Part I: AWAKENING - Your Body's Perfect Logic
Chapter 1: The Rational Response [Your current introduction expanded]
Bodies making perfect sense in an irrational world
The office worker example and modern mismatches
What bodies actually expect vs. what they receive
Reframing "disorders" as adaptive responses
Chapter 1: The Rational Body in an Irrational World
The Moment Everything Changed
I was sitting in a classroom full of people all looking to use food to better their health. I remember coming in skeptical—maybe I shouldn't even be here, probably just wasting my time and money. But I listened. I felt myself cracking. Were some of those things I was feeling really due to my food?
I was an engineer with an MBA, a "healthy," motivated, overly-educated 30-year-old American who had everything at my fingertips, always working to keep myself in shape. But I didn't know how to eat. I didn't know what was in my food. And I didn't know how it was affecting my body. Could so many of my physical and emotional pains be preventable things based around food?
Then came the slide that changed everything.
A bowl of spinach we eat today contains about 1/20th (or less) of the nutrients that a bowl used to contain in the 1950s. On one side of the slide was a single bowl that our grandparents used to eat. On the other side were 20 bowls—the amount we would need to eat today to get the same nutrients. With all our modern advancements, we stopped breeding foods for flavor (aka nutrients), instead growing for size, shippability, pest resistance, and color. We have bred out nutrients for pretty, empty, chemical-laden vessels that taste more and more bland every year.
We have to work twice as hard—20 times harder than our grandparents—just to get the same nutrients to build our best selves. We not only need to eat more vegetables than our grandparents, we need to find ones with fewer chemicals, find ones most naturally grown, and pay more for them.
This wasn't just about spinach. This was about everything. And it was the first crack in my understanding of why my perfectly rational body was struggling in what seemed like an irrational world.
Meet Sarah
Sarah sits at her desk at 3:47 PM, fighting the familiar afternoon crash. Her stomach is growling even though she had a "healthy" lunch just two hours ago—a turkey sandwich on whole grain bread, a bag of baked chips, and a diet soda. She's gaining weight despite her best efforts, feels tired most days, and can't seem to think clearly after meals. Her doctor says her blood work is "fine" but suggests she eat less and exercise more.
Sarah thinks something is wrong with her.
She's actually wrong about that. There's nothing wrong with Sarah. There's something wrong with the world she's trying to navigate.
Sarah's body is being perfectly rational. It's responding exactly as it should to the inputs it's receiving. The problem is that those inputs—the food she's eating, the environment she's living in, the advice she's following—are fundamentally mismatched with what her body actually needs.
Sarah's afternoon crash isn't a personal failing. It's her blood sugar spiking and crashing from refined carbohydrates. Her constant hunger isn't lack of willpower—it's her body searching for nutrients that weren't in that processed lunch. Her weight gain isn't about calories in versus calories out—it's about hormonal responses to foods that trigger fat storage. Her brain fog isn't aging—it's inflammation from vegetable oils that were never meant for human consumption.
Sarah's body is doing exactly what it's designed to do: survive in an environment it perceives as threatening and nutrient-poor. The tragedy is that she lives in the most abundant food environment in human history, yet her cells are starving.
This is the central paradox of modern health: we have rational bodies trying to function in an irrational system.
The Myth of the Broken Body
For decades, we've been taught to think of our bodies as unreliable machines that need constant management and correction. We count calories because we don't trust our hunger signals. We take supplements because we assume our diets are inadequate. We exercise compulsively because we believe our bodies default to laziness. We medicate symptoms because we expect our bodies to malfunction.
This adversarial relationship with our own biology has created a health culture built on distrust, restriction, and external control. We've forgotten something our ancestors knew intuitively: the body is not the problem.
The modern health crisis isn't caused by defective human bodies. It's caused by a massive mismatch between what our bodies evolved to thrive on and what our current environment provides. Our bodies are still running the same software they've been running for thousands of years, but we're asking them to operate in a completely different world.
Consider what changed in just the last century:
Food: Our great-grandparents ate foods that contained 20 times the nutrients of today's equivalents. They consumed virtually no processed foods, industrial oils, or refined sugars. Today, 60% of the American diet consists of ultra-processed foods that didn't exist 100 years ago.
Movement: Previous generations walked miles daily, lifted heavy things, and worked with their hands. Today, the average American sits for 10 hours per day and gets their primary exercise from their thumbs scrolling screens.
Environment: Our ancestors lived in sync with natural light cycles, breathed clean air, and were exposed to diverse microbes that strengthened their immune systems. Today, we're bathed in artificial light 16 hours a day, breathe polluted air, and live in sanitized environments that leave our immune systems confused and overreactive.
Stress: While our ancestors faced acute physical stressors followed by recovery, we face chronic psychological stress with no clear resolution. Our stress response system, designed for short-term survival, is now activated constantly by emails, news cycles, and social media.
Our bodies are responding rationally to these inputs. The problem is that the inputs themselves are irrational—disconnected from the environment we evolved to thrive in.
The Engineering Perspective
As an engineer, I was trained to approach problems systematically. When a system isn't working, you don't blame the system—you examine the inputs and the environment. You look for mismatches between design intentions and operating conditions.
When I started applying this thinking to my own health struggles, everything shifted.
I realized I had been trying to override my body's signals instead of understanding them. I was treating symptoms instead of addressing root causes. I was working against my biology instead of working with it.
The engineering principle that changed everything for me was this: Before you try to fix a system, make sure you understand what it's trying to do.
Your body isn't trying to make you fat, tired, or sick. It's trying to keep you alive and thriving with the resources it has available. Every symptom, every craving, every energy dip is information—your body's way of communicating about its current state and needs.
When you understand what your body is trying to do, you can start giving it what it actually needs instead of fighting against its rational responses.
The Wisdom of Symptoms
Most health advice treats symptoms as problems to eliminate rather than information to understand. But symptoms are how your rational body communicates in an irrational environment.
Cravings aren't moral failures—they're your body searching for specific nutrients. The challenge is that food manufacturers have learned to trigger these searches with fake signals, creating cravings for foods that don't contain what your body actually needs.
Fatigue isn't laziness—it's your body conserving energy because it's not getting the building blocks it needs for efficient cellular function, or because it's spending too much energy fighting inflammation from toxic inputs.
Weight gain isn't gluttony—it's your body storing resources because it perceives scarcity (from nutrient-poor foods) or threat (from chronic stress).
Brain fog isn't aging—it's inflammation in your brain from industrial oils and blood sugar swings that impair cognitive function.
Digestive issues aren't just inconvenient—they're your gut's way of rejecting foods that damage your microbiome or contain substances your body can't process.
Sleep problems aren't character defects—they're your circadian rhythms responding to artificial light, late-night meals, or blood sugar instability.
When I started listening to these signals instead of suppressing them, my relationship with my body completely transformed. I learned that my body wasn't broken—it was incredibly intelligent, constantly working to optimize my health within the constraints of my environment.
The Great Food Illusion
Perhaps nowhere is the rational body/irrational world mismatch more apparent than in our food system. We live in what appears to be an abundant food environment, but underneath the surface, it's a landscape of nutritional scarcity disguised as plenty.
Consider the modern supermarket: 40,000+ products, colorful packaging, health claims on every box. It looks like abundance. But when you examine what's actually inside those packages, a different picture emerges.
Most of what fills our grocery stores isn't food in any traditional sense—it's what I call "food-like substances." These are products created by food scientists to look, taste, and feel like food while being optimized for profit, shelf-stability, and addictive potential rather than nutrition.
Your body evolved to seek out nutrients. When it doesn't find them in what you're eating, it logically asks for more. This is why you can eat a large meal of processed food and still feel hungry an hour later. Your stomach is full, but your cells are starving.
The situation is made worse by the fact that modern food production has stripped nutrients from even whole foods. That spinach slide from my nutritional health class wasn't an anomaly—it represents a systematic degradation of food quality that's been happening for decades.
Our soils are depleted. Our crops are bred for size and appearance rather than nutrition. Our animals are raised on diets that would make them sick if they lived long enough to experience the consequences. And then we take these already-compromised ingredients and process them further, removing the remaining nutrients and adding chemicals our bodies don't recognize.
Your body's response to this situation is entirely rational: constant hunger, cravings for more food, inability to feel satisfied. The problem isn't your willpower or your metabolism—it's that you're trying to nourish yourself with substances that contain little to no actual nourishment.
The Movement Mismatch
Our relationship with physical activity has become equally disconnected from our biological design. We've turned movement into "exercise"—something we do to our bodies rather than something our bodies naturally want to do.
Our ancestors didn't need gyms. They moved constantly throughout the day: walking long distances, lifting heavy objects, working with their hands, playing with their children. Movement was integrated into life, not segregated into 45-minute sessions.
Modern life has removed almost all natural movement. We sit in cars, sit at desks, sit on couches, then wonder why our bodies feel stiff, weak, and sluggish. We've created an environment so sedentary that we have to artificially recreate what used to happen naturally.
But here's what's interesting: when you start eating foods that actually nourish your body, you naturally want to move more. When your cells have the energy they need, physical activity becomes pleasurable rather than punishing. When inflammation decreases, your joints want to be used. When your blood sugar is stable, you have consistent energy for movement throughout the day.
The rational body doesn't resist exercise—it craves appropriate movement when it has the resources to support it.
The Sleep Revolution
Nothing illustrates the rational body concept better than sleep. For most of human history, people went to bed when the sun set and woke when it rose. Their circadian rhythms were synchronized with natural light cycles, and sleep was deep and restorative.
Today, we blast ourselves with artificial light until midnight, eat large meals close to bedtime, drink caffeine in the afternoon, and then wonder why we can't sleep well. We treat insomnia as a mysterious disorder when it's actually a rational response to an irrational environment.
Your body's sleep system isn't broken—it's responding perfectly to the signals you're giving it. Bright light tells it to stay awake. Late-night food tells it to focus on digestion rather than repair. Caffeine tells it to remain alert. Blood sugar swings tell it to wake up for emergency fuel.
When you align your behavior with your body's natural rhythms—dimming lights in the evening, eating earlier, managing blood sugar—sleep often improves dramatically without any other intervention.
This is the power of understanding your rational body: instead of fighting against your biology, you learn to work with it.
The Inflammation Connection
One of the most important insights from the rational body perspective is understanding inflammation not as a disease, but as a rational response to threatening inputs.
Inflammation is your immune system's way of protecting you from damage. When you eat industrial oils that your body recognizes as toxic, inflammation increases to deal with the threat. When you consume sugar that spikes your blood glucose, inflammation increases to manage the damage. When you're exposed to chronic stress, inflammation increases to prepare for danger.
The problem isn't that your body creates inflammation—it's that our modern environment provides a constant stream of inflammatory triggers without the anti-inflammatory inputs our bodies expect.
Traditional diets were naturally anti-inflammatory. They included omega-3 fatty acids from wild fish, polyphenols from colorful plants, and compounds from herbs and spices that actively reduce inflammation. They excluded the processed foods, industrial oils, and refined sugars that trigger inflammatory responses.
When you eat an anti-inflammatory diet—not because someone told you to, but because you understand that your body needs these inputs to function optimally—inflammation naturally decreases. Energy increases. Brain fog lifts. Joint pain diminishes. Skin clears. Sleep improves.
This isn't magic—it's biology working as designed.
From Problem to Partner
Once you understand that your body is rational, everything changes. Instead of seeing your body as something to control, manage, or fix, you start seeing it as an incredibly sophisticated partner in your health.
This shift in perspective changes how you approach every aspect of health:
Instead of fighting cravings, you learn to decode what your body is actually asking for. Often, what feels like a craving for sugar is actually a need for stable blood glucose, or what feels like a craving for fat is actually a need for essential fatty acids.
Instead of forcing exercise, you create conditions that make your body want to move. When you're properly nourished and well-rested, physical activity becomes naturally appealing.
Instead of medicating symptoms, you address the underlying mismatches that create those symptoms. Often, this means changing inputs rather than overriding outputs.
Instead of restricting and controlling, you learn to provide what your body actually needs and trust it to regulate itself.
This approach doesn't mean abandoning all structure or discipline. It means applying your discipline more intelligently—working with your biology rather than against it.
The Path Forward
The rational body approach offers something that most health advice doesn't: hope based on understanding rather than hope based on willpower.
When you understand that your body isn't broken, that your symptoms make sense, and that your struggles aren't personal failures, you can stop fighting against yourself and start working with the incredible intelligence of your biological systems.
This doesn't mean the path is always easy. Changing long-standing patterns takes time and effort. Navigating a food environment designed to confuse your body's signals requires awareness and planning. Learning to distinguish between what your body actually needs and what food manufacturers want you to want requires practice.
But it does mean that you're working with powerful forces rather than against them. When you align your choices with your biology, you get the full support of millions of years of evolutionary optimization.
The goal isn't to return to some idealized past—it's to apply timeless principles of human biology to our modern world. It's to create a life that honors both your body's needs and your contemporary realities.
Over the next chapters, we'll explore exactly how to do this. We'll look at how to rebuild your relationship with food, movement, sleep, and stress in ways that support rather than undermine your rational body. We'll discover how to navigate modern challenges while staying connected to your biological wisdom.
The most important thing to understand as we begin this journey is that you already have everything you need. Your body already knows how to be healthy—you just need to create the conditions that allow that knowledge to express itself.
You don't need to be fixed. You need to be understood. And once you understand the rationality of your body, everything becomes possible.
"The rational body doesn't need to be controlled—it needs to be honored. The moment you stop fighting against your biology and start working with it, you discover that your body isn't the obstacle to your health—it's the pathway to it."