The Unexpected Rewards of Research
I battled weight problems for most of my life. I joined every diet club and followed every diet plan known to humankind. I listened to doctors, nutritionists and experts. But I could never lose weight in sufficient numbers, and certainly never kept it off. I was becoming resigned to my heavy weight when I stumbled upon a weight loss plan in a most unexpected place.
It was while I was doing research for my book, The Blessing Stone. The opening story is about a human female who lived in East Africa 100,000 years ago. To write her story I had to do research into life in the Stone Age, and one reference book I used was filled with paintings of how our ancestors might have looked back then (not much different from ourselves, it seems, although perhaps with a little more hair), and the thing that struck me about the paintings was that the people were all lean and well muscled. The artist justified his renditions with this comment: "Taking into account their low carbohydrate and high protein diet, and the fact that early humans would have been constantly in motion, it is safe to say they would not have been fat or overweight."
Further research backed up the artist's comment, as I found that our distant ancestors did indeed consume a very different diet from the one we eat today. The fossil record shows us that pre-historic fruit, for example, was sour (the sweet oranges and apples we munch on today are the result of centuries of cultivation and hybridization). There was no bee-keeping and so honey was tasted at the most once a year. Where, I asked myself, did their sugar come from? The answer was: nowhere. I then thought of other items in our modern diet that did not appear in the Stone Age. Starches, for another example. The consumption of grains (which would become bread and pasta that is now so prevalent in our lives) did not enter into our culture until around 8,000 years ago.
Research for the story of Tall One in The Blessing Stone further informed me that the modern-day human (Homo sapiens) evolved over perhaps three million years, which means that in all those years the evolving human body was adapting to its local environment. If there was no sugar to be had and no grains to be eaten, then our digestive systems did not evolve to handle simple carbohydrates. And so I asked myself: Is eight thousand years enough time for our digestive systems to evolve to adapt to modern food?
If we who are alive today are inhabiting bodies very much like those of our ancestors of one hundred thousand years ago, does it mean we are meant to flourish on a diet of nuts, berries, roots, eggs, fish, fowl and the occasional red meat? Is this in fact our natural diet, the one we really are supposed to live on? I decided to experiment. It wasn't easy, but I ate like a caveman and sure enough the pounds began to melt away.
Research for The Blessing Stone also reminded me that it is only in the last one hundred years or so that people have become sedentary. Tall One and her people walked everywhere. They dug into the ground for food, they climbed trees, they stalked and chased wild game. They did not drive through fast food restaurants. So, like our Paleolithic ancestors, I took up walking.
I lost nearly seventy pounds in six months, and have kept it off since. After all those diet clubs and weight loss plans, I found the answer while doing research on a completely unrelated subject. I hadn't started out looking for a diet, I just wanted to write a good story. Which makes me wonder: What unexpected revelations will my next course of research reveal to me?
Image Source: www.yes-zim.com
