Weight Maven

It’s the day after Thanksgiving, so what better way to spend it than searching Delicious;). Today’s interesting read comes from Scientific American, An evolutionary tale of human obesity. Money quotes:

If you’re an obese person and can trace your being significantly overweight to some combination of genetic factors … there’s a good chance that your genetic makeup would have given you a leg-up over your “naturally skinny” peers if only you’d been born about 10,000 years earlier.

and:

it was actually only about 60 years ago—after the dust settled from WWII and with the advent of slick advertising, cheap transport and prepackaged convenience foods—that those old, previously adaptive fat genotypes that evolved during the Palaeolithic-era materialized into the crippling, plus-sized problem that we have today. This is such a tiny sliver of time in our species’ evolutionary history that it can hardly be expressed mathematically, but needless to say, it is not enough time for natural selection to counteract what was, for so long before, clearly adaptive.

We’re clearly not all affected by today’s environment the same, but me, I’m very intrigued by the potential for a paleo/primal/evolutionary approach to weight loss.

If you’re similarly intrigued, here are a few of my go-to resources: Whole Health Source, PaNu, and Mark’s Daily Apple.

I just ordered a copy of the Perfect Health Diet; although it’s more of a wellness plan than a weight loss diet, it seems to fit right into this club (check out their color companion for a one-page PDF of their approach). Will report back once I’ve read it.