Waste Product or Waist Product?
One of the things menopausal women hate most is the accumulation of fat around their waist. Even if you never had a fat waist before, you notice an increase in its size at menopause. No more hourglass figure. No more firm, flat belly.
Suddenly, every gram of weight you gain seems to end up around your waist. It’s as if everything you eat becomes a “waist product”!
It’s partly due to a slowing of our metabolism at the time of menopause. But it’s also due to aging. Mother Nature apparently thought it would be a good idea to make human females gain weight as we age. And it turns out that having a little bit of extra weight around our waist is evolutionarily a means of ensuring survival of our species.
Well, that’s all fine and good, but individual women aren’t thinking about survival of the whole darn species. We’re each thinking about our own waist! So, while a larger waist may be a product of aging, we view the whole phenomenon as a waste.
Speaking of waste, isn’t it odd that the word for our feminine middle is the same as the word for what’s an unimportant by-product?
When you eat food, your body absorbs the nutrients in the food and discards the left-overs as “waste products.” So, waste is junk. And the more junk food you eat, the more waste your body has to discard.
It turns out your slower metabolism at the time of menopause contributes to your waste products. The faster your body metabolizes food, the faster it uses the calories as fuel. But the slower it metabolizes food, the less efficient it is at utilizing the calories. So, more of them end up being labeled as “waste products” which end up around your waist as “waist products.”
Not only that. There’s another factor at play. It’s called “transit time.” Transit time is the time it takes your food to go from your mouth to your toilet. Of course, when you put it in your mouth, it’s food. When it reaches your toilet, it's a “waste product.”
Foods with faster transit times produce fewer waste products. Plants fit in to this category. If you’re a vegan, your transit time is very fast ... so fast that there’s hardly any time to form any waste products as the food speeds through your digestive tract on to the wasteland in your toilet.
That’s one reason why vegans tend to be thinner than meat eaters. The waste ends up in the toilet rather than around their waist.
Foods with slow transit times s-l-u-g their way through your digestive tract. As they do so, they start rotting. And all that rotting food turns in to waste products. Unfortunately, once they turn into waste inside your body, you’re stuck with them forever. Not only are they “waste products” that become “waist products,” they even wreak more havoc than that. They become something called “free radicals.” Free radicals are what cause cancers ... all sorts of different cancers.
And other waste products are stored as fat. Of course, fat waste products end up around your waist. And they have a special significance of their own simply because they’re a waist product: They cause heart attacks!
So, it turns out that all this talk about waste products has more significance than meets the waist.
The waste that your body doesn’t want either ends up as a waste product or a waist product. If it ends up as a waste product in the toilet ... hopefully soon after you’ve eaten it, it doesn’t become a “waist product.” But, if it takes a long time to become as waste product headed for your toilet, it ends up producing even more waste products that cause cancer or waist products that cause a heart attack.
It’s all so circular. But, no matter how you look at it, waste products are supposed to be waste products that end up in your toilet, not waist products that end up around your waist to cause heart attacks and cancer.
It would have been a whole lot better if Mother Nature had come up with some other way to ensure survival of the species as we age. Making waist products from waste products is just such a waste.