In the views of current medical theory, obesity is not a kind of disease, but is a
common trouble for many modern people. There are a lot of methods of losing weight on
the market, of which few are effective and none is effective to everyone. Some may
succeed in getting rid of fat, while some may relax their efforts so as to stop all the
measures for losing weight, as a result, the body would rebound and even become more
obese than before.  

Obesity is traditionally viewed as the result of heavy eating while lacking exercise.
From the perspective of energy conservation, as energy intake outweighs that consumed,
the surplus is stored in the form of fat that makes people look plump. This logic seems
reasonable and few people doubt it. However, it cannot provide a sound explanation for
many phenomena in reality: 

(1)  Why some people remain slim even if they are big eaters whereas some become
plump even though they have little? This phenomenon is seen as individual
difference, which is, apparently, not convincing enough.  

(2)  Why some people achieve little in losing weight no matter how many exercises
they do while some others keep a shapely figure even though they seldom do
sports?  

(3)  Now that fat is energy storage in human body, those who have more fat should
be of more endurance. Yet the reality just goes the opposite. 

Why some people remain slim even if they are big eaters whereas some become
plump even though they have little? This phenomenon is seen as individual difference,
which is, apparently, not convincing enough. 
Why some people achieve little in losing weight no matter how many exercises they
do while some others keep a shapely figure even though they seldom do sports? 
Now that fat is energy storage in human body, those who have more fat should be of
more endurance. Yet the reality just goes the opposite.
The big headache on the way of losing weight may not be how to reduce weight but
how to control frequent weight rebound. An endless array of slimming products flood
markets but overweight population seems to increase proportionally. What accounts for
this phenomenon? 
Are there mistakes in the traditional conclusion about the cause of obesity? Yes.
Based on the theory of five zang-organs (heart, liver, spleen, lungs and kidneys) and six
fu-organs (gallbladder, stomach, large intestine, small intestine, urinary bladder and
ternary cavities) in TCM, experiments are conducted to study the causes of obesity,
discovering that obesity is not caused by energy surplus.
Let’s first look at what happen to food that enters into human body. No matter how
complicated human beings’ absorption and metabolism are, a clear point is that
metabolism is a process of producing acidic substances. It depends on cells, the basic
unit of life, to oxidize and decompose nutrients so as to obtain energy and meanwhile
release acidic metabolites. This chemical common sense tells us that an alkalescent
environment is conducive to  neutralize acidic metabolites, making oxidation and
decomposition go completely so that energy can be continuously released. When
oxidation proceeds in an acidic environment, it will be incomplete with only small part of
energy absorbed by human body while the rest stored in the form of fat, a partially
oxidized product. From this perspective, obesity is not caused by energy surplus but
incompetence----human body’s incompetence to thoroughly oxidize food to gain maximal
energy.