Rewilding myself

[galadhir]

Having thoughts about how restoring ground is all about encouraging it to do the things it was going to do naturally if it had only been left alone. About how the earth's ecosystems are complex interconnected systems that exist in a beneficial equilibrium and can self-correct in order to stay healthy... IF they are not pushed too far out of kilter by unwise forceful intervention.

Then thinking about how the same is probably true of the human body. Also a self-correcting ecosystem of many interconnected systems.

Maybe the human body evolved to keep itself at a weight that was healthy for it. Maybe it's the human intervention of unwise forceful starving to try to bend it into a form that we like, for arbitrary reasons, that throws the whole system out of kilter.

Maybe if we just trusted the hugely complex system that we are to know what to do, things would be better with us?

Idk, but the parallels feel relevant to me as I'm currently trying to learn to eat intuitively after a lifetime of dieting. I've tried to control my body so long I have no idea what it would be like if it was allowed to do its own thing. But maybe... maybe it would pleasantly surprise me? I hope so. Watch this space.

Comments

[galadhir]

Thanks! I really hope that there is a set point for my weight, but I have no idea what it might be, if there is. The books say that in the process of re-feeding yourself after a diet, your body piles on weight, goes up to the top of your weight range, and then - as long as you don't panic and start dieting again - slowly comes back down to the middle.

But the process can take a year, and I'm currently in the 'OMG, I'm so fat! What if it doesn't work?! What if I carry on getting fatter until I can't move?' stage. Keeping my nerve and trusting that my body knows what it's doing is surprisingly difficult.

You're absolutely right that if we as humans would just stop breaking things, we would spare ourselves so much effort and angst! I wonder if the propensity to just do everything the hardest and most painful way possibly is what original sin is all about? It does seem to be baked in to the entire species.

[mistressofmuses]

I remember reading that, about weight hitting the natural max until your metabolism kicks in and knows you aren't going to starve, and then settles back to a base point. My weight *used* to be like that, and then like so many, I got out of my 20s and suddenly didn't have that same comfortable settling point.

I feel your pain, so I hope that things get better! (I'm in that same place right now... I was fairly slender for a long time, and over the last couple years have gotten heavier. I'm struggling a bit with it, and hoping that a summer *not* spent in lockdown will make it easier for me to get some exercise.)

Hmmm... that sounds like a very interesting philosophical question!

[galadhir]

It's funny, my son was absolutely rake skinny until he hit his twenties, at which point - without changing anything about his diet - he suddenly became burly. But he put on maybe a couple of stone and then stopped again, and now he's holding steady at the new, higher weight. It's one of the things that makes me think they're right about weight set points, because there wasn't any change in diet or exercise that caused that, it was just genetic or hormonal. I think our bodies are probably much more mysterious than we give them credit for :)