Well I occasionally do Bikram Yoga (yoga in a really hot room) and when I was researching it, I found a lot of articles on how you actually burn more calorie when you exercise in hot temp rather than in cold, because your body is working really hard to cool itself down and stop you from dying from overheating (which kind of sounds alarming... ). But it makes sense. I guess the same if you are in cold temp as body is working to keep your temp up so that you don't die from hypothermia.

Works well for yoga, please don't apply it to cardio! We had some real geniuses who liked to work out in the sauna when I was a lifegaurd. Apparently heat exhaustion is for p***ies.

Maintaining body temp does burn calories (whether it's cooling off or keeping warm), but I'm not sure that it "keeps" anyone larger. It just means our calorie needs are different when we don't have to work as hard to maintain body temperature.

It's just one of the many, many ways it takes fewer calories to survive in the modern world than it did in the past.

Just staying alive is a lot of work if you have to do it all yourself. We just have far more ways to reduce our calorie expenditures, and have far more opportunities to increase our calorie intake.

In a "natural world" it makes sense to be hungry all of the time and eat whenever food is available (because in a natural world, overpopulation occurs before widespread obesity), and it makes sense to expend as little energy as possible.

So our bodies are built to tell us "eat and rest at every opportunity," because that's what kept us alive.

Now it's killing us.

I think the "live to eat" thing is misleading though. I think animals also "live to eat," it's the way they survive. They don't choose to stop eating because it's what's good for them. For many animals, most of the day is spent searching for food - either gathering it, or hunting it down." They're just as food obsessed - if not more so than humans, but the difference is they have to be, and we don't. But you can't tell our genes what our mind knows. Weight loss is about finding ways to develop unnatural habits. It's a matter of outsmarting our genetic predispositions.

When Koko the signing gorilla has been asked what she likes to do best, she signs about food. Similar questions to other signing or symbol using apes yields similar responses. It's always about food. And I think if a lot of animals could speak, it's what they also would say. Food is great, and most animals think so. For most animals, eating is always very close to the number 1 priority, up there with all of the other death and extinction-avoiding drives like avoiding being eaten, and passing on genes to the next generation.

Some scientists say the passing on the genes is the top priority of all species - but you can't do that if you don't eat or avoid being eaten. Now you can't eat if you don't avoid being eaten, but you can't avoid being eaten if you don't eat - so there's an argument for all of those being in the top three, and which of those three may vary from species to species or even from individual to individual or even moment to moment.

Too much food to go around is never a long-lasting problem in the wild, because nature takes care of it. When food supplies are overly abundent, breeding and overpopulation quickly take care of that "too much food" problem. Population numbers increase until there isn't enough food for everyone, and some of them start dying.

Civilization has removed many of the checks and balances of the natural world. We get fat only because civilization allows us to. If we had to live without all modern conveniences, we wouldn't be fat either (there'd be other trade-offs, but obesity wouldn't be one of them).

Kaplods, when did "civilization" begin in this way of looking at it?

Jay

That depends on who you ask. Some argue that it began with widespread use of fire and cooking, others say when huntering/gathering was replaced with agriculture, and others say with the reduced cost of sugar and white flour during the Middle Ages, and others say with the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the century. Others say the Information Age - with the increase in desk jobs and fast food or the changes in the school system (eliminating P.E. and serving processed foods in the school cafeterias). Some say it's been the low-fat movement.

Personally, I think it's a trend that has been going on for thousands of years, but that was fairly slowly moving until the last couple hundred years. No matter when you believe it started, it's pretty obvious that it's snowballing.

Today, even the poorest people in the USA, live a lifestyle that Henry the Eighth may have envied (in terms of less physical work, temperature controlled shelter, freedom from disease, and the availability of higher calorie foods).

The diseases that were a result of "affluenza" in and prior to the middle ages (obesity, high blood pressure, gout, diabetes), are now chronic among the USA's impoverished. Our "wealth" is killing us (and saving us too, the solution is going to be in finding and addressing which is which and making the necessary changes).