It’s not weight gain which causes diabetes. It’s diabetes which causes weight gain. The majority of people with type 2 diabetes (there is no such thing as Type II diabetes) have an excess of insulin in their blood, which causes the body to lay down white adipose tissue. (There are two types of fat, white and brown, and it’s the white fat that is associated with health problems.)

Study after study show that people generally eat in proportion to their lean non-skeletal body mass. When they did studies trying to produce weight gain through overeating, using prisoners as their test population, they found that weight gain quickly tapered off, even when the prisoners were gorging 10,000 calories per day.

Here in Lancaster, there are several group homes of individuals whose genetic defect results in (among other problems) obesity and lack of a gag reflex. The most common cause of death with this particular disability had been choking, so their food consumption was very closely watched. After a decade of 800-calorie diets, they still were grossly obese. They switched doctors, and the new doctor relaxed things, allowing them to have 1000 calories daily. They didn’t gain a lot of weight, despite the 25% increase in food; in fact, they lost about 20 pounds each, on average.

There’s no evidence to show that Seattle Sutton’s gimmicks of wellness incentives and over processed prepackaged foods are any safer than the myriad other weight-loss scams. There’s much more space spent on their web site to “franchise opportunities” than there is to any researching backing up their wild claims.

There appears to have been absolutely no scientific research done that people who eat the TV dinners achieve permanent weight loss. There is however, ample evidence showing that weight-loss dieting hurts your health, rather than helping it.

There is evidence that exercise can improve your health, but exercise generally results in increased weight, rather than reduced weight. An interesting study on the role of exercise in reducing the risk of diabetes and obesity was published by the Journal of Applied Physiology in 2005. http://jap.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/99/2/757″. If you follow the links, you can download the full text of that study for free.