If you see a flare in the air, your next step depends on how you’re currently wired. Never seen one? You might call 911. You might call the local police. Or maybe the fire department. Or just ignore it all together. Just because something happened (a stimulus) doesn’t mean the next step is universal. It [...]
If you see a flare in the air, your next step depends on how you're currently wired. Never seen one? You might call 911. You might call the local police. Or maybe the fire department. Or just ignore it all together.
Just because something happened (a stimulus) doesn’t mean the next step is universal. It depends on who you are and what you’ve experienced.
It depends on the story your body tells itself.
And that story has a lot to do with culture. With phobologic, the body has a built in story. Fearing, flinching — these things help you survive. You can't think about whether or not you want to run away from a rabid bear. It just has to happen; if it doesn't, you're dinner.
The Spartans though? They changed the story. They rewired the fear and the flinch.
With skinny-fat syndrome, your body is fearing and flinching a certain way. Before we get into how to rewire ourselves, we first have to understand what's happening on the most superficial level.
The skinny-fat flinch
I like to think that the body is smarter than we think we are about thinking about the body. Save for anomalies and mutations, it doesn't voluntarily back itself into a corner. The body likes to survive, and that's why you flinch.
You flinch to protect. To survive. You're better off having flinched than not. You look like an idiot when you flinch when you don't have to, but it's worth it. Erring on the side of caution is the rule. Because of this, it's easy to settle into self-created flinches over time.
In a sense, you can say that your body flinched its way into skinny-fat syndrome — based on your genetics and environment (culture), a skinny-fat body seemed like a rather swell thing to settle into.
I think most evolutionary thinkers would agree that if you were a sheltered creature with no need to hunt or gather or move, then having a bunch of excess energy around your waist and little muscle mass would be like hitting the lottery. Why have hulking, energy inefficient muscles if they weren't needed to wrestle with other alphas for status or visually court a maiden? Why be lean and on the verge of starvation when you could be plump and energy affluent?
Think from your body’s perspective. Why would you be eating a bunch of food unless you were actually going to need what the food delivers? How cool would it die in hibernation because your body wanted to look great naked?
What a skinny-fat body represents
Flinching has a purpose based on need. If you want to live, you need your head in tact. Makes sense, then, to flinch to protect your head.
Your body doesn’t care about your six pack. It doesn’t mind your arteries exploding in the future from fried food consumption because it knows the globules of fat around your waist are sources of energy and that it needs energy to survive immediately. Arterial explosion is years away. But starvation? Potentially a much sooner threat, and so we get hungry to remind ourselves of (and prevent) this.
(And don't forget that fat cells might be more than just excess energy storage. This adds to “purpose.” You might be holding onto fat cells because they help you mediate the stress response. Once again, it's better to have body fat than to teem in stress hormones that are literally tearing your body to shreds every second of the day.)
Muscle is one of the more metabolically expensive tissue. It takes a lot of energy to upkeep and use. If the body doesn’t have a need for muscle tissue, it won’t build muscle. When you’re sitting on the couch watching Friends, you have no reason to spend your money on big muscles. Instead, assuming you have a decent income, you're just going to put the extra in the retirement fund. It's safer there. It has more purpose there.
The skinny-fat set point
The most exterior view of skinny-fat syndrome looks like this: your body is flinching excess nutrients towards fat, and also is finding little need for muscle tissue. Unconsciously, your body is playing a game of investments. Send more energy and nutrients here, less there. This tissue isn't as important as that tissue.
It's created a schema for operation based upon what you've experience (culture) and what it has the capacity to do (genetics), and this schema — when all played out — results in a skinny-fat body. Even worse, if you've been hammering this schema — these flinches — into your physiology for a while now, your body has likely settled around a skinny-fat set point.
Consider your set point a level in which your body puts on pajamas, comfy socks, and snuggles into a snooze. Your body likes where you are. Your guts are trying to keep you the same way you are right now. They don’t want change. You’re flinching a certain way to maintain what you already are.
This isn't something that just pops out of no where or changes in one day. Your body has been settling into a pattern over time — a skinny-fat set point.
Undoing the skinny-fat flinch
Undoing the flinch is an investment. You’ve lived however long telling your body that fat cells are good to have around. But now you're shifting the tables. You're trying to convince your body that those cells weren't such a good idea, all while pleading for the addition of some extra muscle tissue.
Some say that this process is all about calories.
I say they are wrong.
This isn't about giving the body less reason to flinch. That doesn't work. It doesn't matter if someone is throwing a rock or shooting a Nerf gun. You're always going to flinch the same way. You're already at a comfortable set point.
This isn't a game of pluses and minuses. You need is something more comprehensive than that. You need to rewire the flinch.
+++++
I also apologetically credit this analogy to Julien Smith and his book The Flinch, which I've read many times over.