I've been trying to lose a few pounds lately. Summer makes it too easy to grab an ice cream or a beer whenever you want. And I thought the smoothest way to start the shredding would be to start weening myself off of sugar. I don't eat entirely too much but it's too easy to find a way to consistently reward yourself for surviving through another day. A little bit too much every day adds up.

To learn a bit more about the whole process, I found myself watching a short Slate documentary called A Brief History of Fat, and Why We Hate It. Biochemist and physician Stephen O' Rahilly dropped this bomb: "Nothing makes sense except through the prism of evolution."

Fat was never an enemy, it kept us alive. In times of scarcity, we needed fat as energy to keep our bodies active and awake. But in an ironic twist of fat, our ancestors helped create a world where we can easily get what they always needed, and we hate what it's doing to us. We're just living in a different world, fighting our own evolution at every turn.