Mike Israetel
speaker
1,094 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Mike Israetel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And the way we were living then is of periods of intermittently, you would just not have enough food.
And so our bodies, and by our bodies, I mean animal bodies, and no change for humanity, same for humanity, developed really robust mechanisms by which that if we had access to lots of food now, we had better store that away for later because animals that did more of that in evolution simply survived more, reproduced better, and continued to pass on their genes at a higher frequency.
because when you dependably have times of lots of food and then times of very little food or almost none, if you're just burning the food off as it comes in or you eat a couple bites and you're like, I'm pretty full and you got shredded six pack, you look really cool, but you're dead on the side of the creek because you ran out of fuel for your body.
But if you are particularly good at first finding food, second, determining which food has probably the highest calories. And third, eating as much of that food as possible. And fourth, storing it away as efficiently as possible into as much body fat tissue as you can. In the times in which we evolve, you're a survivor because there's just the right answer.
But let's fast forward now to all those mechanisms being extant in pretty much every human. Now, where are we? We walk outside and there's grocery stores with aisles as far as the eye can see of foods that companies meticulously choose with their very best marketing research so that we buy them. And these foods relative to our ever-growing incomes are cheaper all the time.
They're more convenient all the time. They're tastier all the time. And because human tastes are determined by human consumer preferences, they're really determined by evolved preferences, which really means good tasting foods and high calorie foods have an enormous intersection. It's not 100%, but gee whiz, it's up there. And so because we live in this, what's called modern food environment,
And we have these ancestral drives of like, well, look, there's a lot of food around and it's delicious. I'm going to keep eating it so that I can, you know, like the chipmunk who stores the food in his face, I can store it for later when I'm starving.
That logic is applied automatically by the parts of your brain that you're not even conscious of unless you choose to be through mindfulness meditation practice. And then what could possibly be the result of that other than lots of people becoming significantly overweight? To me, the obesity epidemic is just not a surprise. It has no mysterious cause.
The 90-something percent cause of the obesity epidemic and why most of us are somewhat or a lot overweight compared to what's ideally healthy is because we were designed to survive in environments with intermittent starvation and capitalism has simply solved the problem of food availability in any extent that you measure it in modern countries.
And you know, like that's a thing that is here with us. And now it's our job, uh, as consumers and as educated people to be like, okay, now that I know all that, what can I do to improve my situation? That's realistic. And at least a siege to the fact that yes, okay. Evolution is a thing and it really does make me want to do this. And I'm not going to try to
search for like some kind of corporate poisons or pollutants or marketing tricks. I know they give me the food that really I'm just buying. And so, but I can always buy different food and I can always change my approach, but I just have to recognize that all of us come from that same evolved background. And it just makes sense that this is what our bodies and brains want to do.
I love that you're bringing that up. I'm actually potentially, I shouldn't be talking about this, but here I go yapping my mouth again. I'm highly considering writing a book that teaches people how to get more muscular and get leaner. But a big part of the book, probably the first part is going to be addressing the question of vanity.
Like is vanity a sin or should we actually be okay to care about how we look? Um, basically TLDR, like almost everyone is to some extent, quote unquote vein. And there's also for almost everyone, absolutely nothing wrong with that. Like it's okay for you not to love your love handles. However, at the same time, trying to forgive means probably to me that an injustice occurred.
You don't forgive thunderstorms for like putting hail on your deck. because they're not sentient beings. There's no injustice. I'm going to tell you something crazy, but your body also isn't sentient. Your brain is, your body's not. And so like, there's no one to be mad at when you have love handles and flabby arms. There's not even anyone to forgive. So do I'll do you one better.
Does that even need to forgive yourself? Cause you didn't do anything wrong. It's just your body doing what it's supposed to do. And it does it. Yeah. Well, the only question to ask is, can I change how my body looks and feels and affects my health by altering what I eat and how I train and how I live the rest of my life?
And the answer is like, that's also nearly solved problem as far as knowledge in the scientific community. There are almost no mysteries left about how to do that. And I'd love to share all of the insight with your listeners. But the good news is like, not only is your body doing what it's supposed to, all
All you got to do is kind of turn it on to this off ramp, take it out another super highway that has all the good stuff on it. And then you're going to see radical changes without having to like, you know, berate yourself or be upset or think that something's wrong or broken with your body and I'm broken with your body. If you were eating lots and lots of food, okay.
like pizza and cookies and ice cream, and you are losing weight to the point where your face looked gaunt, 100% go to the doctor, and he's probably going to do a bunch of screenings, including for cancer. That would be your body malfunctioning. You're eating lots of tasty snacks, and you're gaining weight. This is not a difficult thermodynamic mystery.
I think forgiveness though is such a great point because to me, the forgiveness can be best applied to earlier versions of yourself that berated yourself for having a body. You can forgive yourself for being mean to yourself because it's not nice to be mean to yourself. You could say you're, you're your number one biggest ally.
And there are times to be strict with yourself, but mean and berating and disparaging. You don't want to live inside of a mind that hates itself. So when you look at the love handles and you look in the mirror and you, you want to try to hate yourself a little bit for it. Look at hating things. Doesn't even help them change all that much.
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