On Tuesday, March 16, 2004, at 12:42  PM, Adrienne Smith wrote:

> I also was thinking that yo-yo dieting is unnatural.

Actually, I suspect that yo-yo dieting is pretty natural. Food
availability swings seasonally, and different kinds of foods are there
at different seasons. Also, different species have cycles through the
years. It is common for fruit trees all to have very few fruits one
year, then all have heavy fruit the next, for example.

  For "natural humans" getting fat wouldn't be a problem anyway. Very
few predators eat people anyway, so even very fat people have little to
fear from predators. Besides, we are such slow runners from the tiger's
point of view, that our leanest, fastest runners might as well be
standing still :-) Getting fat is just one more way to store up energy
for hard times. Our modern bias against fat has nothing to do with
nature.