 years ago.
3. The result of your country's last elections was different.
4. Scientists discovered a pill that cures obesity.
5. You changed your lifestyle last year.
6. You ate nothing yesterday and the day before.
Now think of or imagine 5 things that you regret in the past and tell your partner using `I wish ...'

7 Talking point
Discuss any of the following questions:

1. Are people diet-obsessed in your country?

2. Have you been on a diet? What were the results?
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Diet obsession - Transcripts
Innovation in Learning

A A A A ENGLISH IN VIDEO

2- Listening and Watching

Three and a half years ago, I made one of the best decisions of my life. As my New Year's
resolution, I gave up dieting, stopped worrying about my weight, and learned to eat mindfully. Now I
eat whenever I'm hungry, and I've lost 10 pounds.

This was me at age 13, when I started my first diet. I look at that picture now, and I think, you did
not need a diet, you needed a fashion consult. (Laughter) But I thought I needed to lose weight, and
when I gained it back, of course I blamed myself. And for the next three decades, I was on and off
various diets. No matter what I tried, the weight I'd lost always came back. I'm sure many of you
know the feeling.

As a neuroscientist, I wondered, why is this so hard? Obviously, how much you weigh depends on
how much you eat and how much energy you burn. What most people don't realize is that hunger
and energy use are controlled by the brain, mostly without your awareness. Your brain does a lot of
its work behind the scenes, and that is a good thing, because your conscious mind -- how do we
put this politely? -- it's easily distracted. It's good that you don't have to remember to breathe when
you get caught up in a movie. You don't forget how to walk because you're thinking about what to
have for dinner.

Your brain also has its own sense of what you should weigh, no matter what you consciously
believe. This is called your set point, but that's a misleading term, because it's actually a range of
about 10 or 15 pounds. You can use lifestyle choices to move your weight up and down within that
range, but it's much, much harder to stay outside of it. The hypothalamus, the part of the brain that
regulates body weight, there are more than a dozen chemical signals in the brain that tell your body
to gain weight, more than another dozen that tell your body to lose it, and the system works like a
thermostat, responding to signals from the body by adjusting hunger, activity and metabolism, to
keep your weight stable as conditions change. That's what a thermostat does, right? It keeps the
temperature in your house the same as the weather changes outside. Now you can try to change
the temperature in your house by opening a window in the winter, but that's not going to change the
setting on the thermostat, which will respond by kicking on the furnace to warm the place back up.
Your brain works exactly the same way, responding to weight loss by using powerful tools to push
your body back to what it considers normal. If you lose a lot of weight, your brain reacts as if you
were starving, and whether you started out fat or thin, your brain's response is exactly the same.
We would love to think that your brain could tell whether you need to lose weight or not, but it can't.
If you do lose a lot of weight, you become hungry, and your muscles burn less energy. Dr. Rudy
Leibel of Columbia University has found that people who have lost 10 percent of their body weight
burn 250 to 400 calories less because their metabolism is suppressed. That's a lot of food. This
means that a successful dieter must eat this much less forever than someone of the same weight
who has always been thin.
LE

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Diet obsession - Transcripts
Innovation in Learning

A A A A ENGLISH IN VIDEO

From an evolutionary perspective, your body's resistance to weight loss makes sense. When food
was scarce, our ancestors' survival depended on conserving energy, and regaining the weight when
food was available would have protected them against the next shortage. Over the course of human
history, starvation has been a much bigger problem than overeating. This may explain a very sad
fact: Set points can go up, but they rarely go down. Now, if your mother ever mentioned that life is
not fair, this is the kind of thing she was talking about. (Laughter) Successful dieting doesn't lower
your set point. Even after you've kept the weight off for as long as seven years, your brain keeps
trying to make you gain it back. If that weight loss had been due to a long famine, that would be a
sensible response. In our modern world of drive-through burgers, it's not working out so well for
many of us. That difference between our ancestral past and our abundant present is the reason that
Dr. Yoni Freedhoff of the University of Ottawa would like to take some of his patients back to a time
when food was less available, and it's also the reason that changing the food environment is really
going to be the most effective solution to obesity.

Sadly, a temporary weight gain can become permanent. If you stay at a high weight for too long,
probably a matter of years for most of us, your brain may decide that that's the new normal.

Psychologists classify eaters into two groups, those who rely on their hunger and those who try to
control their eating through willpower, like most dieters. Let's call them intuitive eaters and
controlled eaters. The interesting thing is that intuitive eaters are less likely to be overweight, and
they spend less time thinking about food. Controlled eaters are more vulnerable to overeating in
response to advertising, super-sizing, and the all-you-can-eat buffet. And a small indulgence, like
eating one scoop of ice cream, is more likely to lead to a food binge in controlled eaters. Children
are especially vulnerable to this cycle of dieting and then binging. Several long-term studies have
shown that girls who diet in their early teenage years are three times more likely to become
overweight five years later, even if they started at a normal weight, and all of these studies found
that the same factors that predicted weight gain also predicted the development of eating disorders.
The other factor, by the way, those of you who are parents, was being teased by family members
about their weight. So don't do that. (Laughter)

3- Listening and Watching 2

I left almost all my graphs at home, but I couldn't resist throwing in just this one, because I'm a
geek, and that's how I roll. (Laughter) This is a study that looked at the risk of death over a 14-year
period based on four healthy habits: eating enough fruits and vegetables, exercise three times a
week, not smoking, and drinking in moderation. Let's start by looking at the normal weight people in
the study. The height of the bars is the risk of death, and those zero, one, two, three, four numbers
on the horizontal axis are the number of those healthy habits that a given person had. And as you'd
expect, the healthier the lifestyle, the less likely people were to die during the study. Now let's look
at what happens in overweight people. The ones that had no healthy habits had a higher risk of
death. Adding just one healthy habit pulls overweight people back into the normal range. For obese
people with no healthy habits, the risk is very high, seven times higher than the healthiest groups in
the study. But a healthy lifestyle helps obese people too. In fact, if you look only at the group with all
four healthy habits, you can see that weight makes very little difference. You can take control of
your health by taking control of your lifestyle, even if you can't lose weight and keep it off.

Diets don't have very much reliability. Five years after a diet, most people have regained the weight.
Forty percent of them have gained even more. If you think about this, the typical outcome of dieting
is that you're more likely to gain weight in the long run than to lose it.
LE

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Diet obsession - Transcripts
Innovation in Learning

A A A A ENGLISH IN VIDEO

If I've convinced you that dieting might be a problem, the next question is, what do you do about it?
And my answer, in a word, is mindfulness. I'm not saying you need to learn to meditate or take up
yoga. I'm talking about mindful eating: learning to understand your body's signals so that you eat
when you're hungry and stop when you're full, because a lot of weight gain boils down to eating
when you're not hungry. How do you do it? Give yourself permission to eat as much as you want,
and then work on figuring out what makes your body feel good. Sit down to regular meals without
distractions. Think about how your body feels when you start to eat and when you stop, and let your
hunger decide when you should be done. It took about a year for me to learn this, but it's really been
worth it. I am so much more relaxed around food than I have ever been in my life. I often don't think
about it. I forget we have chocolate in the house. It's like aliens have taken over my brain. It's just
completely different. I should say that this approach to eating probably won't make you lose weight
unless you often eat when you're not hungry, but doctors don't know of any approach that makes
significant weight loss in a lot of people, and that is why a lot of people are now focusing on
preventing weight gain instead of promoting weight loss. Let's face it: If diets worked, we'd all be
thin already. (Laughter) Why do we keep doing the same thing and expecting different results? Diets
may seem harmless, but they actually do a lot of collateral damage. At worst, they ruin lives: Weight
obsession leads to eating disorders, especially in young kids. In the U.S., we have 80 percent of
10-year-old girls say they've been on a diet. Our daughters have learned to measure their worth by
the wrong scale. Even at its best, dieting is a waste of time and energy. It takes willpower which you
could be using to help your kids with their homework or to finish that important work project, and
because willpower is limited, any strategy that relies on its consistent application is pretty much
guaranteed to eventually fail you when your attention moves on to something else.

Let me leave you with one last thought. What if we told all those dieting girls that it's okay to eat
when they're hungry? What if we taught them to work with their appetite instead of fearing it? I think
most of them would be happier and healthier, and as adults, many of them would probably be
thinner. I wish someone had told me that back when I was 13. Thanks.

LE

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Diet obsession - Key
Innovation in Learning

A A A A ENGLISH IN VIDEO

1- Before you watch

1. c 2. e 3. f 4. d 5. a 6. b

2- Listening and Watching

Go through the statements and have the students think about them. Play the video up to 07:25. Students can
work individually and check in pairs. Go through the answers.
1. F 2. T 3. T 4. T 5. F 6. F 7. T

3- Listening and Watching 2

Go through the statements and have the students think about them. Play the video from 07:25 to the end. Students
can work individually and check in pairs. Go through the answers.
1. T 2. F 3. T 4. T 5. F 6. T

4- Phrasal verbs

1. take up 2. boil down to 3. take over 4. get caught up in 5. keep off

6. kick on

5- Grammar -- Conditional and hypothetical structures

1. e 2. c 3. b 4. a 5. d

Zero conditional: If + present simple, present simple; First conditional: If + present, will (or can, may, might) +
infinitive; Second conditional: If + past simple, would (or could, might) + infinitive; Third conditional: If + past
perfect, would have (or could have, might have) + past participle; Mixed conditional: If + past perfect, would (or
could, might) + infinitive. Instead of `if', we can say `unless', `as long as', `provided that', `on condition that'.
Instead of `will', we can say `can', `may', `could', `might'. Instead of `would', we can say `could', `might'.

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