Slimming:Learn to Trust the Wisdom of Your Body

Animals in the wild are never fat. Some mechanism seems to keep them slim and maintain an automatic balance between their calorie intake and energy needs. Why doesn’t this system work for people in the Western world for whom obesity has now become the Number 1 health hazard?  To answer that question it’s necessary to go back to the days when our hunter-gatherer forebears struggled to survive in a bleak and hostile environment.

During those times, natural selection must have favoured men and women who could lay up stores of fat to keep them alive during periods of famine and throughout the long winter months when there would have been a shortage of berries, fruits and nuts. By now this propensity for storing fat must have been bred into our genes. But today it no longer serves a life-preserving function, for we live in an age of plenty, where our major hazard is not a dearth of food, but an unhealthy surfeit. Surrounded by so many tempting foods, the truly amazing thing is not that we acquire a middle age spread, but that we don’t all become grotesquely obese. The average woman eats about twenty tons of food between the ages of 25 and 65, but during that time gains only twenty-four pounds in excess weight. That’s equivalent to a daily surplus of just a hundredth of an ounce of food more than is needed to maintain a steady weight, which represents a truly remarkable balancing act.  Nowadays we live in a world where we’re encouraged to become food junkies, with the entire food industry acting as pushers. The whole art of the pastry cook, and the sole objective of the advertising industry, is to get us to eat more than we really need. How can we resist those mouth-watering advertisements for chocolate layer cake? They’re a mouth-watering invitation to over-indulge, with each two-inch slice supplying four-hundred-and-fifty calories, which is nearly a fifth of the daily energy requirement of a sedentary female worker. Taken as an isolated indiscretion it seems a mere trifle, but those extra calories are more than we need to put on a massive forty pounds of superfluous flab a year.

The fact that we don’t suffer this fate is living testimony to the efficacy of the body’s power of self-regulation. Every mammal – mice, rats, dogs, monkeys and humans – is equipped with a weight regulating, closed-loop cybernetic system, which I’ll describe in greater detail in a few weeks time. It’s called the ‘appestat’, since it works in exactly the same way as the thermostat which keeps the rooms of a centrally-heated house at a steady temperature whatever the warmth or coldness of the outside air. Experiments have shown that if the appestats of laboratory animals are destroyed, the animals overeat and become obese. If they remain intact, the animals can be given unlimited quantities of food, and will only eat enough to balance their exact energy requirements. Given this inbuilt homeostatic mechanism, why do we come across so many chubby men and women?  What’s going wrong?  Nature has provided us with a system which will maintain our bodies at a healthy weight without any interference on our part. We don’t have to take slimming pills, submit to operations to reduce the size of our stomachs, count calories, eliminate fats or weigh the portions of food we eat. All we need do is listen to the wisdom of our bodies and eat only in response to hunger cues.

There’s a vast difference between hunger and appetite. Appetite is the desire to eat; hunger is the need to eat.  Must people in the Third World are dying from a lack of nourishment, while we in the West are dying from a surfeit of food.  Our problem can be solved providing we’re prepared to follow the promptings of our ‘appestat’, and eat only when we’re genuinely hungry. At present, most of us live in a state of perpetual satiation. Many adults have never experienced real hunger throughout their entire lives. This means they’ve never known the joy of sitting down to a meal when their mouth is watering, their digestive juices flowing and their stomachs registering the hunger pangs of eager expectation.  Dionysius the Tyrant was a glutton, and once complained that he wasn’t enjoying the black broth he’d been served. To which his head cook bravely replied: ‘I do not wonder, for the seasoning is wanted.’  ‘What seasoning?’ his master replied. ‘Running, sweating, fatigue, hunger and thirst; these are the ingredients with which we season all our food.’ This truism was well expressed by a famous French chef who said: ‘Hunger is the best sauce’.

Over time, you can solve your weight problems providing you’re willing to eat only when you’re truly hungry. One lady followed this method and over two years lost a vast amount of weight. Having established this habit, she felt confident that she wouldn’t gain the weight she’d lost, so she put an advertisement in the local paper: ‘Lost, three and half stone!  Selling my fat clothes – good condition, sizes 18-20’. Over the next few days she was bombarded with phone calls. Nobody wanted to buy the clothes, they all wanted to know how she’d lost the three-and-a-half stone.  The same practice helped Greta Garbo maintain her sylph-like figure. She refused to eat out of boredom or routine, and caused considerable amusement when she replied to a dinner invitation by saying: ‘How do I know I’ll be hungry on Wednesday?’

© Donald Norfolk 2010

www.donaldnorfolk.co.uk