Your Body is a Miracle of Adaptability

Those of us who’ve gone 100 percent raw eventually start to look at others in disbelief: How can these people, we wonder, consume steak, pizza and ice cream, and still live? We know we’d be miserable if we partook of even a morsel of those foods. The same thing will eventually happen with the amount of food you eat.

Our body can adjust to widely ranging circumstances. Just as you will become used to colder temperatures by the end of winter, your body can learn not to ask for more food after a certain time of the day.

Acclimation

We’ll use the term acclimation—not, for technical biological reasons, adaptation—for these automatic physiological adjustments during a person’s life. Acclimation occurs in a short time—weeks or months—within an organism’s lifetime. Organisms adjust their morphological, behavioral, physical, or biochemical traits in response to the environmental changes they face.

When a person moves to high altitudes, breathing and physical exertion become difficult. But after spending time in these conditions, his or her body will acclimate to the pressure by increasing production of red blood corpuscles. The body is compensating for the reduced partial pressure of oxygen. Acclimation will occur with time as respiratory and cardio-vascular processes become more efficient.

Results of Caloric Reduction

What happens when you reduce your caloric intake? Your metabolic rate slows—a good anti-aging sign. Body temperature drops at least 1 degree—another good sign (see Cool Way to Longevity). How does your body respond to not having cooked food? Sadly, no one has yet performed a proper clinical research study on this question. All we have, therefore, are general and anecdotal descriptions of what happens when the body is “deprived” of cooked food. Certain enzymes, we know, stop being produced. Blood pressure drops. Blood sugar level drops. Less glucose will be circulating in your blood. Again, all signs of good health.

My own anecdotal evidence … What happened to my body? It learned not to eat at night. This happened gradually as I made my last meal of the day earlier and earlier. To allow my body to acclimate, I raised the bar so slowly that my body barely noticed when it arrived at Quantum Eating with the last meal consumed at 2 pm. This regimen will inevitably reduce your caloric intake because your stomach has time to shrink before you begin eating the next day’s breakfast.