Why It's Easy To Store Fat And Hard To Lose It?

Once upon a time we were cavemen. Every single day we struggled to find food. We needed to eat what we could when it was available, storing any surplus because the next meal could be a long way off.
The fight would start anew each day: hunting and gathering food in order to avoid starvation.
As a consequence, our bodies’ metabolism was set in a “waste not” mode: accumulating all calories that were not burned.



The escape from this difficult situation was eased 10,000 years ago, when we started planting, growing, and harvesting plants and domesticating animals.
The agricultural revolution took place. Our lifestyle changed from hunting and gathering, to one of agriculture and settlement. We increased in numbers and our societies flourished.
Our metabolism didn’t changed though. 10,000 years later it’s still set on cavemen storing mode.
It doesn’t matter that we can now gather calories at the convenience store just outside our caves 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Nor that our caves are packed with much more food than we can actually consume. Our bodies are still in storing mode.
Human biology is completely out of sync with the modern environment. Or maybe we have built an environment that it out of sync with our biology?
One way or the other, what was useful in the savannah is less so in suburbia.
We have a biological disposition in storing fat, that has been honed over a millennia.  Evolution has thus lead to a gene pool that is designed to protect against losing body weight and predisposed to gain it.
On top of that, every single person has a specific pool of genes, which explains why some have a greater propensity in getting fat than other.
Nevertheless, the general rule stays. Deep inside we still are cavemen, more prone in storing fat than losing it.
That’s why we need to be extra careful with what we eat, how much we eat, and how often we eat.

The Iron You