Tame your inner cavewoman - and lose weight

Learn a slimming trick or two from our prehistoric ancestors

  Raquel Welch in 'One Million Years BC'For most of us, losing weight is incredibly hard - and keeping it off is just as difficult. But according to the latest thinking we're hardwired to eat for survival and the key to staying slim in our eat-anything-any-time society is to learn from our prehistoric ancestors.

It's no exaggeration to say that we now live in an environment
that's the exact opposite of the one human beings are programmed for. For thousands of years we lived in a world where food was scarce and we had to expend huge amounts of energy hunting and finding it. Now we have 24-hour supermarkets, drive everywhere and eat super-size portions. Faced with what has been dubbed our ‘obesogenic' environment, it's no wonder so many of us struggle to maintain a healthy weight.

Diet experts believe our bodies haven't had time to adapt to these changes. ‘We evolved to live in a world where calories were scarce and physical activity unavoidable, whereas now physical activity is pretty scarce and calories freely available and our evolution just hasn't caught up,' explains David Katz, Associate Professor of public health at Yale University School of Medicine.

He points out that the current obesity epidemic, which is not much more than 50 years old - a millisecond in terms of our evolution - corresponds with the post-war boom in labour-saving devices and increases in food production.

What's also changed is the type of food that's available. The post-war years saw, for the first time, food surpluses that, in turn, led to an abundance of mass produced, processed food - most of it laden with sugar, salt and fat -which hits us right where we are most vulnerable. ‘We're programmed to like sugar, salt and fat - and for good reasons,' explains Professor Katz. ‘Breast milk is sweet so we learn to like it early in life. Our bodies need salt, which was so scarce that our ancestors would seek it out and eat it while they could. The same goes for fat, which is the most concentrated source of energy and vital when you are expending huge numbers of calories just surviving - not so when you're driving everywhere and have an array of devices to do the work for you. In a way we're the victims of our own success.'

We're programmed for variety as well. We all know how easy it is to overeat when faced with a buffet packed with different foods, or how you can find room for dessert when you didn't think you could eat another thing. The reason is not greed or lack of self control, but that our brains are hardwired to seek different flavours. ‘It's called sensory specific satiety,' explains Katz.

‘Very simply it means that when we eat we fill up in a flavour-specific way. Different types of flavours such as sweet, salty and sour activate their own appetite centres in the brain and we can eat in each area until we feel full.' This made perfect sense for our ancestors. It ensured that
they didn't survive on a limited diet but were driven to find the variety they needed to stay well nourished. But in our world of plenty it means a constant battle against our primitive instinct to keep consuming. The battle becomes even harder when faced with processed foods that confuse our appetite centres. ‘When you have salty pasta sauces, which are loaded with hidden sugar and breakfast cereal that doesn't just have added sugar, but salt as well, it sends the brain's satiety centres into overdrive,' says Professor Katz.

The bottom line is that we're wired to obsess about food - our ancestors' primary focus was finding their next meal - and we've carried that into a world awash with easy calories. So how do you tame those basic instincts to find your way through the dietary jungle of 21st-century life?

Click here for the seven slimming secrets from our ancestors...

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