Fat, fatter, fattest, fatist, fatista

As a person who thinks of himself as 'fat' (because I am seriously overweight and all the excess fat is the part I'd rather dispose of rather than say, muscle, organs or bones - insert 'lose 40 pounds of ugly fat joke here) I have a few thoughts on the matter. I was sent an email offering me, as a special incentive to purchase some financial training courses (reputable ones I should add), a free copy of the book Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes Us Fat ( http://sweetpoison.com.au/). I immediately put a note on my Facebook where I said: 

Sounds like me. Might even read this, but we shouldn't discount low GI diets because they can be bent by industry (low GI chocolate for fuck's sake (FFS)). Also, the purpose of low GI diets is to reduce the amount of sugar we eat, having already reduced the amount of fat we eat. Since many processed foods contain lots of sugars (and some are worse than others) we need to be careful what we eat. And many unprocessed foods have surprising GI ratings as well. As for evolutionary considerations - that's for the blog I think.

So here it is.

I suppose journalist and traders tend towards being overweight because they tend to sit still in front of computers much of the time, so this was a good offer. When visiting the site and reading an extract I found something of a parallel life, though I am pleased not to have six children including twins rather having only three. Anyway, there was discussion of the Darwinian explanation for some of our bodily behaviour and it occurred to me for the very first time that I have been suckered, again. I am not a bad, self indulgent slob apparently: I  have a highly efficient body that does what it was adapted to do some tens of thousands of years ago when we were all hunter gatherers. All you skinnys out there: clearly you are mutants and come the inevitable ecological reckoning, I know who is going to starve. Sorry, years of suffering fatist prejudice came to the surface there, please ignore. So what do I mean?

Let's talk about fruit - we all know that it's good for you and that it's seasonal. While we were evolving we didn't have international transport of food or refrigeration. You ate the fruit when it was available. You ate as much as you could because you knew winter was coming (or at least your body knew and wasn't fussed by that newfangled self awareness that was wasting resources in your brain).  Your brain knew you would be starving for a while later on and the only thing that would get you through to the next spring would be if you could convert as much of that food as possible into fat. So some of our ancestors did. The ones who didn't didn't make it and neither did their kids. That's how natural selection works. Pretty grim really - not a good bed time story but one the kids have to learn at some stage unless they come from a place where the government feels they can legislate against reality (see US southern states in particular and possibly the Australian Liberal Party).

Now we have agriculture, transport, refrigeration and other forms of food storage so the selection pressure of winter (or monsoon - hello Thailand - or drought - hello Africa - or other periods when food would be unavailable) has receded. Good-oh. It's just that our brain and body is extremely conservative (in a good way) so it keeps urging us to eat more and convert that to fat for the bad times it just knows are just around the next bend. Not only that, we now have a super abundance of food. And not only good food, really terrible food as well. So we keep eating and we get fat because the selection pressure doesn't force our bodies to use the fat. But if we stop eating our bodies think the bad times have arrived and will only use as little fat as possible to try to keep us alive and meanwhile make us absolutely bloody ravenous and steps up the old fat conversion of any food we do happen to eat.

So we try to reduce what we eat, select what we eat more carefully and take lots of exercise (ho, ho - when you are carrying 40+ kg of extra fat exercise is a form of torture). As explained in the video below (which is truly excellent and worth investing the time on - I know it's long) even when we as a society decided to go fat free, we kept gaining weight! This was mainly because of the use of various sugars in processed food (Danger Will Robinson!) but also because we have just too damn much good food (at the moment).

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

So in conclusion, not only have I been suckered by the food industry, I've been suckered by my own brain! The only good news is, so I'm told, that once you significantly reduce sugars in your diet (along with bad fats and high GI foods) your body stabilises and adjusts its tastes so that you are no longer addicted to sugar, find exercise possible, lose weight and get on with whatever the non rational part of your brain tells you to do (reproduce and seek high status). O joy.