What does it take to optimize your body?
This is a constant discussion in the biohacking community. There are various biohacks that you can use to improve and optimize your body, but the most crucial hack is to mimic the environment that our DNA evolved in. Meaning that your diet should mimic what nature provided during seasonal changes. Let’s take a closer look at why.
Let’s Play A Game
I want you to imagine that we’re playing a video game. For this game, we’re going to develop a character.
The world that this character is living in is experiencing several significant changes in a calendar year, as the game world is rotating around a star.
This creates different temperatures and weather patterns, leading to a different availability of food.
Since we know there is variability in access to food, our character should be built so they don’t need food daily.
Since the seasons are constantly fluctuating, there might be long periods of time without food. Our character would be killed off quickly if they needed food everyday in this world.
With that in mind, we’d want to have the ability to store food.
Storing Calories
One way we might do this is by designing a character that’s similar to a chipmunk or a squirrel, as they have the instinct to store nuts for future purposes.
Here, we’re developing a nomadic character and want to store calories.
However, it can’t only be about storing calories. The character would also need to save up on nutrients because there’s different foods available at different times of the year.
They would need to store nutrients from food that’s only available during certain seasons because they may not see it again until next year.
Cravings Are Key To Survival
Do you remember those old Tamagotchi toys? If you didn’t feed it, it would die.
We want to set our character up so that if we’re offline, it knows how to take care of itself.
What we should do is build in features where they have powerful cravings for resources that are rare and essential to survival.
For example, if there was a particular food that they needed, but it’s only available for two weeks, we better tell this character to have a craving for it, just in case we’re not there to play the game.
Human Evolution
In a sense, humans evolved all these characteristics. One way or another.
We evolved the ability to store fat so we would still have access to energy even though there was no food available around us.
Then we evolved the ability to store certain nutrients because there might be one season where there was a lot of Vitamin B12, but then there might be a season where there was none.
Humans evolved the ability to buffer these circumstances and hold on to nutrients for long periods of time. If someone eats an orange on Monday, they don’t die of scurvy on Tuesday. They don’t die from scurvy on Tuesday because they’ve stored enough Vitamin C for a period of time.
We really crave sweet tasting things because frankly, they’re essential. Sweet foods were rare.
Fruit wanted us to transport it around so the seeds could be propagated around the world.
Starvation
Here we are with all these amazing these features. Does that mean that we should go without a particular nutrient from time to time? That it’s healthy to starve once in a while?
I would say yes.
To a degree, we want to mimic the environment that we evolved in to allow the body to run its full range of services.
The Pancreas
One of my favorite examples of this would be the pancreas. The pancreas has two jobs, one job is to produce insulin, and the other job is to produce glucagon.
As I understand it, the pancreas doesn’t produce them at the same time. If we only ever produce insulin, we will never produce glucagon. If we only produce glucagon, we will never produce insulin.
What that says to me, is that if we continuously trigger insulin production by eating sugar, the pancreas will never produce glucagon. That function of the pancreas might suffer as a result of non-use.
If we needed both insulin and glucagon all the time, then we probably would have evolved two different pancreases. But, because of the seasons, the pancreas only needs to do one job at a time.
To Sum It All Up
To optimize on your body, you need to mimic the diet that nature provided when our DNA evolved.
There is no recommended daily allowance because nature never provides the same food all year around.
When we lived as hunter-gatherers in Africa, there would be periods with an abundance of meat, and there would be periods when there was none.
There would be times when only green and bitter plants were available.
There would be periods when there was no food available at all.
There would be times when fruit and berries (a.k.a. sugar) was in season. Then there would be long periods without them.
We are meant to put on fat, and then cycle it off.
Seasonal eating was easier before because we had no choice. Nature decided what was available.
Today, we have an abundance of everything.
That means that we can eat an abundant amount of sugar every day and an abundant amount of meat every day.
It also means that we can eat an abundant amount of junk food every day.
To optimize your body, seasonal eating is key.
If you want help with that, WildFit can definitely help you. If you want to know how we can help you, click the link below.
Why do you want to optimize on your body? What is holding you back? Comment below.