[Chapter 11] The Farmer

Let’s erase everything we know and start from scratch

Go with me for a second.

Imagine your body is a one-acre field. Perhaps it’s situated in a meadow, with water flowing through it, along with vegetation and fauna.

We can think of the streams and ponds and puddles of water as like the body’s fat stores. Rain and other nutrients are like your diet. They flow into and out of your property.

You, the Farmer, have limited powers to cultivate your landscape. You can plant crops or let things go to seed. You can irrigate your fields. Put up fences to keep animals out. Light fires. Plant flowers. Litter trash. Let nature run wild. Build structures. A lot is up to you as the Farmer, just as a lot of your health is up to you.

Nevertheless, most of what happens on your land is outside the Farmer’s control, just as most of what goes on inside your body is. Your plot of land is arbitrary—you didn’t get to choose it. Maybe it’s sandy and difficult to grow plants in. Maybe it’s naturally lush. Maybe it’s swampy with a propensity to harbor a lot of water. Maybe it’s flat. Maybe it’s craggy and hilly. Maybe it’s situated in a beautiful valley. Or in the Arctic, or in the desert. Just like people are diverse, genetically, and they are born into diverse environments.

Okay, you get the point. But why do this? What does this model give us?

One word: TOPOGRAPHY.

The shape of the landscape—its crags, its divots, its plains and so forth—determine to a profound extent how water (i.e. fat) and other elements will array on your property.

We don’t just care about how much water (“calorie quantity”) flows into and out of your field. Nor do we just care about what type of water (“calorie quality”) rains down on your field. Those elements are important, certainly. Without rain or nutrients, your field will dry up and die. Just like you will die without sustenance. And if the food you eat is of terrible quality—Fritos and Coke, for instance—that’s kind of like watering your field with toxic sludge. Nothing good will grow from that.

But what makes a field flourish—or shrivel? What makes it hold onto water or let it flow through? The shape of farm, the type of soil, the soil compaction, and other factors related to the landscape itself.

Let’s bring it back to the 3 ideas we just discussed:

· CICO. This model is concerned exclusively with the quantity of water that flows in and out of your field. Again, “quantity of water” in some broad sense matters. You need water for life. But knowing the water flux doesn’t tell you much about the health of the land, nor does it help you fix a field that’s all busted up.

· The neuroendocrine model. This Farmer model is in many ways just a visual metaphor for this. “What counts are all the factors that make your field attract and hold onto its water.” Ideally, you want not too much water, not too little water; and you want to fix defects in the landscape in order to nourish the perfect field.

· Carbs-Insulin. The CIH is harder to stuff into the Farmer model in a simple way. Maybe it’s something like this. Eating too many carbs/sugars is like watering your field with an erosive compound that eats into the bedrock. Over years of doing this, you create divots throughout the field, where there once were none. These pool with water. So now your field is “fatter.” This erosion makes it harder for healthy vegetation to grow; so the area becomes fetid and buggy and swampy. Maybe in our model, this is the equivalent of developing diabetes. (When you become obese, you often develop other health problems as well.) By contrast, if you fix your diet—by lowering insulin via lower carbs, for instance—you stop eroding your field. It can recover. Maybe some (but not necessarily all) of the pits fill in. Maybe the natural vegetation and fauna return.

Please bear with me—this model is a work in progress. But as my business coach advised: anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly at first. So goes this model.

[NOTE: the discussion that follows over the next few posts would probably benefit from explanations that are based on what we understand about neuro-endocrine regulation of fat cells: that the fat storage in these syndromes is dependent on hormonal dysregulation, the nervous system’s independent stimulus of lipolysis, and the underlying hormonal milieu. In other words, we can understand these observations by thinking in terms of the regulation of what makes fat cells fat on the local level, the central nervous system, hormonal balance, etc.

And so perhaps the value of the farming metaphor is that it gives us all these different variables to think about—whether the soil in any one spot is properly watered, or water-logged—and they’re independent of the water in and out.]

All that said!—I do feel confident that a focus on “topography” can solve many puzzles in this field.

Other random thoughts to stir this pot:

· Instead of an erosive force, insulin could be viewed as a dam:

o High insulin = Water gets trapped in artificial reservoirs, preventing drainage.

o Low insulin = The dam breaks, allowing water to flow naturally out of fat stores.

o This aligns with how insulin regulates lipolysis in the real world.

· Specific landforms could represent key metabolic concepts:

o Places where fat tends to collect = Ponds/swamps

o Insulin resistance = Clogged irrigation channels

o Metabolic flexibility = Well-drained land with diverse plant life

o Poor diet/lifestyle = Soil depletion, weathering, etc

· Farmer interventions as metaphors for fat loss strategies:

o Tilling the soil → Exercise (breaking up metabolic stagnation)

o Rotating crops → Dietary variation

o Building better drainage → Fasting/keto (reducing insulin, allowing fat release)

o Planting crops → Diversifying the gut microbiome

Etc. You can hopefully grok how this idea can be developed out.

In any event, let’s revisit the 7 observations we used to challenge the CICO and see whether the Farmer can make better sense of them…