So there we are, huddling round the dining table with our portions looking larger because they’re on small plates. We’ve also started to look out for sugar in our diet. And our will is strengthening because, so far, we haven’t really challenged ourselves.

We’ve started to take our phentermine, Acomplia or Meridia. We’re slowly reducing our sugar intake. It’s the first plateau.

Plateau? I hear you mutter.

As you climb a hill, there’s steady effort to move your weight up the incline. But, once the routine is established, you fall into the rhythm and it grows easier. Well, it actually becomes so easy after a while that it’s like you’re walking on the flat again. And your body goes into a steady state, neither gaining nor losing weight. There was that initial slight loss when you started, but then your weight stabilized at the slightly lower level.

Well, now you have to make the next minor change.

Back in the Stone Age when we were all out and about hunting and gathering, we had very healthy diet. Lots of natural roughage from the roots we were chewing, healthy berries and fruit picked from the trees, and good protein from the meat (when those useless hunters finally managed to make a kill, that is).

Now let’s skip forward a bit.

Bad news!

We’ve invented agriculture!

Whoever said we ought to put down roots (metaphorically) and build a hut with a field to tend should be shot (we can use a bow and arrow until gunpowder comes along). You’re puzzled. I can see you’re puzzled. Agriculture made our current civilisation possible. Cities and all the benefits of modern living come from the development of the plough and the recognition of the grains that would grow into the now standard crops of wheat, barley, etc. Yes, yes. Agriculture did have some good features, but we were inventing a carbohydrate-rich diet. The effect has been a sharp decline in the health of the nations.

As our diet has moved away from the basic foods that took us from early homo sapiens to our first city dwellers, we’ve been forcing our bodies to adapt to an unnatural kind of food. And then that idiot Raleigh, Sir Walter of that ilk, made everything twenty times worse by bringing the potato back across the Atlantic. There was next to no starch in the root vegetables before then. Why couldn’t he sink in a storm? Why haven’t we invented time travel? We could go back and put all these things right again. As it is, the trend has continued into modern times with increasingly processed food replacing natural produce. Even the current vogue for organic, back-to-basic foods is not going to reverse the trend.

So why I am wailing and gnashing my teeth?

Well, essentially, we still have the same metabolisms that we had when we were primitive. Actually, I still do have a primitive side but this is not the right place to talk about it. So back on the plains and in the wooods, we almost never encountered carbohydrates. The lucky few that did manage to eat some, converted it into fat.

Now why is that a survival characteristic?

Because, if we have some fat, it will carry us through a famine (a short one anyway).

Now that’s a wonderful thing to be able to do when carbohydrates are rare, but it is completely out of place when we have more carbohydrates than we know what to do with. The result? We get very, very fat (if you compare us to our Stone Age ancestors).

Worse. . .

Worse? How can it get worse?

Our bodies are designed to protect the store of fat until we need it.

Hahahahaha.

So because we do not experience famines in our modern world, our bodies accumulate fat as a one-way process. The design was never meant to work in times of guaranteed plenty.

So, for those of you who are still awake, that means we have to create a mini famine so that we start to burn off the fat. Simply cutting down on our sugar intake is not enough. We have to gradually get tougher on ourselves.

Our ancestors would approve.

You know it makes sense.

Tagged with: acomplia • diet • healthy diet • losing weight • Meridia • Phentermine