The Efficiency of High Fat Food

After physically exherting myself for hours on end picking up walnuts, I'm too tired to go to much trouble making lunch. So I do what the farmers and shepherds have done here for centuries, I partake of a charcuterie lunch, nibbling on dried sausage, cheese and a little bit of bread. (I forgo the wine because it would knock me out for the rest of the afternoon.) I don't attempt to limit my portions, I just eat until I'm sated. Occasionally following up my repas with a couple of squares of chocolate.

A local friend told me that in the seventies he frequented a restaurant where there were only two choices on the menu for lunch: plat du jour or charcuterie. If you chose chacuterie, the owner of the enterprise, would pull a sausage out of the large pocket sewn on the front of her apron, and immediately slice off your portion.

Surprisingly, allowing myself to eat as much as I want, I end up not eating much. The fat fills me up quickly.

I don't know what my veins look like, maybe they're as clogged as a Los Angeles Freeway at 6pm on a Friday; but I'm now to the point that when I pinch my thighs, I'm hard pressed to find fat globules.

So this leads me to believe that fat, does not cause a person to be fat.

I suspect our bodies crave fat because the survival of humans depended upon high-fat food. Since it is extremely labor intensive to raise vegetables, fruits and nuts -- and you're at the mercy of the weather -- it was imperative to develop foods that could be stored for longer periods of time and fatty meats and cheese fit the bill.

Up until the last half of the twentieth-century, the majority of people in Europe were what we would now term "poor", and it was absolutely necessary for them to pack the highest amount of calories into the smallest amount of food. Hence, the preference for cheese, sausage, foie-gras. When people worked with their bodies, this high-fat fuel burned off quickly.

When I'm in the U.S., I jog (a lot) and eat things that are much less fatty (in the U.S., I often eat as a vegetarian) but still I have difficulty with my weight . . . I suspect because I eat out in restaurants so frequently; and, jogging for 45 minutes to an hour is not as effective a form of exercise as several hours of sustained physical exertion that I regularly get on the farm.

I read an article the other day outling a new study which found that 7 out of 10 women in the U.S. will end up being overweight by the end of their life, and 9 out of 10 men will end up overweight. The study concluded that it is near-impossible to remain thin throughout one's life in modern America.

Our bodies were designed to function best in a state of constant physical exertion where calories are scarce. The modern western world has destroyed the fundamental balance into which we humans developed over the millenia.

Our bodies have been made obsolete by our machines. Calories are cheap and abundant. These are the reasons for our constant stuggle with weight loss.

We haven't had time to evolve to a balanced way of life that meshes with our new abundant way of living.