Seasonal Cycles and Modern Food Abundance

When you look at anabolic processes, they're not as important as from a survival perspective. So if you think about like seasonal, like think about like winter and think about summer. In the winter, you might have food scarcity. In the summer, you might have a lot more food. So in the wintertime, those catabolic processes would be very important to managing body heat to managing uh metabolic rate in order to uh and survive the course of the winter we might have a little bit less food in the summertime we had ample food that's when the anabolic process would work but they were really only there to build back the muscle that you lost over the winter right so that's why when you overeat so if you were if you you were a hunter gather person on the Serengeti or whatever in the winter,

time while you're hunting and gathering, you've got ample body fat stores. When those body fat stores run out, you're going to start really tapping in the muscle. By the end of winter, you know, you've lost a ton of muscle. You've lost a ton of fat. Now spring comes and you've got ample amounts of food. You're eating, eating, eating. You're going to put that muscle back on, but it's not like you're going to put the muscle back on plus 20 extra kilos. Like you're not going to have like, you're not going to have like hunter gather dudes, like making stone weights to get strong for the winter and like raw, you know, eating plants and thinking like, oh, there's steroids in this plant. I'm going to get, I'm going to be the massive this winter. That's not even part of what is in our evolutionary design. So the catabolic process has to be able to break energy down or fuel substrates and energy or our own body. If that's what's going to keep us alive, the anabolic processes there realistically to just replace the muscle we've lost. so over the course of say a winter season maybe you lost 10 kilos of muscle mass you only need to put that back on over the summertime to get ample food because you're going to put a lot of body fat too so if you're eating like it's summertime for a hundred gather in that situation of course you're going to gain a lot of fat that's that's a good thing for your survival that's what's easy to put on fat because that's going to carry you through a winter time where you have food scarcity. So what we have to do is we have to understand that, that we don't go through that seasonal pattern. We don't go through feast and famine anymore. We just go through feasting all the fucking time. Um, and that's the problem is that people are constantly acting like, um, they're, they're, they're, they constantly eat like they're going to go into a famine, but we don't go on a famine anymore. And then, then they do a program famine where they starve themselves and they go their hunter gatherer thing is running on a treadmill or whatever so if people would just dial down um the extreme manner of wanting to lose weight and definitely dial down what you do after you're done with your body recomposition because that's one of the big things people go back to eating all the shit that got them in trouble in the first place so just think so it's a weird concept i think like we all have cavemen and cavewomen type of genetic things, but we're living in like an alien environment with a level of food abundance and a level of abundance of inactivity that we weren't actually designed to do. And it's probably going to be a long time until our genetic code catches up. And that's exactly why everything we spoke about in this podcast today is your blueprint for an optimal physique. There's the food we eat is a lot more complex than we believe it to be but it is actually simple in just following it it's just that we aren't simple creatures and the digestion process of humans isn't the same as what's extracted in a calorie bomb and then there's the supplements and then there's a micronutrients and then there's how is your body in this space and time with its level of stress and sleep and yes stress of all inputs and then your training status your dieting status it all impacts each other so i guess this is where a coach really does come into play but also just not doing dumb shit and jumping to extremes and taking a lot