Talking to my body

I"ve been thinking a lot about this. Let's see if I can put my thoughts into words that might make some sense to my reader.

The human body is dumb. Dumb like non-speaking. Sure, your stomach can rumble, knees ache, tooth throb, but overall my body "talks" to me in the language of pain & pleasure. I may be quite intellectual, but strictly speaking, my body is more like Ayla in the book of Clan of the Cave Bears, capable of grunting & pointing, but still getting the message across pretty well.

When I intellectualize about losing weight, I can think about it all I want but my body doesn't understand a word. If I go on a low calorie diet, my body, trained by thousands of generations of feast & famine, "understands" that food is scarce, better go into famine mode & lower the metabolism.

And all those years that I ate until full, never exercised...what did my body "think" about this? Did it think, hmm good times, more food than I need today. The body stores energy all over in the body's equivalent of Tupperware: fat. And store it all over. After the muscles were well marbled, extra fat gets stored all over, like layers of an onion, and when those get fulfilled, the overflow goes in saddle bags, fanny packs, and belly bags.

Why does the body store fat for when the famine comes? Because that's how the most successful of our species survived. And the survivors passed the feast or famine strategy on. Call it survival of the fattest.

Not exercising has taught my body it's ok to turn down the thermostat: i.e.: metabolism. It figures I'm more of a gatherer than hunter.

Now 2 new things are happening: I'm eating less, but snacking more, never letting myself get starving hungry (remember that part), and I've taken up running.

This tells my body that I'm now a hunter, running down a deer for dinner every other day. I need to be built like a hunter, and lose the extra baggage, that may slow me down & let Bambi get away. The other part is the smart snacking. When I don't let myself get too hungry, I'm telling my body, in the cave-woman language my body can understand, that meals come around very often, like every 3 hours, there's no famine so it's ok to use some of the stored food, plenty more where that came from.