Amanda Sainsbury-Salis

Amanda Sainsbury-Salis (born 1969) is an Australian medical researcher, educator and author. Her research interests are hypothalamic control of body weight, famine reaction, metabolism, body composition, anorexia, obesity, eating disorders.

Born Amanda Sainsbury in Sydney, New South Wales in 1969, Sainsbury-Salis grew up in Perth, Western Australia. She graduated from the University of Western Australia in 1990. She was the Australian recipient of the Boursière de la Confédération (Swiss Government Scholarship) in 1991 and she received her PhD from the University of Geneva, Switzerland in 1996.

As a young adult Sainsbury-Salis had a binge eating disorder which caused her weight to rise to 93 kilograms (205 lb), with a height of 1.6 metres (5 ft 3 in), despite numerous attempts to lose weight. After she started medical research in weight loss, she lost 28 kilograms (62 lb) and has kept it off over 10 years.

Sainsbury-Salis returned to Australia in 1998 to work at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research where she currently leads a research team. She is also a senior lecturer in the University of New South Wales Faculty of Medicine.

Her book, The Don't Go Hungry Diet, was published by Bantam Australia in 1997. She shares her scientific and personal insights about weight regulation with the public through community workshops, her website and media such as her regular column on weight loss in the Australian Women's Health magazine. According to Sainsbury-Salis, conventional calorie restricted diets don't always work because the body goes into "famine reaction". The body wants to stay at a "set-point" weight and, to establish that, slows the metabolism and hangs on to fat. The way around this is to eat only whenever one feels physically hungry, even if one only eats something like a piece of chocolate cake. While this seems good for many dieters, it can also be a "license to overindulge" for some. Along with ad libitum eating, eating just enough to satisfy hunger, Sainsbury-Salis also advocates eating a great variety of fruits and vegetables and whole minimally processed foods.

Sainsbury-Salis introduced the terms "famine reaction" and "fat brake" into diet literature. She describes those two defence mechanism of body as follows:

The Famine Reaction is your body's way of protecting you from losing too much weight. The Famine Reaction is activated whenever your weight drops below a certain threshold. It triggers the nagging hunger and cravings for fattening foods that you've no doubt experienced while trying to lose weight in the past. The Famine Reaction also causes dramatic reductions in your metabolic rate and contributes to plateaus and rapid rebound weight gain. Your body not only has a Famine Reaction that protects you from losing weight, it also has an ingenious mechanism – the Fat Brake – that helps protect you from gaining weight. Whenever you eat more than you need, your Fat Brake blunts your appetite (notably your appetite for fattening foods) and boosts your metabolic rate.

• 2002 Young Investigator of the Year Award from the Australasian Society for the Study of Obesity, now known as the Australian and New Zealand Obesity Society
• 2004 NSW Tall Poppy Award from the Australian Institute of Policy and Science

• "Dr Amanda Sainsbury-Salis". Past NSW Tall Poppy Winners: 2004 New South Wales Award Winners. Australian Institute of Policy and Science. 2016. Retrieved 10 September 2016. 

• Sainsbury-Salis, Amanda (2007). The Don't Go Hungry Diet. Bantam Australia. ISBN 978-1-86325-523-3.