Why Am I Fat
Updated on July 28, 2007
Big Secret: You're Not Big-Boned
You consume more calories than you need, and your body stores it as fat. (Bone doesn't jiggle or roll, by the way, and if your bones really are that big, you need to see a doctor fast.)
The Built-In Survival Tool
Our bodies are designed to store excess calories, so we'll be able to survive off of those calories during times when food is not available. (This is a good thing because without it, our ancestors would have died during winters, and you and I wouldn't be here today.)
Don't beat yourself up for naturally packing on pounds. Just think about how efficient your body is at not starving to death. If you ever end up in a survival situation, you'll appreciate your body's ability to conserve energy.
Your Ancestors Would Envy You
Our ancestors had to work hard to get their food. Looking for breakfast? If you were in a society without agriculture, you would go pick it off the bush, pluck it from the ground, or chase it down to kill it. Then you had to build a fire from scratch (no matches, lighters, or instant lighting logs) if you wanted to cook any of it. If you happened to live in an agricultural society, you would still have to wake up, milk the cow, harvest your crops, kill the meat of the day, gather eggs, and so forth before you even got into the kitchen to cook. Once you got to the kitchen, you had to build a fire in your stove and prepare everything by hand (no blenders or mixers). Making extra? Without freezers, it's going to be difficult to keep the food you've made from spoiling, so you're going to have to spend additional hours preserving all of your food. Today, we've mostly forgotten how good we've got it.
"Oh, if I only had more time" you say. Well, good news, you do have more time and lots of it because we have conveniences that our ancestors would envy.
The Sedentary Life: Working Hard at Hardly Working
Our current world is filled with food conveniences that our ancestors didn't have. If you want to get food, you can go to a grocery stores or restaurant. (When was the last time you had to milk a cow, chase down a chicken, or plow your fields?) If you want to prepare your food, you can throw it in a food processor instead of chopping, and if that's too much for you, you can just take a complete meal out of your freezer and stick it in the microwave oven. If you did have to cook everything from scratch without our modern appliances, you would probably hold off on the snacks because it would just take too long to make them. Thus, you would eat less. Today we are blessed with more time and energy, since we don't have to spend all of our energy getting and preparing food, but what are we doing with that time.
We have invented so many things to save time and energy. We don't even have to wash our dishes when we're finished eating the food we spent little energy getting and preparing; just throw them in the dishwasher. And, that's just the beginning.
Television sets brought us the theater without ever having to travel to the local stage. Getting up to change the channel was just too much work as well, so we invented the remote. Need to go to the library? Not anymore; just turn on the computer. Our chores have gone from scrubbing our clothes with a washboard for hours to throwing them in the washing machine, which takes only a couple of minutes. Our transportation changed from walking to using horses, and then we introduced the automobile, and it wasn't long before we started driving even to a neighbor's house just a block over because we don't have time to walk down the street. It's no wonder our lives have become so sedentary.
Using Our Extra Time
So if we aren't spending hours doing chores and trying to survive the wilderness, what are we doing with all of this extra time?
The first thing we started doing was eating more. It's a natural instinct to want to eat, and now we have more time to do it, so we do, often without even realizing that we're doing it.
Then there are the sedentary things: television viewing, Internet surfing, driving for hours, reading, sitting while doing crafts, sitting while tending to our prize potted plants, and so forth. These are all fine activities, but what ever happened to all of the energy that we used on those more active tasks?
It ended up at our hips and stomachs in the form of fat.
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