Albert Stunkard and Jean Mayer are among those investigators who argued that it was wrong to blame obesity on character defects, and yet still failed to extricate themselves from the circular logic of the overeating/ sedentary-behavior hypothesis. In his 1959 analysis of semi-starvation diets, Stunkard wrote that obesity research went astray once investigators concluded that “excessive body fat results from an excess of caloric intake over caloric expenditure” and then enshrined this thinking as the dictum that “all obesity comes from overeating.” After that, wrote Stunkard, the physician’s job became nothing more than to explain that “semi-starvation reduces fat stores, to prescribe a diet for this purpose,” and then to sit by and await the result. “If the patient lost weight as predicted, this merely confirmed the comfortable feeling that treatment of obesity was really a pretty simple matter,” wrote Stunkard. “However, if, as so often happened, the patient failed to lose weight, he was dismissed as uncooperative or chastised as gluttonous.” Mayer also ridiculed the logic that obesity was caused by gluttony or whatever was meant by the term overeating. “Obesity,” he wrote in The Atlantic in 1955, “it is flatly stated, comes from eating too much and that is all there is to it. Any attempt to search for causes deeper than self-indulgence can only give support to patients already seeking every possible means to evade their own responsibility.”

But the trap that Stunkard and Mayer had identified is built into the logic of the positive-caloric-balance hypothesis; there is no escaping it. Mayer, as we’ve discussed, proceeded to insist in his book Overweight, as in all his writing, that obesity was the result of sedentary behavior, which simply implicated sloth rather than gluttony and still left the issue defined as a behavioral one. Although Mayer gets credit for convincing his peers that obesity has a genetic component, he implied that the only role of these genes was to make us want to be more or less sedentary. By the end of Overweight, Mayer was insisting not only that the obese must exercise more, but that they must also try harder to eat less. “Obesity is not a sin,” he wrote. “At most, it is the consequence of errors of omission, the result of not having kept up the life-long battle against an inherited predisposition and against an environment which combines constant exposure to food with the removal of any need to work for it physically. In the pilgrim’s progress of the constitutionally plump, salvation demands more than the shunning of temptation. It requires…the adoption of an attitude almost stoic in its asceticism and in the deliberate daily setting aside of time for what will be often lonely walking and exercising.”