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By David Zinczenko
The Cro-Magnon man did not have abs. Oh, our distant ancestor ate
a pretty healthy diet, full of wild game and nuts and fruits—
the kind of high-fiber, high-protein meals we'd be better off eating
ourselves. And he sure exercised more than the average American
does nowadays— dodging sabre-tooths and loping after mastodons
and all that.
But Nature didn't care much whether our prehistoric forebear had
a lean, rippled midsection and the elusive washboard stomach. All
Nature wanted him to do was to survive. And understanding how those
two goals collide is the key to understanding why the modern practice
of dieting is one main reason why Americans are so fat.
A recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine
found that about 60% of Americans who try to lose weight do so by
restricting their calorie intake, with one in 10 skipping meals
to strip off pounds. These are the symptoms of classic yo-yo-dieting
behavior, and a yo-yo diet is a near-perfect blueprint for anyone
who wants to get fatter in the long run. See, the meaning of the
word "diet" has been all twisted around.
The original meaning of the word was simply habitual nourishment—
basically, what we ate on a regular basis. People who lived near
the seas enjoyed a seafood diet, people who lived in the mountains
enjoyed a woodland diet, and people who lived in areas of the Amazon
enjoyed a diet of their enemies' viscera. And for the most part,
everything was pretty peachy (assuming you didn't live in the Amazon
and wind up on the wrong end of a fork).
Survival mode
Occasionally, though, hard times would strike. Maybe a rival tribe
would force you away from your fishing territory. Maybe the herds
would move on to new pastures, leaving you without game. Maybe a
drought would kill the fruits and nuts you normally relied on to
survive. In such cases, when calories become scarce, the human body
goes into survival mode. And that's where the problems begin.
Calories are needed to preserve body tissue, so when you suddenly
begin eating fewer calories, you begin shedding body tissue. And
because muscle requires more calories to maintain than fat does,
your body preferentially sheds muscle. At the same time, it tries
to pack-rat away fat, saving it for later, in case the lean times
continue. Over time, on a restrictive diet, you lose weight—a
lot of fat, but also a lot of muscle.
Eventually, the lean times end. But the body has learned a harsh
lesson: Times can get tough, and so it had better make sure it has
stored enough fat to help it survive the next time food is in short
supply. So it packs fat around the midsection, fat that takes little
effort to maintain and lots of effort to burn off. And that's the
end of Cro-Magnon man's six-pack.
Today, of course, lean times strike when we decide we want to look
better. And they end when we decide to end our self-imposed "diet."
And, having shaved off a few pounds, head back to the dessert tray.
But while these periods of deprivation now come at our own beckoning,
our bodies interpret it through the same prism of survival—
every time we "go on a diet," we teach our bodies to shed
muscle and preserve fat. Every time we "go off a diet,"
our bodies react by hoarding more fat, making us even flabbier than
before. (And worse— because muscle burns more calories than
fat, and because we've shed muscle during our diet, we've reset
our metabolisms to be lower, essentially making it even harder to
maintain our weight.) The more diets you try, the fatter you become.
Most of us are on diets
In fact, even those of us who aren't consciously dieting are putting
ourselves on miniature diets every day. Most of us keep our bodies
in survival mode most of the time: For example, one in five of us
skip breakfast every morning, according to a 2003 study, and we
probably think we're doing something healthy—less food, less
fat, right?
But in truth, people who skip breakfast are 450% more likely to
be overweight or obese. They are training their bodies to store
fat, the way you do if you skip meals regularly.
We're also training our bodies to store the most dangerous fat—
abdominal fat. This fat isn't a static cluster of useless tissue.
It's a living, growing mass, practically an organism all its own—one
that builds, divides, and excretes toxins back into our systems,
that draws blood flow and nutrients away from the rest of our bodies,
that alters the distribution of hormones in our bloodstreams, that
presses on our organs and hampers their function.
Studies show that men and women who have high levels of abdominal
fat—as opposed to those who have fat more evenly distributed—
are at greater risk for heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and even
some forms of cancer.
The shocking truth about America's obesity problem is that we're
fat because we're starving. The best way to make yourself fat is
to let yourself get hungry. And we live in a nation of people who
are hungry all of the time.
We should be grazing on modest amounts of good food throughout the
day, the way nature intended. Instead we skip meals, deny ourselves
when we feel hunger pangs, then binge on massive quantities in one
sitting, pigging out at buffets and fast-food restaurants, shoveling
sometimes thousands of calories into our bodies in a single meal.
But our bodies quickly process whatever it was we shoved into our
mouths, store it as fat, and within a few hours, we're starving.
Again.
You know that motivational phrase, stay hungry? Ignore it. Stay
full. Ignore the call to starvation and deprivation. A diet is about
what you eat. Not what you don't.
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