I know the title statement sounds silly, but I am being tricky. GAS stands for General Adaptation Syndrome – part of the theory of stress proposed by Hans Selye many years ago. This newsletter is going to be a synthesis of my knowledge and experience to date regarding weight gain/obesity, so I may make connections that have not been studied yet by the scientific community that I am aware of.
For all the amazing complexity in how the human body operates, it is behind the times. Our bodies are still functioning as though we were roaming the plains hunting and gathering our food as loose tribes of people. Genetic adaptation occurs slowly over many tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Our use of agriculture and settling down to become farmers and city dwellers over the last ten thousand years is very recent genetically. While this change is beneficial in providing for greater physical security and food security, it has generated different types of stressors for our bodies than they had learned to deal with over the last half million years.
Our bodies know how to deal with the acute stress of a flight or flight reaction to being chased by a wild animal or falling off a cliff and being injured. We also know how to deal with chronic stressors related to season changes creating weather challenges and food scarcity. Crowding people together into cities has presented a whole new set of stressors our bodies don’t know what to do with. Pandemic diseases never existed when people were spread far apart from each other. Sanitation was not an issue as a roaming hunter-gatherer. Social stress and work stress did not really exist before we formed complex societies either. The diets of hunter-gatherers were extremely diverse as they ate anything they could find. That meant that they got a huge diversity of nutrients. City dwellers often had their diets reduced to just a few foods and often suffered from nutrient malnutrition.
So how does this relate to weight gain?
When we get stressed, our body has a body wide simple response. It decides, “is this an acute stress or is this a coming chronic stress?” If it decides this is an acute stress it mobilizes the immune system to fight infection and boost tissue repair. (This is why if you have a chronic joint problem, we can often trigger repair by re-stimulating the area in a way that makes the body think there is an acute issue taking place.) If the body decides it is facing a chronic problem, it reacts in the way it is programmed to react to the only chronic stress it knows how to deal with – oncoming winter and food scarcity. It tells your body to start craving foods that make you gain weight, slows down metabolism, and increases inflammation to kick in a metabolic syndrome to get your body ready to survive a winter with no food. Weight gain is your best bet for survival through a winter without food.
But what we have today is all kinds of chronic stressors that have nothing to do with food scarcity. Unfortunately our body still responds as though it is anticipating a famine. Too much burdensome work, chronic emotional stress, social stress, school stress, toxic environmental stress, poisonous foods, and so on – the list of chronic stressors we have to deal with these days is longer than my arm. But our body has its simple General Adaptation Syndrome for dealing with all of it.
Does this story sound familiar – “I am eating the exact same foods I always eat and exercise the same amount, yet I have been gaining weight steadily for the last six months.” “What changed in your life six months ago?” “ Well, I got a new boss I don’t like and he has me working overtime every night it seems like.” This is chronic stress. Chronic stress triggers the weight gain mechanisms in your body. How many of you already know you are stress eaters?
Not everybody reacts like this. Some people, those you generally think of as more nervous, react to the same stressors as though the stress is acute. In acute stress you have the exact opposite reaction. Your body wants to be light so you can run or fight, so you don’t want to eat. Sometimes this reaction is so extreme people end up with chronic diarrhea – a classic flight or fight response. Some people rev up in response to stress while others slow down and conserve. If you have trouble loosing weight, you are most likely the slow down and conserve type of person.
We have a particularly nasty chronic stress these days – I say nasty because we don’t see it as a stress, but it is. That chronic stress is food abundance. As humans we were designed to starve fairly frequently. Our body uses these starvation times to clean out the poisons and heal the body. If we always have full tummies, we never have the opportunity to clean out and heal. You have to go more than 12 hours without food before you actually start to clean out your liver – your main detoxification organ. Hunter-gatherers often had days at a time without food or very little to eat. If you consume below 600 calories a day your body will kick into detox mode.
We also have the added problem of so many of our modern foods are actually addictive drugs. Sugar is more addictive than cocaine, grains and dairy contain morphine like proteins that the brain gets easily addicted to. Our bad diet produces leaky gut that then creates food sensitivities that often manifest as food addictions just like heroin addictions. Food chemicals and additives have a whole host of neuro-chemical reactions. Basically our body weight balancing systems are hijacked and taken over by weight gain processes.
There is no way around this GAS reaction short of brain damage. The only way out is getting rid of the stress. It is a matter of critical importance to your health that you be happy. Happy turns on the healing springtime hormones and systems in your body. These make us lean and fit so we can compete in getting a mate. This is the high-energy time of year physically, and this is what we want if we want to lose weight. I have often said that the easiest way to lose weight is to fall in love.
So that’s the story. Excess weight usually means that on some level your body is chronically stressed. This is usually subconscious, but not always. The new mind set I am trying to convey is to focus on being happy to change your metabolism into a healthier pattern.