Do you want to lose weight?
Do you dream of having a fantastic body?
No problem!

You have thousands of books, thousands of trainers, thousands of articles, TV programmes and debates at your disposal, where specialists, doctors, experts of every kind, nutritionists, dieticians and personal trainers offer their authoritative opinions on the best diet or the most effective type of exercise.

Not to mention the enormous range of weight-loss products: hardly a day goes by without some miraculous new product appearing on the market, promising extraordinary results with practically no effort on our part.

But if it is all so simple, why are there still overweight people?

(And, incidentally, why do the United States — where most of these products and diets come from — have one of the highest obesity rates in the world?)

Before looking for motivation, look at the body

Most readers know me because of my work as a trainer and coach, and people usually come to me to achieve goals related to business, career, personal development or leadership.

A coach, after all, is a kind of trainer: someone who helps you choose motivating goals, forces you to maintain your focus and pushes you towards achieving them.

Unfortunately, people who claim to want high-level performance very often come to me in a pitiful physical condition, because they are destroying their body and brain with tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, poor-quality food — usually too much of it — and an almost complete absence of physical exercise.

And while they would like me to give them some kind of “magic motivational formula”, I try to explain that whatever results they want to achieve will be impossible if they do not first put their physical condition in order.

If they are not willing to work on this aspect, there is very little point in beginning any kind of collaboration.

The results obtained by those who accepted this challenge have been so spectacular — and I say this without false modesty — that lately I have received more and more requests for advice about weight loss and exercise, particularly during the last few weeks.

Which is understandable: people look in the mirror, realise that their appearance is less than wonderful, remember that sooner or later they will have to go to the beach, and panic.

This puts me in a difficult position.

I do have methods that allow me to maintain excellent physical condition, but they are very different from those proposed by the “experts”, and very far from commonly accepted beliefs.

And since I have no “official” qualifications in this field, I am somewhat reluctant to talk about them. Above all, I have no desire to add my voice to the choir of “experts” proposing yet another miraculous formula supposedly based on the latest studies and research.

Coaching means helping people discover their own answers

Coaching, by definition, does not mean giving advice or instructions. It means stimulating moments of growth and awareness so that the answers the client is looking for come from within — a modern version, in some ways, of the Socratic method.

So when someone wants to work on their physical condition, I proceed in exactly the same way as I would when dealing with professional or relationship goals: rather than giving direct instructions, I offer facts, direct attention and encourage insights that may lead to appropriate action.

That is what I am going to do here.

Since we are talking about fitness and weight loss, I am not going to offer a recipe or a solution, but simply a series of facts that are scientifically established and easy to verify.

Then everyone can draw their own conclusions.

Let us begin.

We still have the bodies of our ancestors

Fact: modern humans — Homo sapiens — have existed for approximately 200,000 years. During that period, from a physical and psychological point of view, human beings have undergone practically no change.

Our mental, physical, emotional and behavioural reactions are essentially identical to those of our ancestors, as are our nutritional requirements.

During prehistory, particularly the Palaeolithic period, humans were hunter-gatherers and ate every kind of meat, fish, eggs, nuts, roots, vegetables, fruit and, generally speaking, anything that could be eaten raw.

They did NOT eat cereals such as wheat, rice or maize, dairy products, or foods that required processing.

Quite simply, we are not designed to digest these foods efficiently and are fundamentally allergic to many of them.

Whether we like it or not, we have the body and mind of predators — and that includes our stomach, intestines, teeth and so on.

Fact: obtaining food through hunting is difficult.

Consequently, a predator — and I repeat, this includes humans — that wants to survive and reproduce in a hostile environment must remain constantly at the peak of its physical and mental condition.

You will never see an obese or badly out-of-shape predator living in the wild.

You do not see one because it simply would not survive.

Obese animals are found in zoos and in our homes.

Fact: precisely because it needs all its physical and psychological resources, no predator would deliberately poison itself, because doing so would immediately reduce its chances of survival.

Human beings are the only animals that deliberately introduce toxic substances into their own bodies.

Predators do not eat according to a timetable

Fact: a predator wakes up in the jungle in the morning and begins looking for prey.

It may find something. It may not.

Several days may pass before it catches anything.

No problem.

A predator’s body possesses all the resources it needs to cope with several days without food. Not only that: periods of fasting are extremely beneficial to general health, and it is no coincidence that fasting is prescribed in practically every religion.

This brings us to another fact:

Eating is a necessity. Eating three times a day is an addiction not fundamentally different from smoking or alcohol. Eating six times a day, as some “experts” recommend, is pure madness.

Fact: the sensation we call “hunger” does not come from an actual need for food, but from fluctuations in blood glucose caused by the foods to which we have become addicted.

In fact, this “hunger” is much more similar to craving a cigarette or a drink than to a genuine lack of food.

Bread, pasta, sweets and ice cream produce sugar in the bloodstream.

Simply eliminate them from your diet and you will no longer know what “hunger” feels like.

Train like a predator

Fact: a predator is not designed for moderate physical effort lasting for long periods of time.

A predator conserves its energy for a few explosive moments when it calls upon all its resources and launches itself at its prey.

Incidentally, the typical gym workout is often exactly the opposite.

Running around the park for an hour produces no particular benefit; a few explosive sprints do.

The logic is simple: predators conserve energy, then use it intensely when it matters.

What changed with agriculture?

Fact: humans began eating cereals with the agricultural revolution, approximately 10,000 years ago.

People discovered that it was possible to survive on wheat, rice, soy and maize.

This required planting and harvesting crops and therefore abandoning a nomadic lifestyle in favour of a sedentary one.

Because cultivating cereals is considerably easier than hunting, this produced a sudden increase in population and made it possible for individuals who would not have survived in the jungle to remain alive and reproduce.

As a consequence, the average level of health declined and — since life became much easier — so did the average level of intellectual ability.

Fact: human beings are designed to be healthy and fit — physically, intellectually and emotionally.

The overwhelming majority of the large and small ailments that constantly afflict us — including excess body fat, illness, lack of energy, poor concentration and depression — are caused almost exclusively by the poisons we introduce into our bodies.

And among those poisons, inappropriate food certainly occupies first place.

I would add that many of the “emotional” problems that plague us and that we have come to consider normal also derive from the psychological “poisons” we introduce into our minds — but that would take us too far from the subject.

Stop trying to lose weight

Fact: people who today try, within reasonable limits, to reproduce a diet, a type of physical activity and a general lifestyle similar to those of our ancestors quickly observe spectacular results in practically every area.

Obviously, there would be many other “facts” worth mentioning, but this seems enough for a beginning.

You can decide for yourself what conclusions to draw.

Which brings us back to the original question.

Fat is not the problem itself. It is the result of nutritional mistakes that began a very long time ago.

Therefore, making “weight loss” your goal is wrong in principle.

The real objective is to find a lifestyle suited to our genetic requirements as predators.

Once this is done — eating like predators in the jungle and training like predators in the jungle — weight regulates itself, without effort and without the slightest sensation of hunger.

Draw your own conclusions

Before finishing, I want to repeat that I have proposed nothing.

Nor do I have any intention of arguing with people who have different opinions about nutrition, with “experts”, with followers of particular diets, with people who have miraculous products to sell, with those who are vegetarian for ideological reasons, or with those who use the Bible as their source of nutritional information.

Everyone is absolutely free to make whatever decisions suit them, based on whatever source they consider most reliable.

I have merely pointed out — coaching style — a number of facts universally accepted by the scientific community.

The conclusions — and the experiments — are up to you.

Good hunting!

by Bruno

Note

Someone might argue that thinking of ourselves as animals in the jungle means abandoning what makes us unique: our humanity, our spiritual dimension, and so on.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

This is not the place to explore the subject in depth, but a study of the level of spirituality reached by Palaeolithic populations would produce some astonishing results.

In fact, their “shamanic” approach to reality and to universal forces was far more advanced than that of our organised and bureaucratised religions.

We will talk about that another time.

Originally published on Kudika Magazine, June 20, 2012