Are You Sabotaging Your Weight Loss Goals? Expert Sheds Light on the Key to Becoming Leaner and Stronger in 2025 with Dr. Mike Israetel
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Why is fat loss difficult for many people?
Dr. Mike, welcome to the podcast. You know, fat loss is tough for a lot of people or can be tough, but actually fat gain is really easy for most of us. And there's a reason for that. And I was wondering, I'd love for you to take us down a little bit of evolutionary history as to why the human body is so good at putting fat on and how it's been a key part of our survival as a species.
You know, the animals, and humans are animals, animals survive with a couple of like non-negotiable needs. One of those is to acquire enough hydration, water. One of those is to stay away from predators. And another one is to acquire food in some capacity. And that's actually true for animals that even that don't reproduce. So it's true to say that your desire, for example, for something like air, what's called air hunger, is higher than your desire for water. If someone said, listen, I'm either going to not let you breathe for the next 30 seconds or you just don't have to drink water for the next 30 seconds. You'd have to be unbelievably dehydrated to actually prefer the water more. And you got air hunger, you got fluid hunger, aka thirst, and then you have food hunger, aka hunger hunger, and that drives you to consume calories and any kind of food you can get, really. There are gradations of food that you prefer more than other foods.
And that evolutionary drive is probably about as old as nervous systems, like all of them, worms and flies and parakeets and monkeys and humans and everyone. And so the drive to consume calories being one of the fundamental animal drives is also a fundamental human drive. And that means it is ultra, ultra deep drive. And it has a function, which is to make sure you get enough food. But if we look at how humans evolved over the course of, let's say, just last common ancestor several million years ago, we split from primates, or actually technically still primates, I guess, we split from the great apes lineage. And what was our environment like in the interim? And it's almost completely true to say that it was largely an environment of pulsatile moments of
Lots of food availability here and there, you know, some running into a few trees which have a ton of apples on them sort of situation or felling a large mammoth and, you know, eating as much of that as possible. Interspersed with probably longer and more severe times of food is either just not much of it is around or none of it is around. And so intermittent starvation is pretty much a thing for almost all animals, definitely a thing for humans during our evolutionary past. And so evolution doesn't design you necessarily for the future. It really only designs you for like the here and now. And it also works very slowly. And we're roughly the same biological creatures that we were, gee, 100,000 years ago, 500,000 years ago.
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.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Why is fat loss difficult for many people?
0:00–9:23
2
What evolutionary factors contribute to our fat storage?
9:23–1:50:42
3
How do calories and obesogens affect weight gain?
12:18–17:57
4
What role do appetite-suppressing drugs play in weight loss?
17:57–21:50
5
How do cultural differences influence obesity rates?
21:50–1:50:42
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Dhru Purohit Show
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