0:03 - Introduction and Audience Check-In
9:11 - Food Insecurity and Personal Reflections
20:08 - Transitioning to Food Security Mindset
21:20 - Overcoming Scarcity Mentality
22:22 - Discussion and Community Engagement
28:17 - Closing Thoughts and Farewell
In this episode, I delve into my personal journey with weight management and the complexities surrounding my relationship with food. Recently, I've been contemplating the final push to shed about 10 pounds and what that means for me psychologically and physically. I reminisce about my life's fluctuating relationship with food, particularly the scars left from a childhood marked by scarcity and food insecurity.
Throughout my early years, food was often inadequate, low quality, and at times, simply unavailable. I recount memories of growing up in a poor household where my mother’s cooking was less than desirable, and the boarding school experience where we faced significant shortages. These formative experiences shaped my attitudes towards food, making it difficult for me to develop a healthy relationship with it. They also fostered a mindset of emergency preparedness, where I instinctively cling to extra weight as a protective buffer against the uncertainty ingrained in my early life.
As I reflect on my weight management journey, I realize that while I successfully lost the initial 30 pounds relatively easily, the mental barriers surrounding the last 10 pounds come with a unique challenge. I explore the fears associated with releasing weight, considering the visceral fat around my organs and the instinct to hold onto reserves due to deeply rooted fears of scarcity. This struggle is not just physical but also psychological, rooted in the evolutionary necessity of our ancestors to store energy for times of famine. I liken it to a "just-in-time" production model, where one must relinquish the instinct to hoard food and trust in the availability of resources.
I engage in the metaphor of food security and discuss how the fear of not having enough food, a theme running through my life, complicates my ability to achieve my goals. The struggle manifests in behaviors like late-night snacking and the urgency to eat preventatively due to past experiences with hunger. I articulate how liberation from this mindset would enable me to pursue a healthier relationship with food and body image.
As the discussion unfolds, I invite the audience to join in with their own thoughts and experiences on weight and food. A caller shares similar struggles, raising intriguing points about how early feeding practices may have shaped our responses to hunger and satiety, further enriching the conversation about the psychological underpinnings of our habits. Together, we explore the idea that our early experiences with food can impact our dietary preferences and bodies later in life and the importance of breaking the cycle of food insecurity.
Ultimately, my exploration of this topic emphasizes a crucial transition—from a scarcity mindset toward embracing abundance, with all the ambivalence that entails. It's about shifting towards self-acceptance and trust in the future, guiding myself away from fear-based eating and into a healthier lifestyle. I wrap up by encouraging anyone grappling with similar issues to share their thoughts and tips, highlighting the value of community support in navigating the often turbulent journey of weight management.
[0:00] Welcome. We just had a little bit of time, a little bit of time today.
[0:03] I wanted to check in with the greatest audience in the known universe. It's massive praise, and I am most humbly and gratefully supportive of your support, freedomend.com. But if, of course, you have any yearning, burning questions, you can just raise your hand, you can unmute, you can chat away with whatever is on your mind i have a topic i do have a topic but, i'm not sure how interesting it is for others i mean sometimes i know it's interesting to others other times i'm not so sure i guess this would be a little bit of the latter so just adjust my headset here so we'll give it a second and we'll give it a second and just check let me just make sure that there's a recording here as well so i go on once go on twice all right well let's just give a little short speech here see if this is of interest to you i've been thinking about food lately.
[1:19] And I'm, you know, at a pretty good weight for the most part. I'm 188, 189. I've been doing more weights lately, so I'm up a little bit from where I was before, but I think a lot of it's muscle weight. But I'd still like to get a little bit further down. You know, I sort of can't help but think that when I look at really old people, they're generally pretty skinny. They're generally pretty skinny. You know, it's a tough thing in life, of course, balancing your pleasures, right?
[1:56] And so if I lose more weight, maybe I can live a little longer. You know, it's that, what is it, the visceral fat, the fat around the male innards and organs. Now, at one point, I was up around, geez, 220 or something like that. So, you know, down 30 plus pounds from there. So But I was thinking like, get another 10 pounds off and so on. It's a challenge, right? You don't want your body to outlast your brain, right? You don't want to have a relatively healthy body and a brain that is falling apart. That's no fun. That's no good. But at the same time, you don't want to die prematurely with particular, this sort of visceral fat that the belly fat seems to be pretty bad for men as a whole. So I could get a little further down off that.
[2:42] Now, I find though, losing the weight that I did in the past was pretty easy. Like the low-hanging fruit right i'd stop drinking juices i've never really drunk that much pop but you know cut out sugar chocolate chips you know cookies that kind of stuff uh pretty easy and yet i find this one this sort of next 10 pounds maybe a little bit more oh that's tough that's tough and it's unusual for me normally i kind of set my mind to something and kind of get it done But this one is tough. So I'm going to talk a little bit. This is kind of personal. Maybe it's of interest to you. Maybe it mirrors some of your experience or experience of people you know. But my experience with food is that of scarcity. And this was really for the first 25, 26 years of my life. As you know i grew up in a very poor household and i did go to my aunt's place uh and i went to one aunt in the west of england i went to another aunt in ireland i still remember those sea crossings these big boiling green walls of water which is crazy crossing the north sea, and they had this sort of magic pantries of infinite food like these big glass jars full of.
[4:02] Breakfast cereals, or they had endless rows of toast at breakfast and jams and spreads. And it was just, it was great, but rare. Now, so I grew up food insecure, certainly at home. My mother was an absolutely terrible cook. And.
[4:17] There was food was scarce and low quality. And then when I went to boarding school, though, there were food shortages there as well. There were significant meat shortages in England. I guess I was in boarding school in 72. I was six years old. So I was in boarding school for a couple of years, six to eight. And yeah, food was scarce, man. I remember one really sad Christmas where it was just me and three other kids and one very depressed teacher who stayed behind at the whole school for Christmas. I don't know where my brother was, but that's where I spent And a tragic Christmas when I was six, seven or eight. Actually, no, I would be six or seven. I think it was probably when I was seven.
[4:58] So food was scarce and we had, you know, slop. You know, we had soups that were tinned and bad and we had endless amounts. Well, not endless amounts, significant amounts of like this white gooey bread. And there were meat shortages and it was tough. I was hungry. Boarding school and thirsty too water was scarce you get these little plastic cups and you could only get you could drink it quickly which is small cup and there were no drinking fountains you could drink it quickly or you could drink it slowly if you drank it quickly you'd have to line up and go get more water from a big container but there wasn't enough for everyone to have second helpings so it was always your choice do you drink quickly and slake your thirst or do you sip and get more water, but it's never really satisfying. So that was not ideal. And then, of course, when it came to Canada when I was 11, it was not that long afterwards that my mother started going around the bend, wouldn't get out of bed, ended up in an asylum. And, you know, we were getting all these eviction notices. And I really thought we were going to be homeless. I really thought, Well, the Wii, my mother and I. My brother was back in England for some years. So, yeah, just this kind of food insecurity.
[6:17] And this continued, actually, I should say, there was a break from it when I had an expense account for groceries, when I worked up north for a year and a half, gold panning, prospecting, all the stuff I've talked about. But I was also burning huge amounts of calories doing a lot of that work. It's a lot of hard, manual, difficult, dangerous, outdoor, frozen temperature labor.
[6:39] So I had enough food, but I certainly didn't gain weight because I was exercising all day, basically, for the manual labor. And then I was broke in college and had to sort of skimp and save. I remember a rare treat for me was a pita from a Greek restaurant. I remember being $2.75. And I would hoard these advertisements from the local school newspaper, which was you'd go to Subway and get a two-for-one deal. And if you got a big, you could ask for extra meat back then, they wouldn't charge you. You got a big sub, I would get two of them for six bucks and be able to get four dinners out of it you know cut them in half and all of that so yeah there was just a lot of a lot of scrimping and and all of that and then you know once I got a job then things got better really for the first quarter century of my life there were significant periods of food insecurity and so I'm sort of thinking okay well why is it difficult to drop this last 10 to 15. I say 10. Let's say 10. Why does it feel so difficult? I feel almost like some, not quite panic, but just nervousness about dropping it. And I mean, obviously, I'm sure you figured it out, though, from the inside. It's sometimes a little trickier. So...
[8:02] What is there, is it 3,500? I think it's 3,500 calories, give or take, for a pound, right? A pound of fat contains 3,500 calories, something like that. So 10 pounds is 35,000 calories, right? So 35,000 calories, let's say you're expending, I don't know, a little under 2,000 calories a day, that's 20 days right so and i remember the story of this guy i think he was scottish he dropped a huge amount of weight 100 150 pounds or something and he just didn't eat for like a year and he had blood work and he took supplements and so on but he seemed to be relatively okay so i think for me, the last little bit of weight that i'd like to drop is tough because my body's instinct based upon, because I evolved with this sort of, or grew up with this sort of food insecurity, it is to hold on to that for emergencies, right? Hold on to like, you know, 10, 15, 20 days worth of food for emergencies.
[9:11] And of course, for cushioning all my internal organs, perhaps a.
[9:19] It's really about having a sort of trust and faith in the future that is my big challenge to have. And it sort of reminds me of, of course, I know a fair amount about manufacturing because I sold my software for many years into giant manufacturing plants. And I remember a guy, I think this came out in the 80s and 90s, but he was telling me about the JIT, just in time, just in time manufacturing. So it used to be you'd get all these parts, you'd have these giant warehouses to store all these parts, and then you'd bring the parts in to manufacture the stuff. And he said, well, you just changed to the point where everybody wanted to save money on these giant warehouses to store all the parts. So they said it kind of came to like you're building a car, you need the wheel, you reach out and the steering wheel just kind of materializes in your hand and then you bolt it in. and you don't store anything. It's this conveyor belt. And of course, it's much more complicated and much more, all the moving parts have to work together for just-in-time manufacturing to work. It's really stressful.
[10:24] And he'd say, there's some manufacturer and you're supposed to deliver the part. And it's like, I need the part at three o'clock on Thursday, not 2.55, not 3.05. And if it's not there at three o'clock, just when I reach out my hand, I'm going to sue you. Like he that it was really, really tough to change. So that just-in-time manufacturing is not storing the materials, right? Not storing the energy in my body for emergencies.
[10:51] And it's kind of like believing that you don't need extra food for winter. You know, that's a bad thing. It's this uneasy feeling. I think particularly sort of the East Asians, North Europeans, and so on, to deal with this horrible winter. And so because you need to, when you're not a hunter-gatherer and you're a farmer, you need to make sure you have enough food for the winter and you feel kind of uneasy about it. Oh, do I have enough? Let me go double check. Now, once you feel you have enough, then you can relax, right? And it's not something usually that you could just will or not will. You can't just, oh, I'll be fine, you know, grasshopper, the ant style, the grasshopper's like, oh, I'll be fine. So if you feel like, I don't know, if you feel like, oh, do I have enough money to retire on? Am I going to be okay for retirement? Well, you're kind of uneasy.
[11:45] And you can't just wave that away. It's sort of an autonomous nervous system process. Because, of course, if people felt, oh, maybe I don't have enough food for the winter, and they didn't have enough food for the winter because they were able to suppress that uneasiness, just, oh, it'll be fine. We'll figure it out. We'll find a way. Well, those people tended not to survive, at least not survive at as high a rate as those who could not turn off their uneasiness about not having enough food for winter until they actually determined and were sure that they had enough food for winter, right? And it's a it's an aristotelian mean you don't want to store too much food for the winter because then people are going to come and take your food and you've also expended too much energy to get food that is in excess of what you need so to go down to a lean body mass, is, for me, like not having enough food for the winter.
[12:49] And it makes me uneasy. Now, if you're not a farmer, let's say you're a hunter-gatherer, well, with a hunter-gatherer, your food is uncertain. You don't know if you're going to find food. You don't know if animals are going to land in your trap. You don't know if you're going to be able to track effectively and fast enough to get your food. And so what you do is you want to keep a little bit of extra weight. When you bring down your deer, you gorge on the deer. You like stuff yourself to the bursting because you don't know exactly when you're going to get food again. And you need to have enough strength to hunt.
[13:29] So, you know, let's say that it takes, I don't know, 1,500 calories to hunt, right? Let's say it's 1,500 calories to hunt, okay? So let's say you got 10 pounds extra, right? So you've got your 35,000 calories, and you've got 1,500 calories to hunt. So you have 23 hunts give or take right let's just say 20 hunts right so you got 10 pounds you got 10 you got 20 hunts in you now in 20 hunts you should be able to replenish but if you don't have if you're if you're kind of lean then maybe you only have five or ten hunts instead of 20.
[14:16] Right so the weight that i carry uh is it's obviously not massively excessive for anything like that i can still you know hike 25 000 steps uh i can rock climb i can tree climb or the treetop trekking i i just just done last week i did two hours straight of pick a ball so i'm able to move fine and all of that so gauging that what i think is that okay this is enough for me to hunt effectively and also i'm carrying a little bit of extra so that if i need to hunt when i've had some unsuccessful hunts, well, I can make it. And of course, the same thing is the case in the winter, right? People tend to run out of food late in the winter, which is one of the reasons why Lent and sort of the Christian Ramadan is late in the winter. And so if you've kind of got to make it for 10 or 20 days until food comes or hunting comes back, you know, if you have an extra 10 pounds, then you have 35,000 calories stored that you can draw on in an emergency.
[15:28] And of course, when we evolved, there were endless amounts of emergencies. I mean, you also might be ostracized and have to figure out how to survive on your own, at least for a time, or at least until you joined another tribe. You also might be thrown in prison and you know of course prison was really terrible back in the day and if you had any extra weight you'd probably be okay for a little bit longer and so on right or your crops could fail and lord knows you've got to pick up the spear and go hunting or something and you've got to figure that out so there's a buffer right so extra weight is a buffer and of course that's why we evolved, to gain extra weight. Because so much of our evolution was sort of feast or famine.
[16:13] So it's almost like an existential thing where I have to say, because, you know, the first 25 years of my life, that's almost half my life. And of course, it's the first impressions of life. And I remember being at a friend of mine's birthday party when I was maybe 14 or 15, maybe 14. A friend of mine's birthday party, it was at McDonald's. And of course, the kids gorged themselves. And at the end of it, because I'm never full, like I can always keep eating. I'm never full. Even when I go to a buffet, like very rarely, I go to a buffet maybe once a year. And I don't experiment with this anymore. But in the past, I used to be like, I'm just going to eat till I'm full. And I'm like, nope, I'm not full. I'm still not full. I don't have that satiety thing, which of course is part of the sort of hunter-gatherer in constant food thing. You don't get full because you should eat to excess because you never know where your next meal is going to come from.
[17:11] And I remember being at this McDonald's birthday party and everybody had kids that all gorged themselves we played our games they'd been a clown or something like that and then the mom was like okay is everybody full and i put up my hand i'm like i could do a fish fillet because i could eat another fish fillet and when people would order pizza when we'd be playing dungeons and dragons i'd have to like will myself back from taking more than my share because i just can eat now i mean i know that i exercise and all of that but this was before i really got well no i was still playing a lot of tennis back then but.
[17:45] So so it's it's a thing where i have to move my mind from a situation of potential emergency and scarcity which conditioned the first you know half of my life to date almost and go to a certainty so, dropping the weight is moving from food insecurity to food security that i can be just in time i need calories i'll get calories right because that's that's the big issue right with with weight is people tend to be overweight, because if they need calories, they have calories. You know, it's kind of like when you have kids and your kids are engaged in sort of social activities and running around sports and stuff like that. You know, the moms are always like, well, you've been playing for 40 minutes, you know, here's a tray of cut up fruit. It's like, they'll be fine. They don't need to eat every 40 minutes. It's crazy. But and of course yeah it's uh you know we were always shopping for the dented cans and you know just no real fresh food and and all of that and english food too like and i had the combination of english grocery stores and a german cook which is really about the worst kind of prison slop that you can summon on this plane outside of hell sort of hades maybe maybe uh limbo but not not heaven for sure.
[19:09] So, I need to be like, okay, if I slim down even more, then I have no stores. I have no fridge. I have no freezer. I have no ass store. You know, you store food. And so, basically, your ass becomes a grocery store. Hey, you need something? Just reach behind you and scrape out some flesh and you've got a nice butt burger, right? That's what your body's kind of doing with this stuff. And so I kind of have to move to this just-in-time thing and this food security thing and adulthood and resources and all of that. FreeDomain.com slash donate for resources if you'd like to help out that food security mindset. But I think that's basically what I need to do where I need to get to with regards to food is to trust that there will be food. Now, of course, you know what's going to happen.
[20:09] I'm going to lose 10 pounds and then the entire food chain is going to collapse.
[20:13] Good thing I waited till now. But I think that's the challenge is to...
[20:21] Because I think I eat in a sort of preventative fashion sometimes. Like I noticed last night, I had a piece of bread and butter before I went to bed. Obviously not an ideal time to eat. And that's because there are times where I wake up and I'm hungry. And then I can't get back to sleep because I'm hungry. i kind of have to get up and make myself some food and then go back to bed now how often does this happen i don't know it's not super often but oh what if i do right because you know losing some time at night from your sleep is not ideal but i'm like oh what if you know and again that's sort of scarcity mindset and so that's what i'm working with i think i think it's going to work I'll, you know, if you guys are at all interested, I don't know if this is all just personal, mukbang stuff, but if you are interested, I can sort of keep you posted about that. But that for me is the challenge with these last little bit. Again, the first 30 pounds, you know, kind of came off. I didn't even really notice it.
[21:21] But these last 10, oof, because i want to be a skinny immortal ghoul uh undead philosopher guy philosophizing into his 90s and so on and i you know sort of do feel i have this collective treasure of a brain that i want to maintain for the sake of you know human progress and virtues but i think that's the.
[21:49] From scarcity to the belief in abundance, which is certainly not programmed into my body or my mindset. And that's a real challenge, but I think I may have identified why this last thing is so challenging. All right. So, yeah, those are my thoughts on that. If you have questions, comments on this or any other topic, I am thrilled and happy to hear what you have to say. And I thought it would be interesting because I know a lot of people have some challenges major or minor with weight.
[22:23] All right Mr. Thomas if you wanted to unmute I'm all ears my friend.
[22:33] Can you hear me?
[22:34] Yes.
[22:36] Hello?
[22:37] Yes go ahead.
[22:41] Yeah I've often had the same trouble with recognizing my hugger signals and knowing that I'm full. Sometimes I wonder if it was from the fact that I was bottle fed as a baby instead of breastfed.
[22:56] Interesting. Interesting. Do you know if there's any studies on that? Sorry, go ahead.
[23:02] Were you breastfed?
[23:05] I don't know for sure, but I think so. I think I was because my mother did stay home with me. My father was working on his PhD and my mother was helping him out with that. And, well, let's see. No, no, because that was okay. So my brother was born in South Africa, but I was born in Ireland. My parents split up shortly after. You know what? I don't think I was. Maybe not. Sorry, just going back on the family history here. My mother was hospitalized after I was born with significant depression, obviously very significant, hospitalized back in the 60s. So I would imagine not. Yeah, I was certainly no wet nurse or anything. So I could very well have been bottle fed. Yeah, that might have something to do with it. I think that would indicate some kind of emergency, right? So whatever causes your body to think there are selected chaos factors around and not being breastfed might be one of those. Maybe it just has that. I mean, I remember going to Ponderosa, Ponderosa Steakhouse back in the day, and it was the first time I was at any kind of buffet ever. And I just, I drove through that thing like an infinite Pac-Man. Sorry, if you had any other thoughts, I'm happy to hear.
[24:18] Yeah, I got another thing to add. My wife was breastfed, and what I used to think of as comfort food, like pizza rolls and very greasy soybean oil type stuff, she was always disgusted by and still remains disgusted by that sort of stuff. And given what formula was made out of, I wonder if that isn't part of it.
[24:39] Oh, that's more and more artificial and chemical. I remember when I was very little, we used to get milk bottles delivered to the apartment. And I remember I used to take a pin and I used to pop a pin in the top of the tinfoil on the milk bottle top. And then I would suckle it like it was a breast. So I would imagine that I was not breastfed, at least not very much, given that that was my impulse when I was very young, was to create a sort of artificial breast out of a milk bottle, complete with like tiny nipple and sucking and all of that. So, yeah, I would imagine that I was not complete in that area. So that's interesting. So because of the sort of artificial nature of the breast of the formula, you think that you have more of an affinity for more processed foods. Is that right?
[25:31] Oh, certainly.
[25:33] Wow.
[25:33] I actually like to drink milk growing up, but I got to drink raw milk recently. And I wonder if that's not like an off-ramp, you know, like a way to get to a more healthy diet.
[25:44] Oh, yeah. The milk from the cow is staggeringly good. Yeah, it's staggeringly good. So yeah, I'm with you on that. That's some tasty stuff. And have you had sort of weight issues or what's your current situation that way?
[26:02] I got overweight when I was in college. I was up to almost 200 pounds and I realized I needed to do something. So I did the keto diet, got down to 170 and I've been 170, 165 since then.
[26:16] And how long has that been?
[26:20] Four years now.
[26:21] Okay well that's good good for you and how tall are you.
[26:23] Uh i'm 5 10.
[26:25] Okay all right man that seems like a that seems like a good weight and how was it for you dropping that weight well you were just returning to a former state though right um.
[26:38] Yeah well there's even worse because i was a very fit before that i would i played soccer in high school i was a 5 9 and 150 50 before I gained all that weight in college.
[26:53] Ah, okay. Wait, how did you get to 5'10"?
[26:58] It's just something in my genetics.
[26:59] Scout fat. Everyone in my family has grown. Got it. It all piles on the top.
[27:04] Everyone's growing a couple inches in adulthood.
[27:06] Right. All my fat is on the bottom of my feet and the top of my scalp. It means that I can rob a bank and go on a diet and they can't find me because I dissolve. Oh, that's interesting. Because, yeah, it's interesting. it would be interesting to know if there are studies that show that being breastfed protects against i mean i think being breastfed protects against just about every bad thing in the known universe but it would be interesting to see if it also protects against obesity, interesting.
[27:37] I think it would oh that was all my thoughts.
[27:40] I appreciate that thank you thank you and you know we can have a long show short show it's totally up to you if anybody else has any thoughts or questions or issues, I'm happy to hear. Let me get my, I now need two pairs of glasses, right? Distance and close up. And I will not bifocal. Bifocal is, I'm not that old yet. I mean, I know I am, but I shouldn't, it doesn't feel that way.
[28:13] All right. Well, yeah. Okay. We'll just keep it as a short show today. I do appreciate people's thoughts.
[28:18] If you have these kinds of thoughts or you have any particularly good ways to approach this uh if you could help me with these last 10 uh i would really really appreciate that that would be that would be great i'd be curious because i was never overweight as a child and yeah i wasn't particularly overweight uh as a as a teenager um no because i was doing like i was geez i was cross-country team i was uh yeah i was cross-country running team i was a tennis team i was a water polo uh team swim team so no i was pretty pretty fit but for me yeah definitely around puberty I felt a heavier and then I started to solve that. And, um, yeah, then I certainly gained some weight after getting married, which is very unfair and not great for my wife, which was not ideal. So, but solved that many, many years ago. All right. Yeah. So if you have any, any sort of thoughts about this, uh, you can post where this gets posted. I would really, really appreciate that. And I really do appreciate everyone's time today. Have yourself a beautiful, wonderful afternoon. Lots of love from up here. Take care, my friends. I'll talk to you soon.
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