saturated fat, like bacon, isn’t exactly the same as eating the leaner, healthier forms of protein like chicken and fish.)
The result: Your tribal forefathers and foremothers could eat anytime they could harvest or catch something, and still not put on excess weight.
The lesson: Our ancestors never thought about a diet in the way we do—and their bodies had the approximate density of granite. Us? We obsess about diet more than red-carpet reporters obsess about designer dresses, and our bodies have the consistency of yogurt.
Still, we can’t blame the advent of fast food and waffle cones for all of our weight issues. The downfall started in the pre-GA. (pre-Golden Arches) era—over 10,000 years or so ago, when agriculture first appeared. Agriculture allowed us to make more advances than a seventeen-year-old boy in a movie theater, but we paid a price for them. Besides Myth Buster sparing the lives of countless mammoths, the rise of agriculture ensured that we’d always have a steady supply of food—an advantage during times of famine, a disadvantage at the $6.99 Mama’s Kitchen Eat-Everything Buffet. With a constant source of food, people became less nomadic, and communities grew closer together. While the average life span increased (thanks to the elimination of the extreme sport of tiger chasing, with, perhaps, some help from sanitation and immunization), agriculture also brought its share of downsides: more bacterial infections, shorter stature, and rotting teeth that comes from eating refined sugar and less nutritious farm-raised food (overused soil depletes food of its nutrients). Our ancestors’ diets shifted from vegetables and meat to grains from the farms, essentially hindering them from getting the diverse mix of protein and micronutrients needed for brain development.
FACTOID
During the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, people eat only after sunset so they consume all their calories at night. Should they lose weight? Anecdotal evidence, gathered by doctors watching residents working all-night shifts, indicates that people who eat all their 2,000 daily calories in one meal gain more weight than those who space those calories over three meals. Why? Because the one-timers are kicking in their starvation mode, making their bodies want to store fat rather than burn it.
The advent of agriculture essentially started the sociological shift that altered the way we lived—and the way we eat—up until this day. We could now produce food, so we could now produce what we wanted, not necessarily what we needed. Instead of making foods that could both complement our bodies and appeal to our taste buds, we started making ones that were kinder to our tongues and pocketbooks than they were to our waists.
We’re not in the business of trying to make you live like cavemen, or help you score a blue-jeans billboard, or help you become thin enough to escape between two jail bars. What we should acknowledge is that we live in a world with free will, with temptations, and with more eating options than the Mall of America. Biologically, our bodies want us to eat right. But in today’s society (cavemen didn’t have bad bosses or deadlines for annual reports), our biological drive to be the right weight and to eat right can be overcome by stress or temptation. And that has shifted many dietary decisions from biological necessities to psychological reactions. What we’re going to do is teach you how to reprogram your body to work the way it’s supposed to work—so that you eat to satisfy and to fuel rather than to console or excite. Controlling your fat isn’t about being banished with a life sentence of broccoli florets. It’s about teaching your body a little bit about the way our ancestors ate. Naturally and automatically.
YOU TIPS!
Automate Your Eating. If your waist management plan is going to work-as in, really work, for your whole life-then eating right has to become as automatic as it was for our ancestors. That’s not as insurmountable as it seems. Just look at one study from the Journal of the American Medical Association. Two groups were assigned two different diets. One went on a diet rich with good-for-you foods like whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and olive oil, foods found in the typical Mediterranean diet. The other group was not given any specific direction in terms of foods to eat but was instructed to consume specific percentages of fat, carbohydrates, and protein daily. In short, they had to think a lot about preparing foods and dividing amounts, while the first group only had general guidelines about foods to eat.
The groups weren’t given guidelines about how much to eat; they let their hunger levels dictate their hunger patterns. And when they did that, what happened? Without trying, the first group ate fewer calories, lost inches, and dropped pounds.
YOU-reka! The point: The people in the good-foods group ate the foods that naturally kept them satiated so their bodies could seek their playing weights.
The “good-for-YOU-foods group” ate significantly more fiber than the control group (32 grams versus 17 grams).
The “good-for-YOU-foods group” ate higher amounts of good-for-you omega-3 fats in the form of olives, fish, and nuts (especially walnuts). Those fats help increase the level of chemicals that make you feel satiated.
The “good-for-YOU-foods group” more than doubled their consumption of fruits and vegetables.
The “good-for-YOU-foods-group” ate the foods we recommend in the YOU Diet, didn’t obsess about calories, and enabled their bodies to do what they’re supposed to do: regulate the chemicals that are responsible for hunger and for satiety (more on this in Chapter 2).
Don’t Undereat. When our ancestors couldn’t find food and went for long periods of time without it, their bodies acted like a life preserver, storing fat in anticipation of the inevitable periods of famine. The same system works today. YOU-reka! When you try to “diet” by going for long periods of time without eating or by eating way too few calories, your brain senses the starvation and sends an SOS signal through your body to store fat because famine is on its way. That’s why people who go on extreme fasts and extremely low-calorie diets don’t lose the expected weight. They store fat as a natural protective mechanism. To lose weight you have to keep your body from switching into starvation mode. The only way to do it: Eat often, in the form of frequent healthy meals, and snacks.
Plan Your Meals. Start every day knowing when and what you’re going to eat. That way, you’ll avert the 180-degree shift between starving and gorging that occurs when you skip meals. Our fourteen-day diet (in Chapter 12) will show you how to plan your meals so that you feed your body regularly to avoid extreme periods of overeating and undereating that can lead to a gain in weight and inches.
YOU Test
Remember Your Ancestry
Some people say their family has big bones or big cells. Some say their family has big appetites. Some say their family just has big beer coolers. If you gained weight as an adult you can get a relatively accurate picture of what your ideal size should be by thinking about what you looked like when you were eighteen (for women) or twenty-one (for men); a time when you were at your metabolically most efficient and when you weren’t stapled to an office chair for sixty hours a week. Most people gain their weight between the ages of twenty-one
