> "So if we burn more of our energy every day on physical activity, on exercise, after a while our bodies will adjust and spend less energy on the other tasks that we sort of don't notice going on in the background," Pontzer says.

I also think this is true related to food. Your body adjusts its metabolism based on the amount of food you eat as long as it's not chronic. That's why you can have competitive eaters that can eat a weeks worth of food and not be overweight. Spikiness and variability are probably good for you. Its funny that the Bryan Johnson types who closely control every calorie in their body have such a bad reaction to any variability. I don't know if its him, but I heard someone not be able to sleep and their levels got all messed up from one sweet. And their conclusion was sweets are so bad for you, rather than you're building your body to be too fragile to shocks.

The interesting thing is when this breaks down. Obviously if you eat a weeks worth of food every day for a sustained period of time, you will start to gain weight. Or if you run 12 miles every day, you will be in such a deficit that it won't be possible to lower your metabolism enough. Outside of the extremes, I think it's a cliff, where you have to have some kind of shock for some period of time for your body to react.

> That's why you can have competitive eaters that can eat a weeks worth of food and not be overweight.

Nope, they do gain weight, or avoid gaining weight by counting calories [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/SVS0ioOdfuE?t=225

> The interesting thing is when this breaks down. Obviously if you eat a weeks worth of food every day for a sustained period of time, you will start to gain weight. Or if you run 12 miles every day, you will be in such a deficit that it won't be possible to lower your metabolism enough. Outside of the extremes, I think it's a cliff, where you have to have some kind of shock for some period of time for your body to react.

Objectively, I don't think this is accurate.

Most people who are overweight got that way slowly.

Dr Mike[1]'s theory is that modern processed food is to blame - not because it's unhealthy, but because it's too tasty. Companies that make food are in an evolutionary arms race with other companies to get consumers to choose their products. And one of the best ways to do that is to make the food as tasty as possible.

Another things many companies probably try to optimize their food for is low satiety[2]. That way consumers consume, and therefore buy, more of their products.

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1. From Renaissance Periodization

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiety_value

Interesting - training for spikiness/variability is a positive view, e.g. embrace the lack of occasional sleep, it trains you to be more resilient.

Depends on the goal is. If you life is full of shocks then build for shocks. If you life is not build for shocks it makes sense to optimize for your existence. You certainly don't want to overfit the model as you are describing but you don't want to build a life around expecting shocks when none arrive. As with all things, it is a balance.

Competitive eaters throw their food up and keep it secret as "I'm just calorie counting" sounds a lot better than "I pretty much have an eating disorder". You can't eat large portions once a week and still train your stomach to stretch enough to eat those gargantuan amounts of food that they need to perform.