by Siim Land
Your blood sugar gets elevated → the pancreas releases insulin to bring it back down.
Normally, insulin would unlock the cells to shuttle that glucose into glycogen stores but after a while, the pancreas gets taxed.
Then the pancreas can’t keep up with pumping out more and more insulin and your blood sugar levels remain elevated for too long.
You become insulin resistant - not being able to produce enough insulin to metabolize carbohydrates properly.
Insulin resistance is one of the main driving factors of obesity and metabolic disorders in the Western diet. We’ll be talking about it a lot more in Chapter XI.
In the example of caffeine, you start off by being satisfied with a single cup, then you build up your tolerance and you need more to feel the same effect.
This is called hedonic adaptation also known as the hedonic treadmill. It points out how we adapt to a stable level of happiness despite the ups and downs of positive gains or negative losses in our life. Despite the fortunate or disastrous events that we encounter, eventually, we’ll reach the homeostatic level of happiness we were at previously.
You win a lottery and you're on cloud 9 - new house, nice cars, fancy clothes, traveling the world and all that fun stuff. Then, after a few months, you adapt to this new lifestyle and it becomes normal. You're back at baseline.
You break up with someone and feel heartbroken. After a while, you get over it and you're back in the game.
You lost your job and had to cut down on your expenses. At first, it’s uncomfortable and displeasing but soon you’ll get used to it. Instead of eating $200 dinners every night you’re satisfied with eating less glamorously.
You start smoking only one cigar a day but over the course of a year you've built up to an entire pack to get the same effect.
Figure 16 The ups and downs of the Hedonic Treadmill
Why is this so anyway? Why do people eat food past satiety until indulgence and get addicted to these simple pleasures that aren’t even meaningful in the grand scheme of things?
The reason for that has to do with our primal origins again. You see, the change in our environment from scarcity to abundance has happened too quickly. We may live in the modern world, but our body thinks it’s still in the ancestral landscape.
Because of this “evolutionary time-lag”, our brain is always trying to motivate us to consume the most evolutionarily valuable nutrients – salt, sugar, and fat. Foods with a combination of carbohydrates and fats have the highest calorie density and enable our body to store energy for the dark times to come. Unfortunately, those times are happening less and less often and these unnatural food combinations that drive us to eat more are available all the time.
In nature, fat is generally available in winter when we had to eat animals to survive, while sugar and starch were available in summer and autumn. There was no time when we had the combination of fat + carbs available to us in natural whole food, but this is the signature of junk food that drives excessive eating.
The deadly combination of salt, sugar, and fat is like a drug, as it stimulates our taste buds in an addictive way and lights up the reward mechanisms in the brain. Michael Moss’ book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us talks about how fast food companies have deciphered this secret code that makes us crave more food. It’s called the bliss point – the specific amount of those 3 ingredients, which optimizes palatability. There’s not too much nor too little, but just enough. By themselves, they’re not inherently bad but when together they cause conflicting metabolic and hormonal effects within the body that leads to diabetes and obesity.
The reason why some people can’t get enough enjoyment from healthy food is that their bliss point is too high. Refined carbohydrates, sweets, pastries and pizzas have overstimulated their taste buds. They simply can’t even feel the taste of anything less than that. To keep up with their primal urges they want to increase their sensations even further. Instead of being satisfied, they keep craving for more and more.
Another thing that causes binge eating is leptin resistance. It’s the satiety hormone, that regulates the feeling of hunger. Leptin’s role is to signal the brain that there’s a dire need for calories. Once we get full it sends another message, saying that we’ve had enough.
However, if we’re leptin resistant then the lines of communication will be cut short and our mind will never get the information that we’ve received enough food. In this case, the body is satisfied but the brain is still starving and keeps on craving for more stuff.
Figure 17 Leptin regulates appetite and body weight in response to food intake
Leptin resistance is caused mostly by emotional binge eating. Usually, it goes hand in hand with insulin resistance, as it’s created by the consumption of simple carbohydrates and sugar with a lot of fat at the same time. These combinations of foods affect the mental processes of people and are the most common cause of obesity and diabetes.
Living organisms are hard-wired towards preserving energy to guarantee survival and avoid pain, which gets regulated by the homeostatic balance of the body. Core temperature, blood pressure, daily caloric expenditure, and hormetic conditioning are all linked to this.
Basically, hedonic adaptation is about you getting comfortable with a particular stimulus and it becomes your default state. You reach a new homeostasis. That can be part of the reason why richer countries tend to over-indulge – they’ve simply gotten used to the pleasurable and comforting aspects of food.
As a conscious human being who seeks to optimize their health and overall life, you should want to pay close attention to where your hedonic homeostasis is. We’re always moving up and down the hedonic ladder with some activities making us less comfortable whereas others less so. The level we dwell on the most becomes our default state – the place where we feel the best and satisfied.
If your baseline for feeling pleased and joyous about food is way up in the clouds – needing 6-course gourmet dinners or even highly stimulating fast food that hijacks your taste perception – then you need to be eating more of those things to feel satisfied. On the flip side, if you were to habituate yourself with healthier but slightly blander meals, you’d get the same satisfaction and blissfulness. The difference is that you’re not over-indulging on empty calories or teaching yourself to like only very rich foods. Subjectively, the feelings are the same but in terms of the final outcome and calories, it’s a completely different story.
Obesity and metabolic diseases are primarily the outcomes of physiological ailments in the body as well as psychological hedonic adaptation to the dopamine rush of highly stimulating foods that make the person follow certain bad lifestyle practices. A rational person wouldn’t consciously harm itself with a diet they know is bad for them in the long run. It’s just that many people are very much controlled by their emotions, feelings, sensations, and thoughts, which unfortunately can be easily manipulated.
Now, the point of all this isn't that all pleasure and comfort should be avoided. Of course, life is to be enjoyed but what hedonic adaptation shows us is that the feeling of joy and happiness depend on our subjective homeostasis - just our perceptions and conditioning. The question you’d want to ask yourself is what emotions, pleasures, discomforts, foods, stimuli are you exposed to most often?
All addictions are not as much caused by any particular stimulus but more so by our attachment to it. You've habituated yourself to doing something, like smoking a pack a day, having a drink in the evening or putting extra cheese on your food. Your happiness isn't linked to how high your homeostasis is in particular but in your adaptation to the stability and comfort you experience. Which means you can be as happy as you are right now if you were to smoke only a single cigar a day or eating just plain broccoli. You just have bad habits.
The key to overcoming any addiction is to detach yourself from the thing that you're addicted to - you have to reduce your exposure to the stimulus. What I advise you to do is to abstain from it
completely - just start fasting.
Intermittent Fasting resets your taste buds and makes healthy food taste amazing. Junk food will actually become too stimulating.
Avoiding caffeine for a certain period of time will lower your tolerance to it. You'll get more energy from less coffee when you do enjoy a cup.
Not consuming social media and entertainment for a while will give your brain a break from being constantly stimulated and triggered. This will help you to become more mindful and focused in life.
Sleeping on the floor or outside every once in a while reminds you how fortunate you really are for having even just a roof over your head. It can also condition you to hold a better posture.
If you understand this concept, then you can see that it's a massive hack for happiness. You'll become happier with less.
However, we shouldn't go extreme with it - i.e. full monk mode in a cave with no clothes or material possessions. We can still experience the pleasures of life and have a greater meaning at the same time. The key is to not make the mistake of scaling up our homeostasis and never coming down from it. We should experience the highs and the lows so that we could appreciate the things we already have. Buy yourself nice things, but get accustomed to being happy without them.
This is what's taught in Stoicism as well. One of the more renown writers of this philosophy, Seneca had an exercise where he voluntarily practiced poverty. He said:
Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?'
Seneca was the richest banker in Rome, yet he deliberately put himself through difficult situations, discomfort, and pain. This not only made him resistant against turmoil but also allowed him to calibrate his hedonic homeostasis as he wished. His happiness wasn't dependent on anything external because he found it within himself.
Hedonic adaptation can be experienced in the pursuit of longevity and performance as well. The idea that you’re going to die is both a catalyst for living out your true potential as a human being and a source of existential discomfort at the same time. If you were to live forever, then you’ll come across the dichotomy of having all the time in the world to do anything you want, thus getting nowhere, and having so much time that you’ll be able to do everything. It’s a paradoxical situation the outcome of which depends on your hedonic homeostasis and mindset. Whatever the case may be, the process of living, fulfilling your desires, pursuing your goals, and dying itself are wherein you’ll find the most happiness. You just have to make sure that it does give you some sort of a greater sense of meaning. Otherwise, you’ll end up with immortal suffering and apathy.
This is still a book about diet and nutrition, but I want you to realize how big of a role your mindset and psychology plays in all of this. How healthy you are and how long you’ll live are very much dependent upon your daily habits – the small decisions and activities you do all the time. They might not seem that significant in the short term but they’re actually the pillar stones of your longevity in the long run.
Think about it…If you’re the kind of person who is falling off the rails with their diet or skipping workouts on a regular basis, then it’s going to add up. After a while, you may gain 10-20 pounds of unnecessary extra weight just out of habit. You don’t have to even notice that you’re doing something wrong. It’s just the culmination of certain things that you simply didn’t pay enough attention to. That extra serving of cheese, sporadic snacking, taking the elevator more often, and dropping the ball many times will scale up the hedonic ladder.
Lao Tzu, one of the most renown philosophers of Ancient China and the founder of Taoist philosophy has a quote: “Deal with the big while it is still small.” The health of your body is THE BIGGEST THING in your life because it literally anchors your psychosomatic experience of the world. That’s why you shouldn’t take it for granted. Furthermore, your life expectancy and longevity are another thing that you can’t expect to focus on only when you’re about to die. It’ll be too late by then. Hell, it was probably too late several decades ago…
If you’re planning on living a healthier life that’s long, full of vigor, bliss, and happiness, then you have to be actively working at it all the time. You may be already eating right, exercising, and sleeping properly. However, by picking up this book, you’ve now embarked on a much more thorough and conscientious routine of health optimization that will not only improve longevity but increases performance in everything you do as well.
In the context of diet and nutrition, then one of the most efficient ways of avoiding metabolic disease as well as increase life expectancy is intermittent fasting. That’s the main practice of the Metabolic Autophagy Protocol which is what we’ll talk about next.
Why Intermittent Fasting?
Although currently living in a modern world, our bodies still think we’re in the ancestral savannah with lions and stuff. This reflects in the way we metabolize food, experience stress, adapt to physical conditions and also how our psychology functions.
You see, the eating patterns of our hunter-gatherer ancestors were highly unpredictable. Quite frankly, completely random. Sometimes they had a whole lot and at others nothing at all. Whatever the case, they were always in between fasting and feasting. They did both intermittently. This cycle wasn’t deliberate but created by the scarcity of food in their environment.
Intermittent fasting (IF) not only has incredible health benefits that are linked to increased longevity but also has psychological effects that help to escape the hedonic treadmill. In a world of unlimited empty calories and too much stimulation, the easier thing to do is to just say ‘NO.’ This is such a huge life hack that once you’ve tried it you wish you started sooner. I’ve been practicing IF since high school practically every day and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made in regards to nutrition. You might ask: “Who would be crazy enough to do this? It doesn’t make any sense.” This is what decades worth of brainwashing and misleading diet advice may do to unwary minds.
It’s quite paradoxical that the majority of people in the world go to bed while starving every single night, but at the same time, almost everyone in Western society is obsessively obese.
The Pareto principle applies here perfectly. He was an Italian economist and in his 1896 paper showed that, in most cases, about 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. 80% of the wealth belongs to 20% of the people, 80% of car accidents happen to 20% of the drivers, 80% of the food is consumed and stored as fat in 20% of the world’s population etc. Mainly it’s used in economics, but this 80-20 rule, or the law of the vital few, is evident in the distribution of calories and obesity as well.
Figure 18 The Pareto Principle - 80% of the results from 20% of the effort
Our civilization has reached a point where we don’t have to worry about our most primary needs as much and can now spend more time on other activities that develop us further as a species. There’s nothing wrong with that. In a perfect world, no animal would have to kill another one and everyone would always be fed and satisfied. However, we don’t live in such a place yet, at least for the time being.
Get your head around fasting. In contemporary nutrition advice, it’s the F word - the forbidden fruit. Don’t skip a meal or else… Or else what? IF is such a natural way of eating and it’s even more suitable for the modern environment where most people could use some positive restriction. So, how does it work?
The Physiology of Fasting
Intermittent fasting (IF) is a way of eating (or not eating), where the food consumed is restricted to a certain time frame. This means that no calories whatsoever get put into the body in any shape or form. In a way, it’s simply timing when you eat.
The two governing states of metabolism are fed and fasted – anabolism and catabolism. The former is when we’re using the macronutrients eaten, that have been digested and are now circulating the
bloodstream. The latter happens when all that fuel has run out and our gas tank is empty, so to say. It happens after several hours (7-8) of not eating.
Figure 19 Anabolism and Catabolism in Action
Anabolism also refers to building up whereas catabolism entails breaking down. Both of them can contribute to each others’ processes – you need to catabolically dissolve the food you’ve eaten to become anabolic etc. They’re the different sides of the same coin.
How Does the Body Produce Energy While Fasting?
The body’s default fuel source is glucose, which exogenously (externally) comes in the form of sugar and carbohydrates and is stored endogenously (internally) as glycogen. The liver can deposit 100-150 grams of glycogen and muscles about 300-500 grams. They’re used for back-up.
Liver glycogen stores will be depleted already within the first 18 to 24 hours of not eating - almost overnight. This decreases blood sugar and insulin levels significantly, as there are no exogenous nutrients to be found.
Insulin is a hormone released by the pancreas in response to rising blood sugar, which happens after the consumption of food. Its role is to unlock the receptors in our cells to shuttle the incoming nutrients into our muscles, or when they’re full into our adipose tissue (body fat).
The counterpart to insulin is glucagon and also gets produced by the pancreas. It gets released when the concentration of glucose in the bloodstream gets too low. The liver then starts to convert stored glycogen into glucose.
Figure 20 Insulin and Glucagon are Constantly Balancing Blood Sugar
Fasting and Ketosis