Friday 14 October 2005

Pic of the day: Hungry as a wolf, here represented by the excessively cute and hysterically funny anime Damekko Doubutsu.

Hungry wolf inside

Well, it is certainly not Intel inside, and you have to wonder about the intelligence as well. But let us take it from the start.

After this spring and my mysterious virus infection, I could only eat only 2-3 cups for breakfast. (Breakfast and lunch were my main meals, since I had some acid reflux if I ate too close to bedtime.) I would eat one cup of yogurt at home, then at work one cup of caramel pudding (milk- based dessert) and a cup of chocolate milk. (Or two of one and none of the other.) Then I would wait for lunch to eat my next two cups, otherwise I would get sick as a dog.

Over summer and fall I have gradually improved so I now routinely eat 3 cups of milk products at work, and even a teaspoon of cod liver oil. Pure fat, but I seem able to eat a few grams of fat every six hours or so. Only the quantity counts, not the concentration. Don't worry, I am not growing fat. I keep shrinking, which is probably why my body has adapted to a higher food intake. But today I overdid myself.

Over the course of roughly three hours, I ate more than a liter of food. (That's a quarter of a gallon, I believe.) I felt fine and didn't think about it till the very end. Then suddenly I felt stuffed to near bursting, a rather unpleasant sensation. At this point I rather regretted my gluttony and pondered the fact that I was so easily carried away by my base instincts.

***

This, I thought, must be how women feel. As we know, most women are roughly as drawn to food as men are to sex, which is quite a bit. This is evident from the plethora of literature (not least magazines) aimed at the two population groups. The merciless laws of natural selection would have weeded out those magazines that got their priorities wrong. And the most successful survivors are those that present mouth-watering food (and subsequent miracle diets) to the female audience and mouth- watering women (and various "enhancers) to the male.

Of course, sufficient body fat is actually important to female reproduction. For men it is not, since we contribute virtually nothing to the body mass of the next generation. Therefore food is not sexy to us, which it literally is to women (in addition to its obvious survival value, which should be roughly the same for both sexes).

It is the survival part that seems to have kicked in now in me. It seems I have shed another two pounds over the last week again, for some unknown reason. I still have enough fat for a few weeks of starvation, or a few months of gradual weight loss like this. But I keep sliding, and evidently the ape brain has received reports from the fat depots about the recent withdrawals. While ordering my appetite (ape-tite?) to go through the roof, it may have forgotten to check with the stomach whether I could actually eat that much...

Even "intelligent design" has its limitations perhaps? Or as the ancient saying goes: "Against stupidity, even the gods fight in vain."