I heard this saying recently: “Fat is natures organic battery.” I thought this was a smart and pithy way of stating the truth. Fat is stored energy! The total opposite of the bad guy wrap it’s been maligned with, it’s in fact the good guy, when you give your body the right fuel and movement.

If you carry around 30 pounds of fat, that’s 60-90 days without food you could survive when the going gets tough.

Today, we don’t have to worry so much about that, because we have supermarkets. However, when you’re in good health and moving your body regularly, your body doesn’t hoard fat. Your body is very smart.

Think of your gut as your second brain, because it has a crap ton of neurons and itself is extremely smart and makes it’s own decisions seemingly independent of the brain. In fact they are both very connected, but my point is to stress that the gut is not an obedient, brainless slave. It’s more like a high ranking officer under the general, capable of adaptive and logical decision making.

When you go through periods of feasting and shortly thereafter periods of fasting (as we did for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, before farming and industry introduced an age of plenty and accessibility), your body hoards fat during feasting periods so it can survive those fasting times.

The body is a marvel of adaptability and survival. However when you’re forever in a stage of feasting, you have to be careful. You have to manage your intake. But also, thankfully, during feasting, fat turns quickly into energy, because it is smart enough to know it doesn’t need to hoard it! There is a delay period after a fasting period, perhaps some days or a couple weeks (depending on the overall health and fitness of your gut, brain and body, and the length of the fast) where it has to figure this outs.

But before too long it will switch over to the high burn feasting state, provided the calories you input are nutritious and not too voluminous; and in this state, your gut will burn lots of fat and quickly turn it into energy. So the key is NOT to eat much less fat – sure, you can manage it and reduce it during diets – but rather to reduce overall calories for your diet period.

In other words, you don’t have to be so careful in reducing fat, you just have to balance three things: calorie intake, nutrition density and movement/exercise. This is that perfect state between feasting and fasting, ideal for modern life where you’re not fighting against the seasons – not great for those living in Siberia or backwoods cabin life, right for most of us who read blogs.

Less movement makes your body think you’re hibernating. Remember that while human progress is as fast as we can put thought into action, while evolution is only as fast as our cells can divide over many generations; the former is fast over days and months, while the latter is slow over many millennia.

So, try and think like your gut would a hundred thousand years ago: hibernating, scarce food, store fat, survive. It still operates like this today, because evolution is so far behind our social and mental progress.

Less nutrition density means more junk calories turn into low value (aka high volume low energy) fat, and the more of these low value calories with little movement means more high volume (as opposed to density) fat packing.

But if you’re moving regularly and eating the right volume of nutritious foods for the amount your moving (and of course your body size and genetics, but this is secondary to the obvious first two of movement and nutrition density), your body will not store fat, it will burn it for energy!

So don’t focus so much on reducing fat intake. Focus more on these three core things:

1. Movement
2. Nutrition density
3. Total calorie intake

For example, I eat lots of fatty meat, some veggies and a bit of starch (rice, bread) here and there, and exclusively use fat (beef tallow, ghee, bacon fat) for cooking.

At the time of this writing, I am 38 years old, 6’, 155 pounds and a dynamo of energy. I have more energy than I did 7 years ago when I knew comparatively very little about food, fat and nutrition.

Fat is the good guy. Treat your gut and body right, and fat becomes energy within minutes of consumption, and does not hang around at at all.

It’ll take time, research and effort to find the right balance, but once you do, you’re going to actually increase your total long term value because you’re going to live years, possibly even decades longer, your brain will be sharper and more capable of producing higher value output faster, and thus your actions will compound much more quickly by producing more value, energy, happiness and community on a daily basis.

Treat your gut right with good food and good fat, and it’ll reward you!