It is hard to imagine that our ancestors 50,000 years ago had exactly the same genetic blueprint that our bodies have today. Although our world has changed dramatically especially in the last few hundred years the way our bodies work has not changed from the hunter/gatherers that we used to be.
The earliest of our ancestors whom we owe our genetics to were required to be totally focused on the constant struggle of getting enough food on a daily basis to survive and had to either hunt or gather it. When times were tough, such as in harsh winter conditions when food was short it often came down to survival of the fattest rather than the fittest.
Our modern day bodies are still programmed with this desperate need to store energy in the form of body fat at every chance we get even though we do not need it anymore. This is why we put on excess fat weight so easily and have a hard time taking it off. Your body is only protecting itself from the next famine that it thinks is coming.
When you combine this with our less physically active lifestyles and the abundance of calorie dense food it is a recipe for the epidemic of overweight people in our society today. Yet when people become overweight they start to panic and often resort to measures such as a diet to try and lose excess fat weight.
But this causes its own set of problems as the body recognizes it as that famine that is approaching so it hunkers down and holds on to its fat stores for dear life. It does not know that there is a fridge full of food in the next room and there is no chance of starvation.
If you have ever been on a diet you will have experienced that fast weight loss at the start then the gradual slowdown and finally that complete stop as the body catches on and puts the brakes on. We can thank our ancestors for this one too as your body cannot distinguish between the lack of food that a famine would bring and the voluntary reduction of food that we know as a diet.
The only way around this is to not reduce food intake much, just one or two hundred calories and try and stay under this ‘radar’ system. If you also up your activity level with a proper strength training program and increase your metabolism you will be able to slowly lose body fat without triggering the ‘survival’ mode.
By being able to still eat enough good food your energy levels will remain high, and this is important as you need to be able to put some effort into your strength training program so you can tone up your muscle tissue which is how you will get a boost to the rate your body burns fuel (calories).
So instead of thinking less – less food, less energy and less strength think more – more good food, more energy and more effort put into your exercise program and watch that fat melt off your body. This is the opposite of dieting and is the very best way to lose weight.
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