How much technical information is too much technical information to absorb on a Saturday morning?

Would reading neuropeptide Y “is a metabolism regulator that plays a critical role during states of low energy supply, which helps store fat as a survival mechanism ... can exacerbate existing diet-induced weight gain, leading to obesity and metabolic disease,” make you turn the page and search for something in this newspaper a wee bit easier on the brain? Like a comic strip? Or an article analyzing the latest economic indicators?

My guess is yes, which is why I willingly work as your translator when important information like the aforesaid from James Kingsland’s article for Medical News Today article needs to be shared.

But the real reason it needs to be shared isn’t to make you aware of a possible new option for the obese. It’s because the way in which the anti-obesity drug featured in the article works establishes something else.

That you should never need it.

Not if you eat and exercise in the manner recommended repeatedly in this column.

A quick review of that MO is forthcoming - but only after a translation of the study performed at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, published in this month’s issue of Nature Communications, and featured in the aforementioned MNT article. In simple terms, the study found the BIBO3304 blocks the SOS signal sent out by neuropeptide Y to conserve energy and stash what’s saved in the fat stores any time it detects a significant reduction in calories.

In other words, the drug doesn’t allow what normally dooms a diet over the long term to occur.

It jams the signal to reduce the rate at which you process and use energy that neuropeptide Y sends after a lack of food leads to weight loss - a genetic holdover from the time when cavemen on the hunt needed to go days without food.

Moreover, this anti-obesity drug dials up your internal thermostat. This was determined by using fat cells from obese people as well as lab mice.

When two groups of mice were fed a high-fat diet for 7 weeks, the group also given the anti-obesity drug burned up more of the excess fat calories than the other group, resulting in 40 percent less weight gained.

While acknowledging the difference between preventing weight gain and promoting weight loss, lead researcher Dr. Yanchuan Shi asserts that “a treatment like BIBO3304 could help treat obesity by increasing energy expenditure through the burning of fat, leading to weight loss.”

While her findings and her words create hope, the potential marketing of this drug is probably a decade away, the average amount of time PhRMA.org cites for a new medicine to go from initial testing to general availability. And if general availability of BIBO3304 ever comes to be, there’s another obstacle: the prior poor track record of similar weight-loss drugs.

In the past, they have created psychiatric or cardiovascular side effects severe enough that 4 out of 5 have eventually been pulled from the marketplace, Dr. Shi estimates.

Now here’s the listing of the potential “side effects” from following the Fitness Master’s eating and exercising advice: improved health, increased energy, and unintended weight loss.

In the eating part of the plan, you don’t concern yourself with total calories as much as the composition of them. You simply increase your consumption of foods high in protein and complex carbs and limit your consumption of simple carbs and unhealthy fats.

Most of the simple carbs typically consumed these days come from ultraprocessed foods that tend to be high in added sugar, refined grains, sodium, and fat. The rate at which the average American consumes them has been linked to an increased likelihood of developing obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.

Conversely, the complex carbs replacing the simple ones have been linked to reducing the likelihood of the four.

Additionally, replacing simple carbs with complex ones increases your overall amount of energy by moderating your blood sugar level. While simple carbs provide energy quicker than complex carbs, it quickly leads to what I call crash-and-burn eating.

The immediate energy rush is soon replaced by a feeling of no energy at all, and you feel as hungry as you did before, so you eat more - more simple carbs. If that pattern becomes a habit, your energy level is erratic throughout the day and weight is gained.

But habitually eat the way I suggest and you’ll lose weight. The protein and complex carbs that now dominate your diet have a similar effect on your body as the experimental anti-obesity drug, BIBO3304.

They dial up your internal thermostat dramatically compared to simple carbs and fat.

To enhance the benefits produced by eating this way - and to keep your internal thermostat dialed up for hours after the fact - you should exercise 4 or 5 times a week. The average session should last at least 30 minutes, two of them should incorporate weightlifting, and one should feature aerobic exercise that makes you breath heavily during designated intervals.