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 Ask people in poll after poll what they would like to change about themselves, and the overwhelming number of responses, at least in first world nations, have to do with losing weight, exercising more, getting fit and staying healthy. We equate a slim, muscular body with being healthy and sexually attractive.
Thus the abundance of books, exercise crazes, television programs and magazines that deal with weight loss and diet. Obesity is a serious problem among humans in many countries, more so now than ever in history, and interestingly, obesity is also only a problem in those other species on Earth that we’ve turned into pets. Evolution tells us why we’re suddenly a nation of fat people, and it also gives us the answer to how we can stay lean, fit and healthy.
What Evolution Teaches Us About Staying Slim, Strong & Healthy
When you study evolution, you begin to understand where we are in the evolutionary process, and why we have some of the physical and mental health problems we have, like obesity. At this point, we’re the product of 2 million years of evolution as a genus, homo (human) as a branch off the australopithicenes, and about 400,000 years as the distinct species homo sapiens. We evolved along with other homo species which includes erectus and neanderthalensis, all of which died out, while homo sapiens thrived.
So for hundreds of thousands - really millions - of years, evolution has shaped us to live in a certain way. Let me give you a brief overview of the type of life evolution adapted us to live.
We were totally a part of our environment, we hunted and gathered, we experienced frequent, intense periods of physical activity, followed by longer periods of relative inactivity. We adapted to having periods of abundant food followed by shortages of food, the key reason why today, in a time of abundant, high calorie foods and no famine for most of us, we easily become fat. Our diet was wild meats and fish, which are high in quality protein and lacking in the fats that clog our arteries, nuts, fruits, vegetables and berries, roots and some grains, none of it highly processed.
We developed good eyesight and a relatively poor sense of smell, and thus became the only species to track mainly by sight instead of scent. It is strongly theorized that tracking, learning to read and understand sign, and developing hunting tools like throwing sticks and the spear to extend our strength and range in the pursuit of game, were crucial elements to the superior development of our brains. While inferior in many aspects - other species are stronger, faster and have more deadly physical weapons in their horns, claws and teeth - humans are strong, agile, and can walk, run, swim and climb with remarkable endurance. It is our versatility and intelligence that sets us apart as a species. We can thrive in climates as diverse as the arctic and the rain forest, unlike almost every other species.
For hundreds of thousands of years humans lived in small groups of about 24, generally based around a handful of six to eight mature adult men and women. Status was determined by sex, age, ability and temperament, and group loyalty, generosity and sharing were essential for survival and thus built into the way of life. There was general equality in the group. The concept of a "chief" who makes decisions for the "tribe" is really a modern, Western cultural construct. One of the great tragedies of the American West was the concept brought in by the American military that chiefs were leaders empowered to make commitments, treaties and agreements for their whole group.
We might think of the life of pre-historic tribal humans as full of hardship and constant tension and stress, but that is unlikely. Studies of contemporary hunter/gatherer groups show abundant time for leisure and group activities, a rich social life, very little worry about finding enough food, and rich traditional activities and ritual that connect the tribe with one another and the environment. It might also be pointed out that many of the hunter/gatherers left today live in the most extreme areas, including the Arctic and deserts. Yet even there, most hunter/gatherer societies exist quite well on about three hours of food gathering activity three days a week, thus allowing plenty of time for other things.
Obesity among hunter/gatherers is essentially non-existent, even among the tribes still practicing that lifestyle, so it is a fairly modern development. It is not politically correct to say so, but hundreds of thousands of years of evolution has given us a standard for what we see as attractive or beautiful and sexually desirable. That is how a species survives, and for humans that standard is universally slim, muscular and lean. The fat body is unnatural to our species, and thus we see it as unattractive or even grotesque.
We are fighting our millions of years of evolution when we look at someone who is fat or obese - and we might very well be looking in the mirror - and we try not to feel a sense of repulsion. Our evolved brain is seeing a grotesque version of what we’re hardwired to be attracted to. There is a reason the fat lady was part of the carnival side show, or that The Biggest Loser is a huge hit on television. There is a good reason why the weigh-in is the longest part of The Biggest Loser, and that it’s done with the most exposed flesh possible. At least we are trying to put a human face on our modern side shows. We have seen the fat man at the carnival, and he is us.
So where did it all start to go wrong? Paul Shepard, in The Tender Carnivore & the Sacred Game, says the change began about 10,000 years ago when we moved from being hunter/gatherers to being an agriculture-based society. Planting crops and keeping livestock on a large scale created huge changes for humankind - physically, socially, culturally, mentally. Permanent population centers were established and city-states created. Rich soil for crop growing made some land more valuable, so land ownership began, along with accumulation of wealth and possessions.
Farming and keeping livestock is labor intensive and a constant endeavor. Hunting a deer or antelope or harvesting wild berries or nuts is only a few hours work for several days worth of food, while raising, feeding, watering and protecting a herd of sheep or goats or planting, cultivating and harvesting a field of grain, is unending labor. Much of the work of farming is mindless and backbreaking, and rich landowners hired the poor to do it or made slaves of conquered enemies. While the tribal system of hunter/gatherers led to equality and leisure time, agriculture brought in slavery and caste and class systems and the plight of poor peasants that continues today the world around.
I worked on a dairy farm when I was a freshman in high school, and the concept of the romantic life of a farmer was quickly dispelled. The farmer is the slave of his herd. The cows had to be milked morning and night, seven days a week, every week. Morning milking was at 5 a.m. and evening milking didn’t end until 10 at times. Shepard writes of the civilized man’s "stolid submission to drudgery and routine," of the farming peasants "stoic numbness and lack of imagination," which ne notes are "inseparable from religious faith."
Religion came out of the development of agriculture as well. Control the food supply and you control the people. That’s impossible to do in a hunter/gatherer society except for with the very young, the infirm or the very old , but quite easy in an agricultural one. He who has the seeds, the knowledge of how and when to plant and cultivate them, who owns the fertile soils, who owns the flocks and who has the means to store and preserve the harvest, is the boss. Those educated enough to accurately figure times and seasons, annual floods and droughts, had power. They would become the ruling classes.
Controlling the peasants meant making rules of conduct, and unexpected, unpredictable events that could destroy crops or herds, like storms and earthquakes, could best be attributed to angry, unpredictable invisible superpowers - thus came the gods. Having some influence on those gods or being able to interpret what they wanted gave you power also, and thus came the priests. Where humans once considered themselves a part of the environment, harvesting the nuts and seeds alongside the birds and squirrels, and hunting the antelope alongside other animal tribes, be it lions or wolves, made you one with nature. You killed and processed the other animals, and sometimes they killed and ate you, and that whole system had a sacred aspect to it. Humans had a place among the wild animals and plants, they were a wild part of it themselves. It was not separate from them or from how they lived in it day by day.
But farming humans were at odds with nature. Nature was something to be conquered, controlled, defeated, feared. Nature was chaos, and farming brought order. In the Bible, wilderness and wild animals are bad, a waste, something to be feared and destroyed. The Promised Land is flowing with milk and honey and fertile fields and large herds of domestic animals.
So with those social, political and cultural changes over a mere 10,000 years, we have often been at odds with the man and woman evolution developed us to be over 2 million years. For 90 percent of all homo sapiens that have ever lived, and for 99 percent of the time we have been on Earth, we lived quite differently from how we have lived this last 10,000 years. We do not live the way we evolved to live, what Shepard calls the cynegetic man, man as hunter, and his description of that life in his book is beautiful and inspiring.
I’ll write more about Shepard’s ideas in other blogs, but this one is about what can we learn from our evolution in order to live a more healthy lifestyle, one in harmony with how evolution prepared us to live. Shepard, even though he wrote his book back in the early 1970s, used his understanding of evolution to recommend what the last 40 years of exercise studies have shown benefits us the most.
He noted that we have a runner’s body. We chased and consumed wild horses for 400,000 years. In his book Indian Running, Peter Nabokov writes of how running in native and aboriginal tribes was a sacred part of their lives, and running 100 or 150 miles in a day was common. Humans can run most other species to exhaustion or death. We need to run. Our bodies are meant to respond to sudden, intense bursts of speed and activity. We certainly are capable of running all day, but time consuming long runs like that are not necessary for optimum health.
Doctors at one time recommended "regular, moderate exercise," which, while better than doing nothing, is just not very effective. We need rigorous exercise. Our body, our heart, our circulatory system thrives on short, intense runs or workouts where the body is throughly stressed. Modern trainers refer to this as High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) or Extreme Interval Fat Burning (EIFB) workouts, and you can find all sorts of ways to develop this program if you search online. In a nutshell, using running as an example, it means first finding the maximum pace you can maintain for a full minute. Start out at about 50 percent of that as a warmup, then increase your pace gradually, in one minute intervals of 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent and 90 percent of your maximum, then drop back down to 60 percent, and repeat that for four or five cycles. At the last cycle, go back up to 100 percent of your maximum for a minute, then drop your pace way down and recover. Four or five runs like that a week are all that’s needed for maximum benefit.
The beauty of it is that it can be done in a half hour or so and if you want a longer run, add it at the beginning or end of the high intensity cycle.. Recent studies have shown that HIIT training techniques produce fast weight loss and the fastest improvement in cardio fitness levels. Get outside and run, on trails if possible to avoid the beating your body takes with a lot of running on hard surfaces. That’s about as close to getting back to the cynogetic mindset as you’re going to find. Remember to speed it up four or five times, or really hit it on the hills. Pretend you’re Daniel Day Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans. Have fun.
The same type of program will work for bicycling, swimming, rowing or cardio machines.
In addition to running, Shepard writes, humans swam, lifted objects and climbed, and using our muscles at stress levels is vital. Children at play outdoors often do all of this as part of their fun. Muscle loss and osteoporosis are preventable aspects of aging, and weightlifting in some form is the key. Doing endless repetitions with 10 pound dumbbells is not going to do it. The body has to be physically stressed. A half hour to 45 minutes of weight work three times a week can do wonders. The key is intensity. You don’t want to hurt yourself, but you do want to get out of your comfort zone. It is also the best use of your time. You don’t need endless hours in the gym.
Once you’ve conditioned your muscles to lifting, this is the key: You should be straining on your last two or three reps while maintaining excellent form. If you’re not out of your comfort zone on the last few reps and really working it, you’re wasting valuable time and effort.
If you don’t have weights it doesn’t matter, you can get a great workout just from bodyweight exercises like pull ups, pushups, chair dips, squats, lunges, hanging leg lifts and so on. Get a pull up bar and keep it in the doorway. Don’t be surprised if you can’t do any at first. I started by being able to do only two, but with consistent effort I eventually got up to 19. Anything over a dozen or so is extremely good. Do a few sets of pushups during commercials when watching television. Do some with your feet elevated. Use pushup bars for increased range of motion.
Weight-bearing exercises like these break down your muscle fibers and they regrow bigger and stronger. That process means that weightlifting burns a lot of calories, and your body continues to burn more in the hours after working out then when you were lifting. That also means your muscles need time to rest and heal in between workouts. Don’t overdo it. Give a muscle group a couple of days at least to heal between intense workouts.
Some form of manipulation of the joints and ligaments is also important. Stretching, yoga and pilates are all excellent. This isn’t intended to be a how-to article, but a why-to, why certain forms of exercise are effective because they work with how our bodies have evolved. There’s all sorts of how-to exercise information available once you understand our evolutionary inheritance and how to work with it.
Eating is also essential for health, and my earlier comments about how humans ate through tens of thousands of years of evolution is pretty obvious - wild meats, fish and poultry, berries, fruits and vegetables, nuts and whole grains, or getting as close to that as possible, and frequent, small meals. Refined foods are everywhere, and they are making us fat and killing us. Writer Michael Pollan put it as simply as it can be when he said, "Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother would not recognize as food." If you can’t tell what the actual food product is in something you’re eating, don’t eat it. I mean, what exactly is the food in a Twinkie?
No, we didn’t evolve to eat Twinkies.
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