If you can’t recall the television commercial where the overweight woman sings and dances her way around a town square as dozens join her - a commercial eventually revealed to be just that, a commercial - it can only mean one thing. You don’t watch any TV.

I don’t watch much yet I see her frequently. Almost as often as the ever-present pitchman for Head & Shoulders, State Farm, and Subway.

A Mr. Patrick Mahomes who still found the time to QB the KC Chiefs to the Super Bowl.

Mahomes never sings in his commercials, however. Which is just as well because the tune the large lady croons about Jardiance, the “little pill with a big story to tell” is far from “really swell,” the claim she makes about it. It’s a claim, though, that’s not only accurate but also applies to an entire group of similar weight-loss drugs known as the GLP-1 agonists.

And for good reason.

Created initially to control Type 2 diabetes, GLP-1 agonists such as Trulicity, Ozempic, and Wegovy have become, according to Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, a cardiologist and nutrition professor at the Tufts School of Medicine in Boston, the most effective line of drugs available to battle obesity, an affliction that now affects more than 40% of American adults. They all share one mystifying fact, though.

No one knows for sure why the GLP-1 agonists create weight loss.

Which isn’t the case for the drug-free weight-loss method I mentioned two columns ago made possible by an understanding of energy density. That mention created a few questions, so it’s time to set the record straight, to take a deeper dive into how understanding ED could be “really swell” for you.

Certainly sweller than any singing about a weight-loss drug.

Energy density refers to the calories in a particular weight of food and is often delineated this way:

Foods that contain fewer calories than grams are called low-ED foods; those that contain equal or up to twice the number, moderate-ED foods, and foods with more than twice the number are referred to as high-ED foods. The oh-so important twist to this is that how you prepare the food can lead to different designations.

A potato in its raw state possesses 74 calories per 100 grams, so it definitely qualifies as a low-ED food. Though you can and they’re high in resistant starch, who eats raw potatoes?

Boil a potato and it still remains a low-ED food, providing 86 calories per 100 grams. Bake one and it remains one too, practically speaking, for a baked potato contains 110 calories per 100 grams, close enough to call equal.

But strip off a potato’s skin, slice it for french fries and fry it, and you triple the number of cals to grams when compared to a baked potato. Make potato chips in the same way, and the difference is even greater.

Nearly eight times the number of calories of a raw potato.

While the additional calories found in the fries and chips come from deep frying, do not dismiss two other factors that increase the number of calories while decreasing weight. The peeling away of the potato’s skin eliminates fiber, and the frying virtually eliminates its water content.

Foods high in fiber and water are almost always low-ED foods. Science shows, especially the research led by Penn State professor Barbara J. Rolls, that eating your typical total volume of food while ingesting fewer calories doing so may be the best to lose weight.

And the only way to eat more by volume without gaining weight.

Rolls calls her way of accomplishing either Volumetrics and wrote a few books about it. In 2007, The Volumetrics Eating Plan (William Morris Paperback, 2007) earned Consumer Reports top rating when the watchdog group ranked that year’s most popular diet plans.

One of the Rolls-led studies published that same year by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition had nearly 100 obese women eat either a low-fat diet or a low-fat diet incorporating Volumetrics. In other words and using energy-density terminology, the second group not only ate a diet low in fat but also one that replaced moderate- and high-ED foods with low-ED foods.

One year later, all 100 women had lost weight. Those on just the low-fat diet lost on average 14 pounds, but those on the Volumetric version lost on average 16.5 pounds.

It’s how the difference occurred makes the extra 2.5 pounds all the more impressive. The Volumetrics group ate 25% more food by weight when compared to the other group.

If eating more and weighing less sounds like a good deal to you, go online and read a PDF the CDC provides, “Low-Energy-Density Foods and Weight Management.” If that piques your interest, why not purchase one of Rolls’ books?

All are good, but I’m partial to the aforementioned one, The Volumetrics Eating Plan.