The Importance of Fuel in Super Meat Boy

You can't leave the first area if you don't learn how to put in gas, right? The thing that blew my mind is like, you know, there was a time when I think people like Ed McMillan and William Jones write stuff about Super Meat Boy. There's very few penalties for not understanding combat yet or not understand as I'm not understanding all the nuances of how to min max your action points yet. And there are definitely consequences for failing to do really basic kind of like fuel management stuff correctly.