comments:
What you have described is the horror of a Pleistocene forager mind that awakens to find itself in a consumerist, calorie-abundant, hyper-palatable food world. None of us were “designed for” this, but none of us are identical in how hard it hits us. It sounds like, for you, at this point in your life history, the horror of it is particularly harsh. Chronic fatigue only makes that confrontation more severe. The way I have phrased this may seem strange, or even unnecessarily obscure or pretentious. But I believe that failure by the individual striver to fully comprehend this biocultural reality is a key reason many struggle more than is inherent. This is not merely a failure of willpower. It is an ancient appetite and reward system operating inside an artificial ecology that has become extremely good at exploiting it. I would suggest reading S. Boyd Eaton, Marjorie Shostak, and Melvin Konner’s 1988 book The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet & Exercise and a Design for Living, or any of the related works from the 1990s through the early 2000s on the Paleolithic prescription, evolutionary mismatch, or the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Understanding the evolutionary ecology for which your own appetite, reward, and satiation systems were shaped can be as clarifying and empowering as any learning I know. Once that clarity emerges, the why of the horror becomes clearer. Caloric deprivation is horror, but not the same kind of horror as being beaten, wounded, or damaged by external trauma. It is an internal psychosomatic horror: the ancient protest of an organism whose deepest regulatory systems know that food is life, that nutrient sufficiency is security, and that abundance is the condition from which growth, mate attraction, reproduction, and survivability flow. This is not peculiar to modern humans. It is one of the great axioms of animal existence. Calories and nutrients are fundamentally limiting. The organism that can feast when feasting is possible is usually better positioned to survive scarcity, compete, mature, attract mates, reproduce, and provision offspring. A well-fed pair of robins does not merely experience comfort. Nutritional abundance can be translated into larger clutches, healthier offspring, and greater reproductive success. Across vast stretches of evolutionary time, organisms that aggressively exploited periods of abundance often left more descendants than organisms that did not. The example does not translate exactly onto apes, much less humans, but the general principle is ancient and widely conserved: hunger is not merely an inconvenience. Hunger is the body’s alarm bell for existential insufficiency. That is the source of the horror. Combined, the ancient myths of Sisyphus and Tantalus seem uncannily apt descriptions of the modern weight-loss struggle. I will not belabor the comparison other than to suggest that interested readers revisit the myths themselves. The weight-loss striver does not defeat appetite once and then stand victorious forever. The stone rolls back. The body asks again. The appetite returns. The modern world offers abundance again. The ancient self says: eat while eating is possible. So the task is not to pretend the stone is light. The task is to understand why it is heavy. Then the how of coping can begin to emerge for each individual striver. Lifestyle, expectations, habits, food environment, and indeed physiology can be retuned so that the horror becomes, perhaps, not an oppressive external tyrant, but a difficult world in which one can strive intrepidly, with courage and resolve, toward one’s best.