Five mental “helpers” for losing excess weight have been named: it won’t be easy

Estimates vary, but it is believed that more than 80% of people who lose a significant amount of weight regain it within five years.

But failure to shed extra pounds often isn’t due to a lack of willpower to make important lifestyle changes, such as eating healthier, cutting calories and increasing physical activity. The “dirty little secret” is that our bodies are programmed by evolution to retain fat, notes CNN.

“We didn’t evolve to intentionally lose weight,” paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman recently told CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the Chasing Life podcast. Lieberman, professor and chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, studies why the human body looks and functions the way it does.

“All animals need some fat, but humans have evolved to have exceptionally high levels of fat, even thin people,” the professor said. “And so we are always under extraordinary biological pressure to have it and keep it as long as we have it, as long as we need it.”

Humans are fundamentally wired not to be happy or healthy, but rather to be reproductively successful, Lieberman said. And to do that, we need fat, a lot of fat—which is why Lieberman calls humans an “extraordinarily fat species” compared to other mammals, even other primates.

“We have such a big brain that requires a huge amount of energy. That’s 20% of our metabolism,” he said. – And when a child is born, half of his energy goes to his brain. He needs a lot of fat. So, human babies are born very fat because they need energy to keep their brains working.”

Professor Lieberman said that fat is stored energy. It helped ancient people stay alive, helped their bodies find food, kept their brains functioning, and kept them healthy enough to reproduce.

“It’s like money in a bank account. And that’s why people who have the appropriate levels of fat have done better in our evolutionary history than those who didn’t, the scientist said. “And so we were chosen to make sure that we could always put it on, because there were always times when we had to take it off.”

Lieberman argues that humans never evolved to intentionally lose weight.

And while our bodies haven’t really evolved since those earlier times, our environment has—and that’s a big discrepancy, according to Lieberman. These days, we don’t have to run away from wild animals, travel long distances on foot, or hunt and get our next meal. We can pick up a smartphone to call a taxi or delivery service and take advantage of all modern conveniences. As a result, many people now live with weight problems and obesity, and all the “diseases of mismatch” that come with it.

“Thus, diseases of mismatch are defined as conditions or illnesses that are more common or more severe when we live in an environment to which we are poorly or inadequately adapted,” Lieberman states, referring to our modern “obesogenic environment.” which often contributes to weight gain.

“And so, of course, it’s difficult. That’s because we didn’t evolve to lose weight on purpose. So, losing weight requires dieting, you need to trick your body and overcome these adaptations that your body will fight with every step of the way,” the expert notes.

Daniel Lieberman, who said we should be “extremely compassionate” towards those facing weight problems, including ourselves, suggests keeping these five things in mind:

1) Not all people are cut out to be stick figures or lithe vagabonds – no matter what you see on TV, in movies or on social media.

“Fat is especially important for humans,” Lieberman wrote in an email. “Even thin people have 15 to 25 percent body fat, which is three to four times more than most mammals.”

You will always have a certain amount of fat, and in some ways it is necessary.

2) Fat actually helps us survive and thrive.

“We have evolved to store a lot of fat—a source of stored energy—due to our energetically expensive bodies and life history,” Lieberman said. “This fat helps fuel our large brains and our high reproductive costs while remaining physically active.”

However, “we never evolved to accumulate large amounts of belly fat, which can lead to health problems,” Lieberman noted. “So having a lot of belly fat is a sign that something needs to be done.”

3) Don’t worry if your weight increases or decreases by several kilograms in short periods of time.

“Most of these changes are due to water,” Lieberman emphasizes. “For most of human history, people regularly went through periods when they consumed more energy than they used and stored the excess as fat, and then used those fat stores during periods of deficiency when they used more energy than they consumed.”

4) If you’re having a hard time losing weight, don’t blame yourself. “Humans have evolved to store a lot of fat when possible and then use it when needed,” Lieberman said. “But we never evolved to voluntarily consume less energy than we used, that is, through diet.”

Professor Lieberman says dieting triggers the body’s starvation response, which causes dieters to crave food and conserve energy by slowing down their metabolism. “So when people diet, they are almost always trying to overcome ancient, fundamental adaptations that prevent their body from losing weight,” he added.

5) If you’re wondering whether exercise or diet is more important for losing weight, the answer is both, but for different reasons.

“You can lose more weight by dieting than by exercising,” says Lieberman. “But exercise helps prevent weight gain or gain, plus it has many, many other benefits for both mental and physical health.”

And regarding this discrepancy between our Stone Age bodies and our modern obesity-promoting environment, Lieberman said we must “figure out how to design our world to help us make the choices we would like to make.”