Tell Me How to Get Fat

Previously I wrote about some considerable dangers from obesity, in what was more or less a tirade against the culture of fat acceptance.

The growing obesity epidemic is a topic that should bring great concern to anyone. It continues to spiral out of control and society as a whole suffers for it. Despite learning all the consequences, some will unfortunately never bother to try and lose weight (similar to many smokers).

But today, we’ll address the basic mechanisms behind fat. The role it plays, how it works, and why it’s problematic in a modern environment.

Understanding the Role of Fat

Evolutionary history is extremely relevant and important for understanding our health, even in modern times. Humans are slow to evolve, and so understanding the health of our ancient ancestors is a necessary starting point.

Fat is and always has been a survival mechanism. Hunter gatherers don’t have access to massive grocery stores. They had to hunt, find, or dig up their food. Their next meal could be 3 minutes from now, or 3 days from now.

When coming across a large source of calories, they overate by design. The extra calories were stored in the body as fat for later use.

Fat then serves as a rainy day fund. When our ancestors couldn’t find food, they burned fat for energy to survive until the next meal.

Environmental Changes

Skip forward to modern day… We’re certainly not struggling to find food. Problem is, our body still functions no different than our ancient ancestors (human evolution is slow). This means the urge to pack on calories still exists.

Problem is, this disrupts the all important energy balance. That is, how many calories we take in vs. how many we burn. We take in more calories than our ancient ancestors and burn less. Both a convenience of modern technology.

Modern Battles

This is a modern day war with our evolution and environment. We have to fight the urge to overeat as well as the overwhelming abundance of food around us.

Fat is a brilliant survival mechanism. When we struggled to find food or battled through a tough winter, it was literally the difference between life and death. Maintaining an energy balance was therefore a forced result of the environment, not discipline.

Today our variables are drastically different. Maintaining an energy balance is becoming exceedingly rare,. and along with several other factors, fat has become a factor in premature death rather than survival.

Takeaway

Several theories exist on how to gain or lose weight. They come with varying levels of effectiveness or scientific evidence. Regardless, we shouldn’t worry about any of that until we’ve first corrected our energy balance. (Please also make sure you’re consuming nutritional calories and not just sugars or starches.)

Understanding energy balance is the first, and arguably most important, step to correcting your weight.

It’s also important for disease mitigation, as many chronic diseases are correlated to these energy imbalances.

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Photo by Andriyko Podilnyk on Unsplash