FAT is a TALENT
Yes, you read that right!
“God comes to the hungry in the form of food.” — Gandhi
“Gluttony kills more than the sword.” — anon.
According to the World Health Organization, obesity rates have soared to all time highs in the more “developed” (industrialized) countries of the world, with an average of 14% in the 29 most industrialized nations (the highest being in the United States at 34%), with comparable rates being overweight (U.S. currently at 32%). So a full TWO- THIRDS of Americans are now either overweight or obese!
Food! Glorious Food!
When prisoners on death row have exhausted all their legal options and are within hours of execution and the end of their lives, they are asked what they would like for their last meal. They are told they can have anything they want. People take great care in planning that last meal. They often recall favorite memories of their best meal ever: where they were, who they were with, what they ate, how it tasted. They usually smile when planning their last meal and eating it. The prison guards often smile when they serve that meal. It is a small ray of light and comfort in a dark place.
“Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship.” — Elsa Schiaparelli
One of the best-selling genres of books and media is food and its preparation. People love to cook and watch others cooking; many refer to themselves as “foodies” and make fun of their fetish for all things culinary as “food porn”. Most important human events such as births, graduations, marriages and funerals are accompanied by food. Parties tend to gravitate toward the kitchen. Children and their parents love to cook together. Preparing and eating good food is at the center of our existence on this planet.
Over the approximately 200,000 years of human (homo sapiens) history, most of those humans spent their entire lives without agriculture, without domesticated animals, without grocery stores or refrigerators. In other words, most of the people who lived on this planet before you spent some of their lives STARVING (what we now politely call “hungry”)!
The struggle for survival has always been a food fight: more calories today, better chance of surviving until tomorrow. Since humans and other species have spent most of their evolutionary history under conditions of food scarcity, they have had to compete hard for those calories. Darwin’s concept of “survival of the fittest” has always meant in part that those who have the ability to consume and store more calories will survive more.
The consuming more calories part of the survival equation has to do with both physical strength and social skill. You can get more calories by fighting with someone over food and winning, and by having relationships that generate synergy for food acquisition. Both brute strength and a civilized culture are good for survival.
When all humans lived in a world with very scarce and unreliable food supplies, it was possible to gorge on a high calorie meal and starve to death before the next meal was found. The next meal was often days away. This brings in the second survival factor related to eating: storing calories up for a hungry day.
Some people are very “talented” at depositing calories as fat and saving it up, that infamous “slow metabolism”. While most people with a slow metabolism hate it, it’s like having a bank account where the money goes in fast and comes out slow: you get rich, only in this case you get fat! The biological “ability” to create/save fat stores is inherited and, like all abilities, it varies across the population. Some have more of this “talent” and some less. People who become obese have more of this biological talent than those who do not, and would have been survival superstars in the early chapters of human history.
And Then Things Got Better … A Lot Better!
Throughout most of human history, thin was not in. Thin was starving. Thin was dead! The problem of overweight and obesity is a very recent one for human beings, because until very recently in human evolution we all lived in a resource/calorie poor environment. A good deal of physical effort was required to find and eat low-calorie fruits and vegetables, and even more effort was involved in catching and killing prey animals that could run away or fight back. People who could find and eat more calories quickly and burn them off more slowly had a survival advantage that they passed along genetically to their offspring. Fat is a wonderful thing, a safe stable readily convertible source of energy. It’s like having a nice full gas tank in your car or oil tank for your house. Full and happy.
As human intelligence and ingenuity developed, we created more efficient methods for securing calories. Farming, which began ~12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, and domestication of food animals resulted in larger and more reliable sources of fuel. As people shifted from a nomadic hunter-gatherer search for food to living in place in villages, starvation and malnutrition rates declined. Life got better (and in some ways worse) for homo sapiens with better return of calories on investment of effort.
During the industrial revolution, labor-saving (i.e. calorie-saving) devices were invented such as trains, machines for factories and agriculture, cars and household appliances, and larger food supplies were generated with less muscle work, tipping the balance even further toward a calorie surplus and away from deficit. But … there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
Beyond a certain biological tipping point, increasing fat stores begin to harm the body rather than protect it. As a body’s weight increases beyond “healthy” levels, a range of health problems begin to appear:
• Coronary artery/heart disease
• Type 2 diabetes
• Cancers (endometrial, breast, and colon)
• Hypertension (high blood pressure)
• Dyslipidemia (high cholesterol/triglycerides)
• Stroke
• Liver and gallbladder disease
• Sleep apnea and respiratory problems
• Osteoarthritis
As more people have access to more calories with less physical effort, the rates of overweight and obesity and related illness skyrocket. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey indicates that about 32% of U.S. adults aged 20–74 years are overweight. Another 34% are obese, compared to 15% in 1976. So TWO-THIRDS of American adults are now either overweight or obese! There are equally troubling levels of overweight/obesity for children and teens.
It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature
Homo sapiens is pretty much the smartest kid in the evolutionary class. We have noticed that we are getting fatter and are paying a price for this, so we have figured out a rational solution: lose weight by eating less. Brilliant! But when people try to lose weight by eating less, they are fighting against a biological survival drive that has been strengthened and refined over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. They are literally taking food out of their own mouths, an act which, if performed by someone or something else, would normally provoke a fight to the death. The greatest challenge in the weight loss field is how to win a contest with our own powerful instinctual urges to eat and survive.
You can’t fool Mother Nature; she is too smart and too strong and she knows all your tricks (kind of like your real mother!).
We don’t need to be very smart to eat. If we did, most of us would have died off over the past 200,000 years. Survival instincts like eating, fighting, sex and sleeping need to be “strong, fast and simple”. They are set with a hair trigger. If a prey animal runs past you, and you stop to think about what you’re really in the mood to eat that day, you will starve to death. If a predator is bearing down on you, you shouldn’t have to think: “Hmm, I wonder if I should fight or flee” because by the time you make up your mind, you’re dead!
From an evolutionary-time view of human history lived mostly in conditions of food scarcity, the hair trigger to eat is a good deal. For people who now find themselves living in a calorie-rich world with little need to engage in physical (muscle) work, however, a hair trigger for eating that is very strong and hard to turn off can be very bad news.
The urge to eat can be triggered by a number of situations:
- We’re starving (calorie deficit below maintenance requirements)
- We see food, either real food or media images of food from marketing/advertising
- We observe other people eating
- We’re feeling something (anxious, bored, etc.)
Some people are more sensitive to these triggers and experience more frequent urges to eat, so they end up eating a lot and storing up lots of fat and becoming overweight or obese, especially if they have a talent for fat retention. When they notice this fact, being smart little homo sapiens, they usually develop a very logical strategy: EAT LESS!
Just because something is logical doesn’t mean it is right or it works. What we now know for sure is that simply eating less is, well, simple-minded. It is not a successful strategy for maintaining a healthy weight over the long term. Simply eating less tends to produce either a small weight loss or a larger weight loss followed by a regaining of most or all of those lost pounds and in many cases extra pounds.
The REAL Pain of Weight Loss
To fully appreciate the power of the human urge to eat, you need to travel back in time about 200,000 years to the savannahs of Africa where “we” (homo sapiens) first appeared. Imagine that you are standing alone and naked on a flat hot dusty plain with no shelter, no water, no food and no weapons. Your teeth, nails and muscles are much less strong than many of the natural predators in your environment. You are definitely NOT at the top of the food chain. You face two terrifying dangers:
- You could die of injury or starvation or dehydration
- You could be attacked and killed by a predator
Can you imagine the level of FEAR you would experience standing alone on that exposed plain? In fact, it is very difficult for most people in the relatively safe and comfortable developed world (where most overweight people now live) to directly feel the terror of such a life-threatening environment. We have built a cocoon of invulnerability around us to protect us from the horrendous fear of suffering and death that most organisms live with every moment of their lives. Just observe a bird or other small animal as it remains constantly on the lookout for predators and checks for escape routes. It is NOT feeling calm and relaxed out there. It is only when we are assaulted by one of life’s many threats that we are shaken out of our civilized cocoon and dropped back on that hot dusty plain: naked, weak and alone.
The fear and dread and terror (what we now politely call “anxiety”) of dying and annihilation that we feel when we face our real aloneness and vulnerability in the world is what the existentialist philosophers call “angst”. They argue persuasively that much of our personal discomfort and dis-ease in life is really existential angst. The best way to manage existential threats and fears is to do things that protect or distract us from them. There are a number of strategies that humans and many other animals employ to avoid and soothe feelings of fear, aloneness and vulnerability such as
- Huddling together
- Solo and mutual grooming
- Having sex
- EATING FOOD
- Ingesting intoxicating substances
- Chanting, rocking, dancing and other repetitive trance-inducing activities
- Building industries and cities
- Learning about and dominating the natural world
Eating food reduces existential fear in three powerful ways:
- It removes one root cause of the fear (starving to death)
- It calms fear through brain chemicals released during eating
- It provides a distracting activity on which to focus
In fact, the main reason that airlines started to serve meals was to distract their passengers from their fear that these big heavy machines would fall out of the sky and crash!
It’s all about FEAR
One of the ways that we have survived as a species is by knowing what to be afraid of. Our most common fears (heights, spiders, snakes, the dark etc.) are connected with dangerous situations that have threatened our safety throughout the millennia. Fear is like a STOP sign that says “Caution! Danger!” If the sign is too small we won’t see it in time to hit the brakes and avoid a crash. If the sign is big and red and has loud sirens blaring, it will stop us every time and we will survive more.
When a person has been the victim of a life- threatening attack or accident they often suffer from what we refer to as “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD). Until fairly recently, people suffering from PTSD (with their anxiety and depression, flashbacks, nightmares and difficulty sleeping, intense startle response and hyper-vigilance) were viewed as emotionally disturbed. We now understand that PTSD is in fact a NORMAL reaction to a life-threatening event. PTSD is like that big red STOP sign with loud sirens: it alerts us that we are approaching a situation that is similar to one that threatened our survival so we will avoid it.
One of the greatest threats to our survival as a species has always been starvation. When people are unable to eat enough food, they experience intensely painful feelings of fear, anger and despair. These are the emotional echoes of millions of years of starvation experiences. We could call these emotions “Evolutionary PTSD” (EvPTSD. These are the same feelings that are triggered when we try to diet (starve) our way to a healthy weight. And it is these intolerable feelings of EvPTSD, not just the physical hunger itself, that are the root cause of the failure of most weight loss plans.
When EvPTSD is triggered, it feels so dreadful and so much worse than simple hunger pains that we will do almost anything to stop it. If our attempts to eat are not successful, we experience even more of these painful feelings, and we will intensify our efforts to eat. If our efforts continue to fail, we will eventually fall into despair (which is the biological mechanism for giving up on the pursuit of an unattainable goal before using up all of your resources) and ultimately coma and death.
Wouldn’t we be much better off without suffering the pain and anguish of EvPTSD? We would certainly be more comfortable, but there is a survival advantage to EvPTSD. Imagine that 200,000 years ago, some humans felt only mild distress when they were unable to satisfy their urge to eat, some felt a moderate amount of distress, and still others got whacked with full-blown EvPTSD. Since every feeling organism tries to avoid pain as much as possible, the humans who experienced the higher-dose EvPTSD would be the most highly motivated to find and consume food in order to shut off those dreadful feelings. Those who tried harder to get food would probably get more food and survive more than the ones with a milder reaction to food deprivation, and so this “talent” for EvPTSD would be favored and passed along to their offspring according to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The result is that most of us now experience reasonably strong EvPTSD when our urge to eat is triggered but prevented from being satisfied.
A story about fat
Once upon a time, I went to watch a professional tennis match. Just before the players appeared, a press photographer walked onto the court and over to the sidelines where he would take his pictures of the match. The photographer was extremely obese; his fat body jiggled as he walked by. Suddenly, one person in the stands yelled out “Hey you fat pig!” Another screamed: “Get off the court, you disgusting slob!” Soon, the crowd was roaring with hate toward this man who was simply there to do his job. Their faces were red and their fists were clenched and shaking.
Why would people react this way to someone they didn’t know and who was simply going about his own business? Since human beings have spent hundreds of thousands of years of their history hungry and starving, fat has always been a matter of life and death. If one person in an early human group was fat, this meant they were consuming more calories than everyone else, usually because they were in an “alpha” position of dominance in the group’s hierarchy and so had more access to more food. What do you think the thin hungry people would feel when they noticed those nice bulging fat supplies? How about envy and jealousy? Maybe resentment? Perhaps even HATE?
The thin (read: starving) people in those ancient human groups would certainly wish they could take the privileged place of the fat person and so have access to all those extra calories. They might want to drive the fat person out of the group to accomplish that move up the food chain. They might even be angry and resentful enough to feel like attacking or even killing (and eating?!) the fat person who was consuming an “unfair” amount of calories and so “depriving” everyone else. Compare these aggressive reactions to those we have toward the hungry and malnourished, which tend to be ones of pity, compassion and empathy (“There but for the grace of God go I”).
Might some of these feelings toward people who ate more food and got fat have been passed down across the generations? These emotions are expressed as hostility and contempt and the discriminatory attitudes “overweight” people often face in areas such as hiring/promotion decisions, salaries and relationships. This mistreatment is one more burden they must bear.
So what? Now what?
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” — Virginia Woolf
Someday …
- the pharmaceutical industry will achieve the Holy Grail of a medication that safely and effectively dials down the urge to eat to healthy levels
- medical science will provide us with the means to change the structure of our own genes (hint: next gens of CRISPR) and adjust our metabolism to the right set-point for optimum weight maintenance
- chemical engineers will be able to create nutritious foods that we can eat to our heart’s content without gaining weight
- we will develop more complex nutritional paradigms that free us from our currently simplistic and self-defeating one that focuses only on “calories” in and out
What should we do in the meantime if “dieting” (self-starvation) is doomed to fail? Here are 5 strategies that do not rely on simple “willpower” to overcome involuntary biological mechanisms (a sucker’s bet) and increase the odds of success:
- Structure the ENVIRONMENT: If you do not bring excess food into your home, you will not eat it. If you do not go into a restaurant, you won’t eat beyond your meal plan.
- Use MONEY as a motivator: Money is a signifier of your access to resources. Losing money is at least as painful as refusing calories. Many studies have found that assigning a financial cost to failure (and a reward for success) to reach specific health goals can flip the motivational balance TOWARD healthier behavior.
- EXERCISE: Cardiovascular exercise reduces anxiety and urges to eat, upscales metabolic rate, and increases overall well-being.
- Take a TEAM approach to your health: Social support decreases fear and suffering and increases compliance with shared goals. Working with others toward your health (weight, exercise, wellness) goals can facilitate success.
- HELP feed the hungry: shift some of your focus from your own hunger to the charitable virtue of helping others.
