FAT triggers

The Gabriel Method uses an acronym called FAT.

FAT doesn't mean "fat", but it does refer to fat gain.

FAT stands for "Famine And Temperature".

Think about how our ancestors, tens/hundreds of thousands of years ago, lived in the wild. 

Before the domestication of animals, they had to hunt.  So they had to be fit enough to chase and catch their prety.

They were also the hunted.  In many places there were wild animals that were bigger and faster than humans.  Humans tasted really good to these guys!

There was also the risk of starvation, either due to famine or the weather.  When winter set in (or an Ice Age!) food was scarce, fruits were difficult to find because plants weren't producing them and animals were difficult to find as well because they went into hibernation or they migrated to places with warmer climates.

So basically, you were either facing the risk of being eaten, not having enough to eat, or freezing to death. 

These days, mostly in First World countries, we don't have to face those risks.  We don't have to dodge lions (unless you are in Africa!), you don't face starvation, and (hopefully) you aren't going to freeze to death because we live in houses and we wear warm clothes.

Despite not having to deal with those risks anymore, our bodies still respond to a multitude of stresses that it INTERPRETS as either Famine or Temperature triggers.

Any time we are feeling a LACK of anything - a lack of money, having no job, no transport, no housing, love, appreciation, creative expression, friendship - our brains (the hypothalamus to be precise) emit a stress hormone which the cells of our bodies interpret as Famine and we GAIN weight.

Any time we are feeling negatively stressed - our jobs are under threat, we are facing eviction, our boss or spouse or neighbour is always yelling at us, there may have been rape or physical abuse - our brains release more stress hormone which the cells interpret as feeling UNSAFE.  To try to create a safer environment, a "buffer", our bodies will GAIN weight.

But there are some other environmental stresses that cause us to gain weight too.

One of those stresses is HORMONAL.  If you are taking a medication such as the Pill, or HRT, or anti-depressants, in fact any pharmaceutical drug, your body can interpret that as a stress that causes you to gain weight.

Another type of environmental stress is TOXINS.  The human body is not designed to process artificial flavourings and preservatives.  It doesn't know what to do with them so it can store these toxins in the cells, and then it will want to gain more fat to make storage for the toxins.

Toxins also trigger INFLAMMATORY responses (which I posted about previously) such as asthma, ADD, eczema, depression.

So it is really important to avoid eating artificially flavoured, highly processed foods. 

Possibly the most important FAT trigger is NUTRITIONAL FAMINE.  If you are consuming alot of processed foods (pies, chips/crisps, fries, chocolate, sugared drinks, alcohol - basically anything that has been changed from its natural form!) you are probably suffering from nutritional famine because all the goodness has been stripped out of the fruit/vegetables/meat and highly processed until it no longer resembles what it once was.  Nutritional famine is exactly what it says - a type of Famine!

So if you are starving yourself of the nutrients it needs every day, the FAT switch is going to be flipped and your body is going to start gaining weight, storing every bit of fat you swallow.

More to come....