Why did we start woven? (Part 2)

On every level the story that the fitness industry is telling us isn’t working. The biggest reason being it does not understand the environmental challenges we currently face as humans. Let’s be clear, it is not your fault that you struggle to stay consistent with your exercise routine. Humans are designed to be lazy. Laziness, in this context, is not a personal failing but a trademark of our evolutionary biology. Consistent throughout nature is food scarcity, which keeps our natural world in order. And because of this, we evolved mechanisms to limit our bodies from developing in ways that would be hard to sustain. For example, our body limits the amount of muscle we can build because it requires 10 calories a day to maintain. It would make no sense for your body to build muscle easily when there were not enough calories available to sustain it, so it would build as little muscle as was necessary. Every part of our body has been designed with this in mind. When we get low enough in calories for long periods of time our body compensates by subconsciously moving less, thereby expending less calories. Diet for long enough and your body will shut off all non-essential metabolic functions to preserve basic life functions like your heart pumping and your brain function for as long as possible. 

Not only this, the environment in which we evolved required us to move an incredible amount just to find food. Hunter gatherers were forced to take between 10 - 20,000 steps a day. As evidenced by the average American step count of 3000, our environments no longer require us to move in the same way. But this is out of step with our evolutionary biology. Humans are inherently allostatic creatures, i.e. we are always reacting to our environment, anticipating changes and adapting so that we may thrive. Humans are incredibly resilient and adaptable because of this, but that adaptability has a tradeoff. Our bodies are constantly reacting to the stressors around us and if we don’t stress our bodies they slowly deteriorate. Age leads us to deteriorate inevitably anyway, but without stress that process accelerates exponentially. Modern technology has created incredibly comfortable lives for so many of us. It is ironic that this comfort and ease is actually making us sick. But it's not a personal failing; it’s not your fault, necessarily. We have much less control over our environments than we think. 

We now exist in a world in which we don’t move enough and are surrounded by a surplus of food that we can get more or less whenever or wherever we want. It is not our fault that our brains were hardwired to make sure that we would expend as little energy as possible naturally. You would never have seen a hunter gatherer going for a jog for their health. It’s not our fault that our brains are hardwired to consume as many calories as possible, especially in the form of sugar or fat, which taste so delicious specifically because they are calorically dense. It’s not our fault that the food industry sinks its teeth into us from an early age. To struggle in this environment is definitely not the personal failing that the fitness industry would have you believe. When you overeat around the holidays is it your fault? When you can’t get in a workout because your kid is sick or you had to work late is that your fault? I don’t think so.  

But the fitness industry does not have good answers to these environmental challenges. Its answer is to place the blame squarely on your shoulders. It’s your fault you overeat. It’s your fault you don’t exercise enough. We are set up to fail and when we inevitably do the fitness industry shames us for it. This shame shows up all over the messaging throughout the fitness industry, often leading to giving up before you have even had a chance to succeed. The fitness industry encourages this by making it all seem so simple and easy. Fitness influencer after fitness influencer will talk for hours about how “we all have the same 24 hours in a day” when reality is very different for those with different socioeconomic backgrounds and in different phases of life. “Anyone can eat healthy.” Can they? “Obesity is a choice.” Really? And when we fail it often leads to an all or nothing mindset. One missed workout turns into a week turns into a month. One bad meal turns into completely falling off the wagon. 

Not only does the industry not have good answers, it loves to tell us what we are doing wrong. We are never working out enough until we’re working out too much. We aren’t working out hard enough except for when we’re working out too hard. Don’t do this exercise, do this one. Don’t lift like that, you’re going to hurt yourself. Don’t eat that food, it’s poisonous. It’s exhausting. If you truly tried to tally up all the things the fitness industry as a whole told you not to do or eat, you would be so paralyzed by fear that you would refuse to eat or work out ever. Unfortunately, that’s where a lot of individuals end up. We end up paralyzed by outright misinformation to the point where we just throw up our hands and give up trying. 

And in the end, we don’t blame the fitness industry for its failings, we take the blame and shame the fitness industry puts on us and internalize it. Whether intentional or not, the fitness industry’s most defining feature is making us feel inadequate. If you are a woman you can never be skinny enough; the pressures to crash diet or cut out carbs or take GLP 1’s has never been stronger. If you're a man, you can never be big enough; young men these days feel intense pressure to take anabolic steroids. The fitness industry crushes us with body dysmorphia to the point where we feel an immense pressure to look a specific way, but the reality of the sacrifices necessary to actually look that way are never made clear. Nevermind the fact that those who ‘look the best’ feel horrible and deprived. Nevermind the fact that bodybuilders who take steroids end up shortening their lives, often by several decades. The fitness industry wants us to sacrifice everything in our lives to look a specific way, and shames us when we are unable. You have only yourself to blame if you can’t stick to the crash diet or you can’t fit training six days a week into your routine. Nevermind the fact that nobody on instagram actually looks like that in real life.