The Necessity of Stress, Part 2

It’s pretty easy to get black pilled today and lose hope. Life gets tough, things spiral out of your own control, and if you are not properly acclimated to stress, it can hit you hard. With moderate and regularly controlled stress, our bodies learn to better process it.

There is genetic hardwiring within you that will react to stress. Certain functions will remain dormant until activated by environmental stimuli. Intermittent fasting has been quickly picked up by several prominent individuals and studies have started hailing it as the hippest new diet trend. The benefits, other than unintentionally lowering most people’s calorie intake, have basically revolved around body recomposition. Your body reacts to periods of starvation by breaking down its own fat and using that as energy in the absence of food. Other benefits are thought to be healthier and longer lives, although this science is in its infancy.

The idea behind this is that your body goes into survival mode, activating dormant parts of yourself for quicker recovery from danger. While negligible in the short term, there is also science backing up the benefits of saunas, cold showers, and exercise. All of these do their part in simulating the stresses we’ve erased with consumer conveniences. We once ran and fought, overheated and froze, and experienced periods of time in which you temporarily starved in the absence of prepared food. In the absence of those stresses, your body goes screwy. 

When you are constantly on the feed, your body, as previously mentioned, will store that excess as fat. This is an evolutionary adaptation that would allow our ancestors to bulk up in preparation for times of hardship. Pretty useless when your body will never see that hardship. Fat cells in the body, aside from really adding some curves to those yoga pants, are good at screwing up your body’s hormone production. Cortisol, especially, is the stress hormone. Excess fat will produce excess cortisol and will make you feel down. On a longer time scale, this will almost inevitably lead to depression, and other medical complications. Since weight gain is a natural phenomenon in the body and hormone fluctuation is a result of the imbalanced tissues of the newer, heavier frame, the traditional cure for weight related depression would’ve been to lose the weight. Treat the cause, not the side effect.

“Not so fast there, you bigoted fat shamer. We’ve got pills that can fix the imbalance, so now we can truly be healthy at every size.”

Jabba the Slut

Doctors are quick today to peddle off antidepressants for a range of issues, including obesity related depression. Unfortunately, our bodies are robust and adaptable, so the synthetic feel good hormones are finicky at best. Often times, the body will react to the influx of antidepressants by shutting down its own production center, leading to dependence. In addition to your new found dependence, dosing is tricky, and your body can quickly develop tolerance to the foreign born substances (bigoted body nationalism fighting of cheap pill migrants). There are issues out there that require medication to properly treat them, but obesity-related depression is not one of them. Treat obesity’s cause, not its consequences. 

Religion is something we, as modern people, have decided is unnecessary. Godless and rootless, we stumble from place to place consuming without reason. Finding religion, regardless of how healthy you think you are, is essential to becoming a whole and healthy person. As I’ve previously said, religious people end up living longer. This is obvious and with a number of explanations, and I believe the best of those is that it gives your life meaning. You have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Life is no longer a blip between birth and death, but a pit stop on the way to salvation. Do not overlook the mental benefits of going to church and experiencing fellowship with your fellow man. 

Diet and exercise are time honored ways to control weight, and when made into routine, they can lead to happier and healthier people. Exercise has been found, as effective, if not more effective than prescription antidepressants, and have a plethora of other benefits without the side effects. Lift some weights, eat healthy foods, and watch how things fall into place. Religion, too, can help us find a reason to be healthy where once there may not have been. It’s inevitable that we all have faults in life that we can seek to correct. Some things are set in place; fixed, preset things we’d like to fix, but are basically set in stone. That makes it all the more important to correct the things that we have the power to change. If you want to boost your own confidence and become a pillar upon which others can rely, or maybe even just find a spouse, start with getting fit and healthy. I have personally seen how diet and fitness can lead to positive change, not only to yourself, but those around you. 

Get healthy, and get on the path to becoming a whole person. Experience stress, so that the good times mean something. Eat healthy food, and cast off the sluggishness brought on by junk food. Find meaning and reason to get out of bed in the morning, and never make the mistake of succumbing to decadence and too much comfort.