Excerpt from The Human Being Diet by Petronella Ravenshear
Excerpt from The Human Being Diet by Petronella Ravenshear
Petronella Ravenshear is an author, board-certified nutritionist and creator of the The Human Being Diet (HBD).We’re delighted to feature this excerpt!
A Brief History of Feasting and Fasting – it’s in our DNA
Hardwired into our very DNA is the memory of our ancestors’ battle to find enough food to survive. Those of us who could eat the most when food was available and those of us who were good at storing the extra food as fat survived, and survival (and reproduction, of course) is success in evolutionary terms. We’re programmed to eat food, and to eat as much of it as possible when we get the chance.
We’ve naturally got a sweet tooth because the hypothalamus in the brain equates sweetness with calories and energy, and energy equates to survival. But sugar, mainly in the form of honey, was a rare treat indeed. We also make a beeline for high-fat foods including butter, cheese and olive oil and we’re programmed to like these foods because they too are sources of concentrated energy (calories). It’s all about survival. It goes without saying that our environment has changed beyond recognition in the last 50,000 years or so but our genes are pretty much the same.
Our ancestors, the cavemen, were doughty survivors. They survived the life-threatening consequences of hunger, thirst, extremes of temperatures and wounds from battles and wild animals. We are the caveman survivors with the genetic memory and fear of hunger, thirst and extreme cold or heat, written into our genes because those are the very things that killed so many of our relatives.
Celebrations, religious holidays, weddings and family gatherings have always involved feasting and it all harks back to ancient tribal feasting. Imagine the hunters’ pride at bringing home enough food to feed the tribe – sitting round the campfire at night, listening to the stories, looking at the flickering fire, feeling safe and connected with each other and eating from the same pot. But we’ve lost that simple pleasure – families all over Europe and beyond hardly eat together anymore – they sit alone in front of the TV, their food on their lap. Walk through any city and food, fast food, is everywhere: billboards and burgers, and people eating in the street and on the run. Food is all around us and our new survival tactic is, of necessity, to try and ignore our ancient programming and not to give in to temptation.
The Diets Don’t Work
The Victorian era (1837-1910 give or take) kicked off with the idea that fat was appealing and attractive: it signified wealth. But eventually fatness fell out of favour and the first ever diet book was published in London in 1863 by an undertaker called William Banting. It was called A Letter on Corpulence and it was a bestseller. This book was an early forerunner of the Atkins type diets – potatoes were out but copious quantities of fish, and meat were on the menu. “Banting” became the by-word for slimming.
The Banting diet was followed by Horace Fletcher’s chewing diet. Fletcher said that all the ills of humankind could be solved by chewing each mouthful of food 32 times. We could eat what we liked as long as we chewed it until it was liquefied. At boarding school in 1960s England I remember the nuns trying unsuccessfully to persuade us wilful girls to adopt this practice.
Diet & Health, With Key to the Calories was published in 1919 by an overweight Californian doctor, Dr Lulu Hunt Peters and that was the first we ever heard about calories. And since then we’ve had endless weight loss diets including Scarsdale, Weightwatchers, Cambridge, Montignac, Atkins, Dukan, 5:2, and Lighter Life. We’ve had variations from low-calorie and low-fat, to high-fat and low-carbohydrate, and high-protein Paleo regimes, varying from powdered non-food diets to piles of red meat. All of them work but generally they don’t work for long, because they are too boring, or too restrictive, or just too difficult.
The latest ‘magic slimming solution’ is Semaglutide (sold as Ozempic and Wegovy) which became available as a type 2 diabetes drug in the UK in 2019. It’s prescribed as a weekly injection which reduces appetite and makes people feel fuller for longer. But it’s now prescribed off label for pretty much anyone who wants to lose weight and who can afford the hefty price tag. Vogue reports that dermatologists and plastic surgeons alike are concerned about the ‘Ozempic face’, which is gaunt, deflated, and saggy. But other common side effects of the drug include nausea and vomiting, constipation, diarrhoea and pain.
The problem with magic bullet tactics and these drugs in particular (other than the unpleasant side effects, and unknown long-term effects) is that they don’t change our relationship with food. It is the same with most weight loss diets, they don’t teach us anything about how our diet affects the way we feel, or which foods best suit us as individuals. Once the diet or treatment is stopped the excess weight quickly reappears. In clinic, when someone came to see me for weight loss, there was inevitably a long list of tried and failed diets and healthy eating programmes which were often successful initially but later abandoned. And nearly everyone’s experienced yo-yoing and has a wardrobe to prove it.
What we need is not a quick fix or a new diet but a lifestyle change – something that’s healthy and sustainable. We need a new way of eating, feasting and fasting, that becomes a way of life. We need a health-giving way of eating to make us feel better; a formula which reduces inflammation and stimulates weight loss, as a side effect of improved health. We need to learn to deal with stress and to spend more time in the parasympathetic arm (rest and repair) of the nervous system. We need to recover our rhythm and our natural balance.
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Category: On Writing
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