First Half Done

I’ve enjoyed 150 Cokes over the last 15 days. I’ll get the total first half weight gain when I weigh in the morning, but as of this morning I was up 11.5 pounds. Measured my body fat yesterday and it was up to 12% – not too high, really, but still 3% up from where I started at 9%.

Friends have expressed concern about what could happen to my health while I’m doing this crazy stunt, but I want to point out again that the amount of sugar I’m consuming is no more than what half of all Americans consume every day. The caffeine, at 350 mgs/day, is no more than three or four coffees, and I usually drink that much coffee anyway.

No, my health is no more in danger than that of many Americans. I’m gaining the same kind of weight that half of Americans are already struggling with. It’s normal.

Also, I’m not doing anything that is outside the realm of normal human behavior, and, as long as I lose the weight afterwards, my health should be as good as ever, maybe better. Here’s the theory:

In the 200,000 years of evolution of anatomically modern humans, the one predictable thing about food supplies was that they were unpredictable. And there were no refrigerators. An animal would be killed, there would be a temporary abundance of food, and the only way for people to store that food would be to gorge on it and store it as fat to last them a few more days or weeks until they got another animal. Same with vegetables. Vegetables would ripen, people would gorge. The group would move to an area with available food, gorge on it, and then have to store that food as fat until they found another food source.

That’s why our bodies evolved the insulin response that makes us fat. When we eat a lot of food, especially a lot of sweet food, our insulin goes up and our fat cells store fat. The difference is that our Hunter and Gatherer ancestors would then have to fast for a while. We never fast. We’re constantly gorging. Constantly fattening.

So, this may actually be good for me.