fat and fertility

FAT AND FERTILITY


I know a few of you will snicker and be all hating a brother, but I’m terribly excited and thrilled to be bringing you something new and different. I know most of you wouldn’t mind in the slightest if I turned this into the “all semi-automatics, those magical instruments for non-marksmen, all the time” blog, but I get a bit bored with the same old, same old. While still staying within the post-apocalypse, stewpot bound, peak oil, doomster genre, it is nice is cover different subjects as much as possible. So, while I started reading that wonderful book “Cannibals And Kings” by Marvin Harris, I ran across the subject of women’s body fat, ovulation, fertility and lactation. And I was thrilled not only to answer a question that has long plagued me but also have subject matter that was new. The subject could have been anything, its novelty was what was important. Don’t think I want to know THAT much about the inner workings of girl parts. Those are subjects best left to gynecologists as they swan dive into dark recesses faintly smelling of sea life stranded on beaches. Yes, yes, I know it is an internal moist area so sometimes you can’t control what is growing up there. But, then, I could make the same excuse for my rectal region.

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Come the Apocalypse, a lot of you are going to be chaining the wives to the kitchen stove, shoeless, trying to repopulate the farm. But some of you might actually need to be conscious of your surroundings and regulate your population so that you don’t overexploit your resources. Even after our current Malthusian idiocy made possible by petroleum crashes and burns, there will more than likely still be too many folks around that we can return to an actual hunter/gatherer existence ( after the Mayan collapse the area was virtually abandoned, but somehow I don’t think we’ll be that lucky ). But even a herder group needs to keep from overpopulating. There is X amount of grass for the animals to eat and no more. Farmers can overexploit their environment and can make that work for a few generations ( chop down forests, reduce fallow time, increase irrigation, cut back on meat consumption, steal the neighbors land ), but herders have a much shorter feedback loop. In short, birth control is a needed skill. You can rely somewhat on herbal remedies. But it is far better to make ovulation impossible that to become pregnant and then roll the dice on an abortion. Herbs don’t always work. The following method isn’t the only method you need. Primitive hunters controlled ovulation but still had to engage in infanticide to keep their numbers in line with resources.

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A fertile women will not resume ovulation until her body fat by weight resumes 20-25%. It takes roughly 27,000 calories to bring a fetus to term, which is about the calorie count that that amount of fat contains. In other words, a women’s body won’t allow itself to get pregnant until it contains enough food for a fetus for nine months. If a women just popped a kid, the infant is consuming a thousand calories a day in breast milk. The women can’t easily bring her fat content back up under that kind of drain. Keep in mind we are talking about traditional diets, not the modern diet containing 300 calorie soft drinks and three thousand calorie Dorito chip bags. Which is why my son was conceived after only five months of my daughters birth. We were combining lactation with the withdrawal method and thought we were safe. If I had known about body fat requirements for conception I would have realized the dear wife had a surplus of calories throughout both pregnancy and breast feeding. Hey, when you’re that young all the fat is in the right places. Talk about a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing.

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Okay, so the key to prolonging conception is to nurse as long as possible while on a high protein, low carb diet. The same with the beginning of menstruation. The lower the body fat, the longer it takes to begin. In diets containing mostly starchy vegetables and little animal flesh, menstruation starts earlier and the interval between pregnancies lessons. In hunters diets, the predominance of lean meat made it difficult to start menstruation. It wasn’t unusual to delay that until age 18 or even twenty. In farming diets, high carbs and low protein, menstruation could start as early as age 12 or 13. A hunter female ( by which I mean a female in a hunter/gatherer tribe, not a female that hunted ) could prolong lactation for up to four years, whereas with high carb diets it is almost impossible to go beyond 18 months. To me, this points to an evolutionary pressure during hundreds of thousands of years during which we were all hunter/gatherers to where the normal diet helped to prolong pregnancy intervals so as not to overpopulate and ruin the environment. Mother Nature didn’t design us to pop out kids one after another but to spawn intermittently. We had to help, since even the smallest population increase will eventually overrun the planet. War is always a good way to control population, as is “accidental” crib deaths. Or the ancient equivalent of forgetting the baby stroller was on top of the car, leaving Og Junior behind on a picnic. The preference for male babies isn’t as much about breeding more warriors as much as drastically reducing the breeding stock ( then, wars got the male/female ratio back in check ).

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Again, I know you all don’t want to hear such ugly truths as the necessities of a more vulgar existence. But, at least use this information to help regulate your reproduction. To those females that already have this information, which I assume is most or all of you, my apologies. Think of this as needed learning for us ignorant guys whose reproductive knowledge ends at the orgasm.

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