Mr. Roboto

After the last post on feeding cycles, I started thinking about how many modern nutritional prescriptions are off the mark.  For example, you have many people recommend six meals a day, each one "balanced", and total calories the same day after day.  How un-naturalistic can you get??

It's like people are thinking about how to feed a machine instead of an organism.  Sometime people recommend "variety" in a diet, but this is mostly lip service.  Decrease calories one day a week?  Why, what for?  Instead, it should be connected to an overall context of the feeding cycle.

For example, here's a scenario for a hunter: he wakes up in the morning, and he is out of food and getting hungry.  So he commences with intense physical effort to acquire game.  If he's fortunate, he scores some game; if not the hunt continues, maybe stretching out another day.  After acquiring game, maybe he feasts immediately or instead he waits until he brings it back to camp.  Next there is a night and perhaps a day or two of relative relaxation and good eating.  Then food starts to run short and the whole cycle begins again.

Within this type of scenario, you might have many things happening: calorie-wise, there might be a deficit on the initial hunting day(s), a surplus for a day or two, and then another deficit day.  Meal-wise, you might have fewer meals on the hunting days and more meals on the feast days.  Meal composition-wise, you might have more carbs (plant food) on the deficit days and more meat on the surplus days.

But all of this would be a mixture and flow, nothing like a static amount of calories spread over six meals a day.  And judging from the lion study, a naturalistic eating pattern is what we're designed for.  Figuring out examples and a template for all this is difficult though.  Modern hunter-gatherer tribes have been pushed out to marginal areas, and so their feeding cycles may not be representative of our ancestors.  The best bet is to utilize the existing research, take some educated guesses, learn from experience and the experience of others, and try to build a more naturalistic eating pattern that is functional and healthy.

Comments

[Chris H]

Interesting. Especially in terms of thinking about how to sequence exercise into your pattern - i.e. hard workout then eat then rest for the gorge days, fast, then workout fasted then eat again......

[Chris H]

Also thinking about the type of exercise here in the sequence. If hunting fight/flight stuff is the model then we would be talking about short but intense workouts - intervals, crossfit circuits and the like - rather than lots of strength focussed singles with lots of rest? The intense stuff has been shown to induce GH release.

Looking forward to reading more of your though on this