American weight-loss Diet

The traditional American weight-loss diets for quick weight loss encourages people to reduce the number of calories they eat in order to force the body to burn fat. But there’s a fundamental problem with this theory: the body of a Homo sapiens (Latin for “wise man” or “knowing man)” absolutely hates to burn fat. Why? For over two hundred thousand years, most of our ancestors were hunters and gatherers whose bodies adapted to having abundant amounts of food to eat after an animal was slaughtered or crops were harvested.

Their bodies then allowed them to survive scarcity after that food had been consumed. To withstand this environment of literal feast or famine, the human body learned that whenever excess food was available, the body stood a better chance of riding out the inevitable lean months if it learned to convert any extra nutrients into fat. Fat not only kept our forbears warm and cushioned their organs, it stored nutrients the body could call upon to keep them alive during lean times. Given this history, it is literally human nature to store fat for future use. Though food is now plentiful in our society, we need only go back a few generations to see how this instinct to conserve flab helped our ancestors weather crop failures and famines.

With this as the backdrop, let’s consider this modern-day activity we call dieting. At its essence, dieting consists of starving our body so it will lose weight. Already, you can see the problem. Homo sapiens’s brain is so intelligent, has been fine-tuned for so many millennia, and is so intent on keeping our species alive that it outmaneuvers our dietary strategy of depriving ourselves to shed pounds. We only need to miss a meal or two before a warning alarm is sent out to the cells: “Oh, my goodness! She’s starving again. Hang onto every nutrient you can. We have to save her life!” The body then slows down our metabolism, the rate at which we consume nutrients to obtain energy from them, so that it consumes fewer while we’re dieting than it does when we’re nourishing ourselves properly.