From the author: At the end of each week on this blog I publish the next chapter from my book “The Art of Personal Change: Losing weight without diets and hunger strikes,” and on Wednesday evening I look forward to everyone’s online broadcast at YouTube for discussion and answers not questions. Previous chapters and broadcasts: Introduction Physiological aspects of appetite and hunger Psychological aspects of diet The main problem that humanity has solved over tens of thousands of years of evolution is the uneven availability of food resources. Certain foods were available at different times of the year, but people regularly suffered from seasonal fluctuations, such as dry summers in Africa and the Middle East or cold winters in Europe, or from unpredictable factors such as floods, droughts, locusts or other parasites. Each society, in the course of evolution, has developed its own strategies for smoothing out regular food shortages. When British explorer A. F. R. Wollaston reached the snow level in New Guinea in 1913, he discovered a large number of bodies of Aboriginal people who had literally starved to death. The bodies were mostly women and children, and were found in small groups lying in rough huts along the path leading down from the mountains. They managed to find one living girl, they took her to the camp, tried to give her milk, but in the end she died. A man, woman and two children were also found, but they also eventually died. As a result of the earthquake and tsunami, the usual habitat of this group was seriously damaged. They had no choice but to collect all their supplies of sweet potatoes, take their pigs and move through the mountain pass to a new, sparsely populated territory. Unfortunately, the food supply was not enough, and they were unable to find enough food in the forest. Several decades later, in a crevice between these mountains, a tribe of aborigines who had not yet had contact with Europeans was discovered from an airplane. The mountains surrounding them were not inaccessible, like the Himalayas, but there were simply not enough food resources in that area for the transition. European attempts were made to organize an expedition, but they all failed due to complex logistics; one group delivered food supplies to a certain point and returned, the other group went with its food supply and replenished it at the control point from the supplies brought by the first group. But in the end, the complexity of organizing the expedition exceeded all acceptable limits, and this idea was returned to only with the advent of helicopters. Apparently, these Aboriginal tribes lived for several thousand years without contact with other inhabitants of New Guinea, and all because they were separated from each other by a “hungry land” that could only be overcome in our time. The problem of acute food shortages has been key to the survival and settlement of humanity throughout history, and only in the last couple of hundred years has this problem lost its severity. Different groups of people, depending on their living conditions, have developed their own strategies to ensure a regular supply of food. In fact, all these strategies can be divided into stocking and distribution strategies. The easiest way to store is to eat as much food as possible and store it all in your fat cells. Normal levels of fat reserves allow a person to spend 5 to 8 weeks on an extremely meager diet, which, from an evolutionary point of view, was quite optimal for smoothing out seasonal fluctuations in food availability. It is quite possible for a person to accumulate enough internal fat for almost a whole year of an extremely meager diet, but such body weight did not allow ancient man to function effectively and continue to obtain excess amounts of food. Evolution has developed its own normal level of fat reserves for each ethnic group and gender. In modern Europe, different peoples are very mixed, and it is very difficult to trace any patterns. At the same time inIn Africa it is still possible to quite clearly trace the differences between the peoples, their occupations, evolutionary food traditions and appearance. While traveling in Africa, I noticed that the Wolof people, who traditionally were engaged in farming, are usually large: the men are strongly built, the women are a little plump; Members of the Fulani people, who have migrated across Africa with their cattle for centuries, are usually slender, tall, not overweight, and even in adulthood quite athletic in build. This pattern caught my eye, and I began to observe people on the streets, in minibuses, in parking lots, and in local cafes. When representatives of agricultural regions traveled in a minibus, they often had with them many baskets, sacks, and bales. As I understand it, when representatives of nomadic peoples were traveling somewhere far away, they simply took a live ram with them, tied its legs and threw it on the roof of the bus. We made similar observations during stops. When we ate among the Wolof, we were usually offered two types of dishes: wheat grains (couscous or bulgur) or rice, usually with chicken, rarely with fish. They could also offer a sandwich - a French loaf cut in half, generously smeared with mayonnaise and stuffed with a boiled egg. Among the Fulani it was a stew: in one place there was a large pressure cooker, and everyone was given a piece of very fatty stewed lamb and given a flatbread, in another there was something like a brazier on coals, pieces of lamb were simmering in their own fat on baking sheets. Once, having received such a fatty treat from mostly slender and tall people at night, we laughed for a long time that the secret was that they carry their belly not on themselves, like us, but on a leash next to them in the form of a live ram , and when hunger overcomes, they simply take this sheep and eat it with their entire large family. The accumulation of large fat reserves greatly interferes with daily activities, and therefore different peoples have developed their own strategies for conserving food resources by fattening domestic animals. The Papuans of New Guinea fattened pigs. In warm, humid climates, the sweet potatoes that formed the mainstay of their diet lasted for several months, but feeding the excess to pigs could save some of the calories for longer. In addition, pigs can be fed feed that, although suitable for human consumption, was only consumed during times of severe food shortage, such as palm hearts. At the same time, food processing technologies developed: they learned how to squeeze out olive oil, which can be stored for a long time, how to salt, dry, dry, and otherwise preserve foods. Distribution strategies also include the organization of feasts to which neighboring tribes were invited, counting on reciprocal gratitude when they had an excess of food. Ancient people cultivated small fields, widely distributed, which made it possible to smooth out fluctuations in yield. If one field turned out to be unproductive, this was compensated for by other areas. Later, exchange and specialization appeared. Some tribes fished, others cultivated the land. By regularly exchanging their reserves, they leveled out the acute seasonal shortage of food. Apparently, the evolutionarily developed norm of fat reserves among European and Arab peoples was a slightly plump woman and a large, but less plump man. To this day, among the Arab peoples of the Middle East, the standard of female beauty is a woman with fairly curvy figures. Evidence can also be found in the literature. For example, the image of a Nekrasov woman. The famous Jewish writer Shalom Aleichem in the story “Tevye the Dairyman” has an episode where the main character dreams of sudden wealth falling on him, that he will fatten his wife and she will be of good health, with a double chin. And in many portraits, almost until the end of the 19th century, we will not see women who meet today's standards of beauty. They would simply be considered painfully thin and sexyunattractive. Evolutionarily established standards were determined by the habitat. A woman needs to feed not only herself, but also her children, and even if the children are not infants, the opportunities to earn food for themselves are quite limited. Leading a sedentary lifestyle in an area with regular seasonal food shortages and being quite severely limited in movement by having children and running a household, it was quite possible to afford a couple of extra pounds. Side problems of excess weight, such as hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, have historically been negligible, since people more often died from infectious diseases, hunger and war. Unfortunately, evolution has not kept pace with technological progress. It has been almost 200 years since the problem of hunger has ceased to be the most acute problem for humanity, but this has had virtually no effect on our eating habits. We have begun to suffer en masse from chronic non-infectious diseases, since we had heard practically nothing about it before. The tribes of New Guinea did not know what diabetes and heart disease were until they encountered European civilization. When the Europeans arrived with their prepared food, three meals a day, salt shakers and sugar bowls on the tables, the aborigines began to overeat en masse. They could not stop, the abundant presence of food provoked an appetite, and they ate, ate and continued to eat. In just a few decades, a large number of obese people have emerged and the number of deaths from chronic non-communicable diseases has risen sharply. Scientists observed an interesting picture: as soon as some tribes returned to a fairly traditional way of life with a rare inclusion of prepared foods from supermarkets, they quickly got rid of obesity and associated diseases receded. Having analyzed the evolution of eating behavior, we can draw a fairly obvious conclusion: returning to the traditional diet, you can improve your health. You can come up with something like a Polynesian diet, remove modern foods from the diet, regularly organize festivals of belly fat and gluttony, but then you also need to have periods of regular fasting. This is not actually true, the traditional diet involves eating when food is available and fasting when food is scarce. Today, food is available not only every day, but every second, and this is where the system fails. In order to eat constantly available food, we have natural mechanisms, but in order to stop, we don’t, since they were simply not needed, food was never in great abundance and for a sufficiently long period. Like it or not, if we don’t have nomadic pastoralists in our blood who historically carried their calorie reserves on a leash behind them, and not in our stomachs and thighs, then we need to consciously regulate our eating behavior. Then, after hundreds or thousands of years, this will become part of reflexes, automatic behavior, but, unfortunately, technological progress is ahead of evolution, and this is our payment for the joys of our perfect world. But evolutionary mechanisms were launched through standards of beauty and preferences for a sexual partner. If earlier a plump woman symbolized fertility, health, the ability to give birth and raise healthy offspring, now a plump person symbolizes poor health, possible heart problems and other diseases. Nowadays, a toned, athletic body with moderate fat reserves has become a symbol of health for both men and women. This launched evolutionary mechanism forces us to lose weight en masse and lead a healthy lifestyle. HOMEWORK Having analyzed once again the evolutionary development of eating behavior, think about what traditional strategies can be easily adapted to today's conditions. Is it possible to have big parties with friends and overeat? And then how to arrange long fasting weeks? Think about which of the known diets is most historically justified for you, taking into account the area of ​​residence and the seasonal availability of products. What kind of lifestyle do you lead and what.