Born to conserve energy

I just finished reading “Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding.” by Daniel E. Lieberman, Professor of Biological Sciences and human evolutionary biology. It’s a really thought-provoking book that dives into the evolutionary response as to why exercise can be so hard for so many of us to incorporate into our life even though we all know it’s supposed to be good for us.

You should absolutely check it out. He touches on a ton of research (70+ pages in the bibliography) showing how exercise provides significant reductions in chronic illnesses, inflammatory processes, cancers, diabetes, and more. that exercise provides. He also provides a great starting point for you to think about your movement differently. By considering our ancestry and the physicality required for humans to adapt to survive we can better connect with how to start thinking about adapting our environment to incorporate more healthy movement into our days without distracting from the non-negotiable tasks that you need to be able to survive in the modern world.

Take some time to think about your day. What heavy manual labor or activity is replacing the movement our ancestors would normally get searching for fresh water, food, and shelter? If there isn’t anything in your daily tasks requiring such activity, now is a great time to start considering what you could do differently to meet some of your baseline movement levels.

As always - never stop looking for ways to make positive adaptations and keep moving forward.