CHARGED BATTERY PART I

January 29th, 2020

Tell someone you haven’t eaten anything for the past week and they look at you like you’re legit insane.

In the culture climate of the last few decades it goes against everything we’re told and elicits thoughts about eating disorders.

However, this might be the one area where grandmother’s wisdom doesn’t hold.  If you think about it, most grandparents in the western world, specifically north America, got their eating advice from parents who went through the Great Depression… an era when people had so little to eat they actually did starve to death. 

Make sure you eat enough, is perhaps more reminiscent of a passed down trauma.

Truth is, we’re  very well built for going without food for long periods of time.  If you close your eyes and imagine yourself as a hunter – gatherer from 100,000 years ago, do you think you’d be getting 3 square meals a day?

Not at all.  You might have something that amounts to a very dry salad.  But the good stuff only came along every once in a while.  After a big successful hunt, or when the tribe comes across bushes of berries.  We learned to eat everything edible because there was such a likelihood that we wouldn’t have anything to eat at all.

Frankly, the fact that we are so well built to go without food is the reason why so many people have weight problem.  Our body is permanently programmed to save as many extra calories as possible.

Why?  Because the times our ancestral bodies had to go without food were so numerous and frequent that putting on fat became a permanent feature. 

Notice that our bodies haven’t adapted to do the same with other necessities, like sleep and oxygen.  We can’t go a couple minutes without taking a breath and go a night or two without sleep and your performance regarding anything starts to go down the drain.  Keep sleep depriving yourself and you run the risk of significant brain damage and death. 

But Skip a meal? 

Sure you might proclaim to the world that you’re starving! but in reality, you’ll be fine.

If you can grab a good hold of your side, then your battery is still charged up.

And just to put it in perspective, it’s worth mentioning the case of a man named Angus Barbieri.

In 1965 he weighed 456lbs.  Then he fasted for 382 days.  Think about that for a second.  The guy didn’t eat for over a year.  When he finished he was 180lbs.  And he kept it off for the rest of his life.

One way to think about obesity, is to think people have fully charged batteries.  If there was a famine tomorrow, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who would last the longest.