Your built in autopilot system
Evolutionary biology offers us a “user’s manual” for working with our built in auto pilot system for optimal human health and longevity.
Good news - you can regain your health and fitness! Step #1 is to realign your diet and lifestyle with your evolutionary biology ( your built in AutoPilot system, something honed to perfection over hundreds of thousands of years ). Once that is good all of a sudden things get way easier and you feel way better. You lose that belly fat effortlessly. Your health improves across the board. No real thought required. And maybe best of all, meals are delicious, nutritious and satisfying. It’s an enjoyable way to live and a tasty, sustainable way to eat !
Two quick caveats and one spoiler alert before we dive in.
1 Nutrition is an area where DIY solutions, advice from friends or Dr Google almost always fail miserably to produce positive results.
2 Diet is a rare area where unlike snow tires, TVs and cell phones - factory made products don't solve problems, in fact they almost universally make them much worse. Working with a nutrition coach and shifting towards foods made by mother nature vs Food Inc - that is part of a proven path to improved health and wellness.
3 The sicker you are, the further you need to turn the dial back toward emulating your hunter gatherer ancestors. Healthy people can get away with some daily transgressions, they can cut a corner or two but if you are sick, discipline is required to dig your way out. The good news is that typically once we get you well you can add some cheating back in, more on that later.
Footnote - it actually helps to know where you came from, if your ancestors are all northern European vs central Africa or south America. It will help inform how you should eat from carbs to soy to dairy. We can discuss but in general, eat like your ancestors vs some culture that's literally foreign to your genes.
Time machine ready - hop in and lets go
To understand how you can pull-off this amazing personal transformation back to good health, let’s start by traveling back in time, not a million years but just 200,000 years. By that time in human history we had become superbly adapted as Paleolithic hunter gatherers. Our environment and the harsh process of natural selection had shaped us into masters of our domain / apex predators - we were propagating, prospering and perhaps surprisingly, enjoying far better health back then vs what we have today.
We humans hunted and gathered. Large herbivores like mammoths, bison and deer were at the center of our hunting based diet. They provided plenty of nutritious protein plus lots of good fats. As for carbs, we ate lots of leafy green vegetables, and a few tubers that were high in fiber but low in sugars and starch. Throw in some mushrooms and berries plus fresh clean water and that was about it. Very low carb indeed. Certainly not 70% processed carbs from Food Inc factories.
It was a low carb environment, except just prior to winter. Each year in late autumn an annual carbohydrate bonanza arrived in the form of ripe sweet seasonal fruit. It was super abundant but only for a short time. We needed to take full advantage of this highly caloric opportunity but it came with some challenges. Let’s look at how our bodies adapted to handle this annual high carb influx, a deviation away from our regular diet of meat and fish full of good fats and lots and lots of fresh vegetables.
Unlike protein or fats which we hunger for but have a built in hormonal off switch for ( i.e. satiety) our evolutionary biology allows carbs on the other hand to trigger the opposite reaction - a binge / gorge response. This “eat all you can / no off switch” response kicked in each fall as fruit became available - the more we ate, the more we wanted. As hunter gatherers, survival of the fittest programmed us to not just eat a peach but to eat all the peaches! Such glutinous carb binging behavior made sense for most all of human history - winter was coming and food would be scarce, better pack on some belly fat.
So how did our bodies become adapted to all this seasonal ripe fruit, full of carbs and sugars? Too much circulating sugar, anything more than a teaspoon, is actually quite damaging to our bodies on a deep cellular level. So how did we adapt to both take advantage of this seasonal carb overload and at the same time protect ourselves from all that sugar?
Here’s how it worked then, and still does today. Our body senses when we ingest a high carb meal and the hormone insulin is deployed to clear excess sugars from our blood stream to deal with this “energy overload” and return to what is called homeostasis, a healthy normal range.
Insulin works in a triage fashion. The first thing insulin does when released into the bloodstream is to shut down all fat burning - makes sense, with all that excess sugar the last thing we need is more fuel on the fire, thus fat burning is halted. We will come back to that in a minute.
Next, insulin goes looking for places to store all these excess circulating carbs. Insulin asks “Are we currently exercising? Maybe we can burn off these carbs as fuel for muscular activity underway?” If the answer is no, it moves on.
Next up, “Did we exercise recently / are our muscles in need of glycogen stores to replace the ones we used up yesterday, at the gym? Can we shove some sugars into those tired muscles?”
And lastly, to save us from harm, insulin converts all the remaining excess circulating sugars into… fat. That fat is then stored around our waist as subcutaneous “belly fat”. It’s also stored at a deeper level, around our liver and other vital organs. Not good long term but the short term crisis averted, our blood sugars returned to a safe range and homeostasis is restored.
This seasonal addition of some carb driven gains to body fat was actually quite beneficial for our hunter gatherer ancestors facing a long winter with reduced food availability but for us, modern humans, this carb conversion process is anything but healthy.
In a modern day context, these autopilot systems like a gorge response and insulin that worked so well for millions of years lead us today not to leanness and good health and improved survival but instead to the opposite - illness, obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease etc - not good.
We humans are after all animals, ones that are superbly adapted to thrive in certain environments on certain foods. Like a panda in a zoo, feed it the bamboo that it's evolutionarily adapted to consume and it stays healthy, feed it Big Macs and it gets sick and dies. We humans are no different - switch us over to a diet we are not adapted to, one chronically high in carbohydrates, especially processed simple carbs and we get seriously sick, our healthspan / lifespan dramatically reduced.
This change away from a hunter gatherer diet toward a much higher level of carbohydrates in our diet, abundant year round, has only happened in the last 10-12,000 years with the advent of agriculture - less than 1% of our human history! And in the last 50 years, the trend towards ever increasing levels of carbs in the diet has accelerated with the shift towards an industrialized, factory centric food system dominated by a handful of multinational corporations ie Food Inc.
Most of what they produce, most of what’s on grocery store shelves, most of what people now eat ( 70% ! ) is now highly processed simple carbohydrates. From a 20% carb diet for over 99% of human history to a suddenly much higher carbohydrate diet today. And the human health effects - they have been catastrophic.
This radical change starting just 10-15k years ago with the introduction of agriculture and accelerating hugely over the last 50-100 years - it has had profound negative consequences for us humans. Our brains shrank, 11% for males / 17% for women. Adult male height dropped a full 5”. All text book paleo anthropology. And lots more disease. We went from 6’ 2” super healthy ice age hunters with strong bones and few cavities to shorter, weaker, sicker grain farmers with weaker bones and more cavities.
We took an animal, us humans, one that was perfectly adapted to a natural diet and changed everything, overnight. The results? One third of all Americans are now obese, two thirds are overweight / prediabetic. T2 Diabetes, a direct result of too many carbs over too long a time is now at epidemic levels and alarmingly it’s still on the rise. Too many carbs are now directly linked to metabolic syndrome, a whole host of related diseases from Alzheimer's to cardiovascular disease.
Instead of returning to a healthy human diet, one we are well adapted for, we have instead doubled down on our industrialized food system placing profits ahead of public health. Thus this SAD (Standard American Diet) a high carb, low protein and bad fats diet is still being promoted world wide. Much like cigarettes back in the day, factory food is super profitable for the multinational food companies but it’s literally killing us.
Food Inc, much like cigarette companies did, promotes myths and misinformation in order to extend its product lines and profits. Sadly the people and institutions they sponsor do the same. Misleading myths like “calories in vs calories out, all calories are the same” and “to lose weight just eat less / move more” are doomed to fail because they run counter to the autopilot systems in our bodies designed for a vastly different food environment.
When we increase activity and restrict calories, especially fat calories, our body's evolutionary autopilot system perceives the situation to be “Oh no, the hunting must suddenly be very poor, calories and fats are down while activity is up. The stress hormone cortisol begins to circulate. The body reduces cell metabolism, lowering your energy level while simultaneously holding on to fat reserves and dramatically ramping up cravings / signals of hunger.
While these are all effective metabolic strategies for a hunter gatherer, for a modern human trying to shed 20 or 30 excess pounds however these are highly counter productive - leaving a person with low energy and high hunger cravings for quick calorie dense foods, like say a bag of chips or a bowl of ice cream. That's great for Food Inc of course but not for us or our health.
Today's processed high carb food environment and the never ending spikes in insulin brings with it serious health issues our whole natural food diet hunter gatherer ancestors never had to deal with.
With insulin circulating at high levels, all the time, year round your body / fat cells / muscle cells all start to become “insulin resistant”. Thus it takes more and more insulin to accomplish the task of clearing all those carbs from the bloodstream. The result - more stored fat, less fat burning and… because those consumed calories were stored vs burned, even though you are gaining weight, you're super hungry because your belly fat got fed, but not you.
This cruel side effect of a high carb diet is worth noting. If you eat a typical 60-70% carb diet, a sizable portion of your caloric intake is immediately taken out of circulation and shunted into fat cells. You are denied that energy and thus starved / very hungry while at the same time you have no energy and gain more fat / weight. Again, this is great for Food Inc snack sales but highly counter productive for you.
Of course, Food Inc, desperate to maintain profits eagerly promotes the “twin sins of sloth and gluttony” argument placing the blame on you and your lack of willpower and discipline. Buying into this twisted logic can lead to guilt and depression - not good. They sing a song “If only you would eat less and exercise more, then you could easily lose weight, but due to your character flaws you don't. Feel guilty yet? Maybe you deserve a treat…”.
Of course the real problem is an overabundance of carbohydrates which trigger a gorge response in our brains and set up an eating pattern based not on nutrition but instead upon addiction. And addiction its turns out is not only the most profitable business model ever discovered, it's also what Food Inc is quite good at because they learned from Big Tobacco. Actually much of Food Inc was bought up years ago by Big Tobacco once the jig was up with cigarettes. They brought with them their deep knowledge of addiction, their scientist and functional MRI machines - all so they could look at subjects' brains light up as they tasted new super addicting foods. Cool Ranch Doritos anyone?
And just like with cigarettes, Food Inc will deny and delay, lobby and bribe for as long as possible in order to keep the high carb / high profit train rolling despite the massive public health costs. (Fun fact, once the writing was on the wall that at last cigarettes were being targeted as a a public health threat, cigarette companies took their profits and bought into all the largest food processing companies, bringing their knowledge of addictions with them they invested heavily in addictive food like substances ( Dorritos, etc). They know that there are small profit margins in hunter gatherer foods - meat, eggs, dairy, seafood, vegetables, etc - that all pale in comparison to highly addictive highly profitable food factory products.
So can you stop evil Food Inc and save the world from their addictive products? The short answer is nope, it’s way beyond your sphere of influence. The good news is that you don’t have to - you can instead focus on getting yourself healthy, as well as those you know and love.
All those carbs, especially those processed carbs - they are causing your insulin to spike, fat storage and a reduction in energy. A negative feedback loop ensues. Guilt and fat pile on. So what can you do, in your life, right now to get lean and healthy again?
In this case, moving forward means looking backward. A spear and loincloth are not required but walking away from all those new fangled processed carbs and towards meat, eggs, dairy, seafood and lots of vegetables slathered in naturally healthy good fats - that immediately gets you back to working with your built in autopilot, working with your evolutionary biology, instead of against it.
The positive changes will start immediately. Without any decrease in caloric intake, without any hunger or feeling deprived, you will get healthier. And because carbs are reduced and proteins and fats are abundant - you get all your nutrients plus a feeling of satisfaction / satiety. So much so that people on a well formulated Human diet soon discover they are consuming less calories, even though they can and do eat all the food they want. This effortless caloric deficit, the difference between what they need and what they consume, allows your body to burn off its excess fat reserves and that belly fat starts to magically melt away, all the while you leave each meal feeling full and satisfied!
A low carb diet, like we have always eaten, one relatively high fat / high protein, a diet delivers calories slowly and evenly, without spikes in insulin, so fat burning is allowed by the body without much insulin - that's natural, and healthy. We revert back to what we have always been - a lean healthy fat burning machine with plenty of energy available for exercise. We spontaneously get up off the couch eager to go for a walk or hit the gym. The feeling of satiety prevails, the energy flows and things automatically work better.
Another benefit of eating as we are designed to eat - optimal immune function. If we were to diet / cut calories, especially fat calories and ramp up exercise - as recommended by conventional wisdom it would impair our immune function. This perceived famine ramps up the stress hormone cortisol and it's easier to get sick, again not helpful to our goal of steady sustainable weight management. Eating as we are meant to is a low stress healthy approach.
Practically speaking, reshaping our body, losing belly fat, becoming leaner and more healthy - it all does take some time if done properly. Experts say a pound or two per week is a reasonable and sustainable pace to expect for losing weight. Patience and steady determination are key. It took years to add that weight and it can take many months to melt it away. And the first month is the most challenging as the body needs to make the switch away from an unnatural carb addiction and back to a natural fat burning state. The good news is that it can be done, the carb cravings subside and the switch in fuels allows our bodies to do what they have always done - happily burn fat for energy.
Cutting the carbs, especially sugars and processed foods - combined with switching away from bad fats like highly inflammatory vegetable oils - this is central to the solution. Drop the rice, switch to cauliflower rice. Drop the potatoes, cereal, pasta, baked goods, anything made from flour, the sweets, sugars, candies too. Carbs are an addiction for many so it’s hard at first but once the body reverts to burning fats instead of craving / burning carbs things get far easier. The pounds start to come off, you have more energy, food tastes better, you feel good again.
What we practice today is called Low Carb / KETO / Paleo but these are just new names for a return to the way we have always eaten and what kept us very healthy for almost all of our time on earth. We are supremely adapted to eating that way. It's delicious and sustainable and way more healthy than the current norm, the Standard American Diet. Remember, the SAD diet is now being directly linked to an epidemic of deadly health issues ranging from heart disease to cancer, insulin resistance and diabetes to Alzheimer's. The answers are not more pills and procedures with their side-effects and shortcomings. The answer is to return to a diet that we superbly adapted for, one that can help us thrive and once regain what is rightfully ours - robust natural good health.
Making the transition requires knowledge, perspective and resources - all reasons why working with a health coach exponentially increases your odds of sustainable success.
As your health coach here at Arizona Institute of Integrative Medicine I am eager to be of service to you with a step by step personalized approach that is easy to implement in the real world and quite sustainable. It's also delicious. Together we can get you lean and healthy once again ;-)
Your AIIM Health Coach
Greg Kiger