famine: it's a bad thing

My unifying theory of eating, disordered eating, weight dysregulation, and eating disorders: famine defense. I am not alone in this, and the numbers are growing. Some feel it doesn't matter "why" a medical disorder arises and survives, but for me the famine defense helps me organize these disparate issues; I do not struggle to reconcile these many issues and don't feel they pull against one another.

Assuming you are a fan of evolution -- and not all are -- why would humans have such a complex and multi-faceted relationship with feeding ourselves if not for survival of one's genes through famine? If finding food was as simple as reaching up and having it, grazing through a field of adequate nourishment, our hunger drives would be pretty simple. Yet we have terribly complex and multifaceted systems to help us seek, choose, refuse, and feel sated by food. Only one system has to go down to make the others go awry as well.

Intermittent famine is the threat that humans have faced and survived most often, and we are well-adapted to it. We're not all that adapted to turning down food, and I have no doubt any more that the turning down of food opportunities is doing serious harm

• It sets up moral and anxiety-based relationships with foodstuffs: we have good foods and bad foods to choose from, and our morality and intellect are judged by those choices.
• It creates "dieting," an artificial and unhealthy intermittent famine. This self-imposed famine condition sets  us up for internal forces built to fight a lack of food: compulsive food-seeking, a melting of social connections, a messianic value to restriction.
• For some it breaks the development of normal social eating and intuitive feeding behaviors.
• Others suffer by setting off a genetic cascade of thoughts and behaviors that make normal eating nearly impossible.... something we now call an eating disorder.