And then you store the rest of the food cache you found… where again? A prehistoric fridge?

Oh wait that’s called fat cells, one of the best evolutionary advancements ever! Overeating really pays off.

I'm not really sure what you're arguing, because the initial claim was there's no evolutionary benefit to undereating. Yes you can store visceral fat and I'm not arguing there isn't a benefit for that, just that there's a clear benefit for undereating as well.

No evolutionary benefit.

But there's a demonstrable one - a longer lifespan. In most animals (including mammals) a longer lifespan gives more time for reproduction.

Jumping in to try to settle on common ground.

It's not that there isn't a benefit to under eating. Demonstrably there is.

Nor is there a strict disadvantage to overeating sometimes - it keeps you alive and is a great way to store food.

It's just that we probably regularly did both. We probably ate a lot, then very little, either on daily, monthly, or annual cycles. So it just so happened that beneficial things took advantage of those cycles as the right time to do beneficial things.

Think of it this way: I need to defrag my hard drive, but I cannot do that when I'm playing games. It's not that there's a benefit to stopping playing games, it's just that that's when I can defrag. It's probably similar with all the autophagy benefits of fasting - we were probably regularly not eating so we did it then. During eating we can't really do all that good stuff.

And conversely, I really need to build muscle and brain tissue, and that's probably easier to do when I'm calorie rich. It's just the right time, and I can count on a calorie-reduction later to do the other stuff.

We just never have that calorie deficit anymore.

Overeating doesn’t cause any issues to any animals during their average reproductive period (younger ages). Longer lifespans and calory deficits lead to lower quality offsprings. Nothing “demonstratable” there.