Am I thinking too much?? Part 1.......

Once again I didn't workout this morning due to plain and simple oversleeping. If I lay a certain way in bed my arm goes numb. Well, I kept doing that all night and kept waking up cause my arm was numb. I finally figured out what I was doing and I guess I missed the alarm. Oh well. The entire week is shot, tomorrow is a new day.

I've been doing a lot of reading about nutrition. A. Lot. The reason being is that all the methods I've used for losing weight in the past are no longer working. If I eat any less I'll starve myself. I haven't had anything sweet in weeks. My diet is so clean it's squeaky. And I've been working out (okay, not this week but this is an anomaly). Yet I can't seem to get the scale (or fat %) to move. So I've been reading. And reading. And reading. All the 'experts' say pretty much the same thing, which is what I'm doing.

So I started thinking. When I can't figure something out, I will take the situation and go backward to a point where I can figure it out. For example, I'm a chemist. If a test doesn't work right I'll go backward through the steps to try and figure out why. If I get all the way back to the beginning and can't find anything wrong, then clearly there is something with the sample. Make sense?? Well, it does to me.

So I started thinking about humans and eating. It's only been about 10,000 years since humans have been actively farming crops. Even then they could only farm in certain areas and during certain times of the year. Prior to that they had to travel to gather their food, they were hunters and gatherers, not farmers. So the basic assumption can be that food was not a constant thing. There were periods when it was scarce or non-existent. Which started me questioning this whole method we have of eating. Where exactly did the 3 meals a day come from? Who decided that we needed to eat every 2-3 hours?? Why??? I've tried to find the answer but it's not there. I find all this talk about keeping your metabolism revved up. Not going into starvation mode. Blah, blah, blah. I no longer buy it.

Having been to Africa and seen the animals in the wild, it's clear to see they don't eat 3 meals a day. They don't even go looking for food until they are hungry. They eat till they are full then laze around until they get hungry again. The only time that's different is with babies. They get to eat whenever they want which, I believe, is why mom makes milk. At one point a few years ago, I was having some problems with my dogs and the vet told me to feed them twice a day. I had been feeding them once a day. I asked why do we feed them once a day and he said probably for convenience, ours not theirs. Now my dogs eat twice a day and are quite happy with that (they eat the same amount just split into 2 meals).

I think 3 meals a day is something modern man dreamed up as a time saver. Instead of people going willy-nilly eating at all different times, a schedule was developed and that actually saved time. Over the last hundred years we've gotten so used to that schedule that it's etched in stone in our brains (not our bodies). I think our bodies were meant to fast sporadically.

Religious groups used fasting in all kinds of ways. The Orthodox Greeks fast like 200 days a year. There's lent, where you really don't fast but you give things up. There Ramadan where you fast all day and eat only at night. The list goes on and on. None of these groups are excessively obese as a whole. In fact the Mediterranean diet is considered one of the healthiest on earth. Could it be because of the fasting???

Part of my problem recently is that I have no desire for food. There is nothing I crave or want. Nothing that sounds, or tastes, especially good. I'm eating well and keeping the calories down so I'm not sure what it is but I go through periods like this every couple of weeks. Food just loses it appeal and I force myself to eat. I never lose weight during these times because I'm continuing to eat 'when' I'm supposed to.

Okay, I have to get ready for work and I don't want this post to be a novel, so I'll stop here for now. I'll finish when I get to work.