FEELING FAT OR ANXIOUS? HERE’S WHY…

Feeling fat or anxious? 10,000 years ago, you’d have the advantage!

Ancient humans were subject to much harsher and ever changing conditions than we are today. We’ve become pretty skilled at building amazing shelters, AKA homes, to the level of controlling the climate in our shelter (I’ve even got a little space heater warming up my feet as I type)! We’ve even figured out how to have fully prepared food delivered to us without even having to leave the shelter of our cozy, comfortable homes. What a life we have created for ourselves now.

But back before we had the conveniences of modern society, everyday required a physical and mental effort to acquire nutrients. Our life depended on being active in order to get what we needed. We also had to work with what nature gave us depending on the season. Summertime often meant that fruits and vegetation were more readily available, while winter generally meant we needed to rely more on animal meat and hunting. For thousands of years our genes have been adapting to these changes and the signals our bodies get from our environment, including our food. Seasons of feast, famine, hard work, and rest were the norm.

We also had to be concerned about severe threats to our physical safety. Extreme weather,  large predators, and poisonous plants were everyday concerns. Being on alert wherever we went to avoid an attack, watching for signs of terrible weather approaching, running from danger, avoiding poisonous things. In this type of environment, caution is king and our big brains helped us analyze threats and prepare for the worst.

Can you guess which humans survived? The fat storing worry warts!

Think it’s your fault that you don’t want to get up off the couch? Nope, your genes are telling your body that you need to conserve energy! That’s right, the humans that could conserve energy and store enough fat to fuel their brain and body through the winter survived. The ones that worried the most and avoided physical danger survived. And they passed all those good traits on to you!

It took humans thousands of years of natural selection to optimize for our survival in these harsh conditions. Then with the help of all that fat we were able to store, our brains grew, we became smarter, and we started coming up with ingenious ways of making our life easier. This has worked really well for us. Food is much easier to come by and we are able to avoid succumbing to a multitude of illnesses and infections. But we’ve unknowingly created for ourselves other problems because we’ve changed our environment faster than our genes could adapt to alongside.

Your body doesn’t know that there is a grocery store around the corner year round, and your subconscious brain is still looking for threats. So by trying to prepare you for what it thinks is the worst, your body is making you fat and anxious…a big thanks to your body for helping you out, right?

Now-a-days knowing what is harmful to us isn’t as immediate as it was in our ancient past. Ate some poisonous berries? You’d realize pretty quickly that you made a mistake. But being diagnosed with diabetes? That problem was likely brewing for years, and what is the problem anyways?  Our major threats are different now, they are generally more slow to develop like heart disease and depression.

The good news is that you can work with your ancient genes to improve your health and reduce anxiety. All you need to do is understand a little about how your modern lifestyle clashes with what your genes have been built for. You can build for yourself a lifestyle that utilizes the aspects of modern life that are aligned with your body (like eating whole foods), and reduce or avoid those aspects that aren’t (like sitting in and office all day). 

Us humans are pretty inventive. Now, after eons of inventing ways to make life more comfortable and safe, we get to use that creativity to enjoy life! We now get to be creative with what we eat instead of scrounging for scraps, and the exercise that our bodies evolved for doesn’t have to be for desperate searches for food… it gets to be fun!