Gut Feel Based Hypotheses: Awakening the Hidden Scientist in Each of Us

When my gut thinks it can defend weight gain.

My reasoning for weight gain is simple: if your body is putting on weight, it is doing so for a very good reason. There is always a reason behind it.

While it is not appropriate to say that we understand the exact reason, a few plausible explanations exist. First, it could be a backup plan based on the body’s interpretation of stress, storing sufficient food as fat for difficult times. Second, weight gain could be a disaster recovery strategy. In this view, your body is storing weight as a form of currency. The idea is that later on, when you finally allow your body to get adequate rest, it can dip into these funds, this stored fat, to help fuel its functions, as well as to heal and recover from the damage that life has caused.

Now, I am well aware that this hypothesis might seem wrong to some. There is no specific scientific study that directly validates this idea. So, one might ask, isn’t this approach non scientific?

Many of the hypotheses we work with in the pre-healing community are based on a different kind of evidence. They are based on gut feel. But this gut feel is not just a whim. It is driven by a deep understanding that the human body is extraordinarily complex. It has evolved over millennia, from a single cell to a complex multicellular organism. During every stage of that evolutionary journey, those cells were far more complex than we can even imagine or have yet understood.

The complexity is immense. These cells have been interacting with their environment, decoding external signals, and living life in the most optimal way for eons. Because of this, they possess an innate intelligence that is far beyond what we can currently perceive or reverse engineer.

If we operate from this belief, from this assumption that the cell is right, that the body is right, that the organ is right, it changes everything.

If we follow this premise, that nature is intelligent and we are merely trying to reverse engineer its wisdom, we approach things with more humility.

When I look at a problem like obesity, I do not blame the obesity itself as the root cause. Instead, I ask a different question. Why did the body become obese? What is the root cause that is driving the body to store this weight? This is not to say that obesity is good, but to recognize that there was a reason, a driver, behind it.

This shift in perspective applies to so many things we think we know. Instead of looking at cholesterol as a problem and blaming food for atherosclerosis, we should ask why this person is getting atherosclerosis. Is cholesterol truly the villain? Instead of blaming salt as the root cause of hypertension, we should ask a simple question. Humans have been exposed to salt for a very long time. It is not as if we suddenly started consuming more salt. So, what is causing this hypertension? Could it be something much more significant than salt?

When we start looking at the body as an intelligent machine, one with technical capabilities far surpassing anything humans have created, we develop a new respect for it. This perspective shift helps us avoid that knee-jerk reaction where we see a problem, a disease if you will, and immediately blame the body for its flawed response. It helps us get over the belief that the body is just a machine and that we, as humans, must jump in and save it.

We see this kind of narrative play out in movies, especially in Western dramas. In those stories, for every problem on planet Earth, it is the Americans who come to help. There might be a Russian villain, an Indian villain, or an alien villain, but the hero is always an American who comes to the rescue and saves everyone. This is not a commentary on any one country. It is about a narrative that emerges when we become very strong and believe we are superior. And this narrative applies not just to the United States, but to each one of “us” as individuals.

When we believe we are strong, intelligent, and right, we tend to become disillusioned. In the context of health, especially when diseased, we conveniently assume that it is the body’s mistake, its inadequacy and shortcomings. We look at disease as a problem with the body. We look at hypertension, diabetes, and obesity as things that are wrong with the body. We never look at them as signals.

We rarely look at hypertension and ask, is the body increasing blood pressure for a very good reason? Is it trying to convey something? Is it trying to circumnavigate a problem by increasing the pressure? We never ask that. Instead, we believe the body is stupid. Let’s stop taking salt. Let’s take BP medications. Let’s control the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system. Let’s control this and we will be fine.

Our entire healing methodology is based on a very anthropomorphic way of looking at things. We think, as humans, that we are the smartest. And we apply this logic even to the very life that built us. The cells in our body have a technology that far surpasses our own. The amount of products the liver can make, no chemical factory on earth can replicate so easily. There are components, phytochemicals in nature, and metabolites made in the human body that cannot be synthesized in a lab.

Once we realize how complex and advanced this system truly is, we would look at it like a child looks at something advanced, with respect. Not as something stupid that needs us to jump in and fix. That is the core of the pre-healing philosophy. It is a gut feel based on the understanding that nature is always right, or at least, nature is mostly right. And from there, we ask the important question: what is it that we could be missing?

This gut feel, I believe, is what scientists call abductive reasoning. It is the process of forming the best available hypothesis from pattern recognition before any formal testing begins. It is the flash of insight, the hunch, the moment when you look at a collection of observations and sense a deeper pattern waiting to be understood.

This approach is not meant to replace the deductive and inductive methods that form the backbone of traditional science. Rather, it should complement them. The gut feel gives us the direction, the hypothesis worth pursuing. Then, we put that hypothesis to the test through rigorous inquiry. This is the key: being open to decoding patterns in the world around us, while also being open to going the extra mile to validate our findings.

Each is equally important. The scientist who only follows protocol may never stumble upon a truly novel idea. The one who only follows intuition without validation may wander into error. But with a slight change in approach and perspective, this age-old scientific method could become even more revealing. We awaken the hidden scientist within each of us, not as someone who merely consumes knowledge, but as someone who actively participates in the act of discovery.

With this change of outlook, we could start to study life differently. We could come up with research that looks at disease from an unbiased perspective.

Our research could be more explorative, wherein we now look at metabolic dysfunction as metabolic adaptation. We look at hypertension as a short term adaptation that requires suitable and urgent action. We look at diabetes as suggestive of “inflation” and loss of value due to surplus energy. We look at pain as a call for attention and ask ourselves how best we can respond to various pain signals rather than just suppressing them.

Our clinical trials can be based on the need of the hour rather than driven by monetary benefits from patents.

Our education can be based on life and understanding the intelligence of nature and natural processes, so as to make us more humble and open to challenging our own beliefs.