What We Can Learn From Made Up History

The Body Used to Keep the Score

One thing that surprised me about this graph is that there's no kink in the graph from when I was 18 years old.

I gained weight quickly in the womb, at roughly 4 kilos every nine months.

As a child, I packed on another 63 kilos in eighteen years. At that point, I'd reached my mighty adult height of 5'10" and grew no taller.

But I kept getting heavier at roughly the same rate until I was twenty-five. I remember my chest and shoulders broadened considerably, and I had to replace all my jackets.

And at that point, I reached my adult weight and strength and stayed there for the next fifteen years.

Throughout all that time, my nutritional strategy was: "Whenever hungry, eat the nearest things until you stop being hungry. And if you see alcohol after 5pm, drink it, unless you are required to drive later. Make sure you never need to drive anywhere, but remember to take whatever vehicles you own for monthly spins to keep the batteries charged. Lunchtime is the best time for spins."

I was an extremely lazy child. I did do judo once a week voluntarily, but my father literally had to pay me on a per-kick basis to play football. (US readers: Soccer! A woman's game. I would have loved American Football.)

And I was the laziest conceivable adolescent (although I did go ice-skating on Wednesday afternoons instead of going to school, at least until I discovered gambling)

At college, because I was usually in the bar at exactly the time on Saturday afternoon when sports captains discover they are short a man, I played every sport except football. Always slightly drunk.

I was nominated president of the 'Seconds Club', for those who were not very good at sport, on the basis that I was “the least sporty person in King's” and when I protested that I'd played every available sport for my college (Including throwing the javelin. I'd never held a javelin before the intercollegiate final.), the nominator said: "Oh, sorry, I meant that you're the least sporty person out of all the people who are sporty at all. Obviously we wouldn't want a dweeb..."

In photos from the late eighties, I'm thin as a whip.

As an adult, I rather overcompensated for my unsporty youth, and did the sort of training that professionals do (without achieving anything like their results, I don't have the genes and I'm dissolute...), and it must have affected my body composition, but I don't think it changed my weight at all. If it did, I didn't notice.

In photos from the nineties and the noughties, I'm just a strong-looking man. Not thin any more, but not fat either.

I think this is normal.

I think this is what most humans were like, for most of history. I think this is what healthy humans are like. I think this is what healthy omnivores are like.

It doesn't matter what you eat. It doesn’t matter what you do. Some people live exclusively on white rice and do backbreaking work in fields. Some people get most of their calories from honey for half the year. Some people mostly eat coconuts. Some people mostly eat fish.

They do not get fat. No one gets fat. Nobles with all the food they could ever want and nothing to do all day do not get fat. Peasants who live on low-quality crap like rice and spend all day in backbreaking work in paddy fields do not get fat. Hunter-gatherers who eat mostly honey do not get fat.

The Body Keeps The Score

What on earth would have been the point, evolutionarily speaking, of designing animals that, the minute they found themselves with enough food, got too fat to fight, too fat to fuck? That extra energy could be being used for reproductive purposes. Why use it to store energy for a rainy day that might never come, and turn yourself into helpless prey?

The only people who get fat anywhere in space or time are people who eat the modern western diet. As that diet has gone round the world, obesity and the diseases of modernity have followed it like a miasma.

No coincidence.

Aha, you will say: "What about people like Oliver Hardy? He was extraordinarily overweight. Even as Babe Hardy in his twenties he was really revoltingly obese."

And I will have to agree with you.

According to wiki, Ollie had a BMI of 40 when he was twenty-one years old, before he was famous, before he was rich.

Presumably there have always been people whose appetite mechanisms are mysteriously broken, whose hunger is never satisfied.

Just like there are always, somewhere, houses that are far too hot, because the thermostat is broken.

But I think that you have to go a long way out of your way to find people who look like Ollie in the past.

And I will smugly point out that Oliver Hardy at age 19 was a fatherless orphan in a country with no welfare system; A struggling actor, relying on the Freemasons for room and board.

Proof positive that, if the Americans of 1920 wanted to be fat, the calories were available to them, however poor they were.

But they weren't fat.

We are being poisoned. We are probably being poisoned by something in our food.