This is Why You're Fat
I almost forgot what epigenetics was. Just kidding. But I hadn’t talked about it in what feels like years and somehow this week I’ve had conversations about it several times already.
Epigenetics: best analogy that I’ve heard is that genetics loads the gun but epigenetics fires it. Your genetics make you more or less likely to experience x, y, or z but your environment and inputs change the expression of your genes aka whether those possibilities happen or not. I disagree with a lot of what people have lazily or ignorantly accepted as genetics - it has become a convenient excuse not to try to change - but the advent of epigenetics into (more) common lingo has given many hope and begun to bridge the gap of understanding that even your DNA expression changes throughout your life. At every level, to varying degrees, you change. Remember:
Your body is changing every minute as long as you’re alive.
Your body reflects what you actually do and how you experience it, not what you think or wish you do.
Your body is always looking out for you.
While you may have cancer run in the family, it’s more likely that you treat your body and your traumas the same way your parents did, and your body is reacting accordingly. You may have bunions “run in the family”, but as Our Esteemed Biomechanical Goddess Katy Bowman taught us, it’s more likely you just copied the way your mom stands and walks and that’s what pushed your big toe in.
The point is that you have a lot more say than your excuses lead you to believe. And if a doctor has ever told you that “you just have to live with it” you’d better run away and never return, because that doctor doesn’t understand or know or trust that your cells are always changing. Impermanence is real.
I want to return to #3, however, because this blew my friend’s mind. If your grandmother lived through a famine, you’re more likely to be fat. Why? Because your body is smart as shit, and so was your grandma. She wanted her progeny to SURVIVE, and she passed down changes in DNA expression that made it easier for you to put and keep on weight, and you’re probably also shorter.
LEFT TURN TIME:
I was about to write about this idea (italicized, above) that gets thrown around a lot, around the Dutch famine resulting in grandkids who were more likely to be short and easily put on fat, because if you’re in a famine that sounds like a great idea to ensure their survival. I wrote the part above, then stopped to look for an article to cite on the famine studies. I clicked on this one http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2018/05/grandmas-trauma-critical-appraisal-of.html which gave a serious critique of the claims, enough to give me pause, and reminding me that if there’s a stat that’s widely thrown around and cited by the mainstream press that it’s almost less likely for it to be true or for sure settled, often stemming from one or two shoddy places that get jumped upon for political gain and then championed like a dead show pony on a parade float. People like ideas and so when we get to jump on one and it feels good we run with it. And then that idea lives in our brains without knowing that the original experiment was poorly designed, or that data is constantly evolving, and that ten years from now we’re operating from it as if it were true regardless of what is going on now.
So, maybe we can return to the idea of valuing what we see and experience with our own eyes above all. That coming to our own conclusions is the most reliable form of research. That we can notice how we look or act like our parents and grandparents (if we know them) and then see how many choices we make mirror their behavior. That getting to know our parents and grandparents might be the best research of all, if possible. From there, we can slowly begin to make new choices, forge our own paths, and honor the ones they honed before. And hey, if we do look like them a lot in bone structure or other things that may be harder to change, then maybe there is something to this whole genetics thing. (Of course there is - but how much?). Even your facial structure has more to do with nutrition and use than genetics. (My fav account for how you can adjust your health and looks is here. Also see Weston A. Price or Dr. Steven Lin’s book The Dental Diet, which draws mostly from finding a Weston A. Price book in a hostel during a time of disillusionment for Dr. Lin)
I recently talked to one of Vern’s other caregivers about how much strife existed between her and her abusive mother until she learned that the abuse her mother had experienced from her mom vastly exceeded anything she got. The mothering she got was an improvement from someone who tried to do better. Mindblowing.
So let’s get back to focusing on what we’re doing, how plastic we are, and how much potential we have.
Do this to orient the fuck outta your life, 4x:
Write out a vision of the future you want, that you feel an emotional tie to, that exists long after you die. What vision can you create that you would be proud to be a part of?
If you created a funnel backwards from that future, what actions might you do this week, this month, or this year to contribute to its creation? Write them down.
Repeat exercise weekly for 4 weeks to sand it out, restructure it, and land on a cleaner, clearer representation of the future you can point to and say, “Yeah, I took part in that.”