Pay Attention to Your Instincts and Environmental Context!
After I experienced a heart attack during a 3-mile walk, I could be forgiven for making a comment like that, but the fact is that there is absolutely nothing about exercise that we are meant to enjoy. In fact, we are hard-wired as Homo sapiens to avoid all meaningless expenditures of calories. Homo sapiens are the most successful animals on the planet. Our bodies developed over long periods of time in an environment of food scarcity where we had to fight to find calories to survive literally. In this context of food scarcity, success as a species was very simple. We are successful when we thrive and reproduce; that’s it. In order to ensure success without having to understand the big picture, our bodies developed what are called biological feedback systems to help us remain on the path of success, leading us to thrive and reproduce. All medically educated people learn about many biological feedback systems our bodies continually use to subconsciously keep our bodies functioning properly.
Today we don’t like to think of ourselves in such simple terms, but we need to remember that in the big scheme of things, it has only been a few seconds since our ancestors swung from trees in central Africa. Whether you believe that the initial spark of life was divine, or by chance, or even divine chance, very, very few people (and even fewer scientists) still argue that some manner of, shall we say, development was not a part of our collective primitive past.
Basic agriculture was introduced roughly 10,000 years ago. If we say that one inch represents that 10,000 years, then approximately one inch over a foot would represent the total time that Homo sapiens–the first creature to even vaguely resemble modern humans–have been on the planet. Two hundred feet would represent the time since Homo erectus–the first to exhibit perfectly adapted bi-pedal locomotion–first walked on the planet and 500 feet would represent the time since the three-foot-tall Australopithecus afarensis nicknamed “Lucy” found in 1974 near Hadar in Ethiopia walked out of Africa and starting the first human diaspora–that’s only 33 yards shy of two entire football fields of time. Remember that the total time humans have been planting and harvesting is represented by one inch. We switch from B.C. to A.D. at about five millimeters, and at 1.27 millimeters, Columbus’s grandfather wasn’t even a twinkle in his great grandfather’s eye. We weren’t even writing with typewriters at 2/3 of just one millimeter of time. On two football fields, everything from the dark ages to the present day would fit under the head of a pin. If you inverted that pin, the mark left by the point would represent more time than has passed since the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent marked the zenith of the Ottoman Empire.
Let’s move back to just 10,000 years ago and work within the inch and forget about the two football fields of time. Within that context, we lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in a world of scarcity. Without arguing about primitive diets, we can all agree that Homo sapiens ate what they could and were glad to get it. Our physiology developed so that we have senses of smell and taste that allow us to seek out carbohydrates which are the preferred fuel of our body and especially our brain. Humans are hard-wired to recognize and crave calorie-dense food sources. We have senses that can identify a fruit that has just a few more carbohydrates than another by smell alone; that’s how we determine which fruit is the ripest–that’s no accident. Running through the forest with something that wants to eat you close behind, one would like to have the ability to deftly gather the most carbohydrates possible on the run, as it were. Our ancestors had that skill, or we wouldn’t be here today. Other animals developed physiological traits that assist them with their preferred calorie source. Carnivores don’t need to see color as we do, but they have the ability to see even minute movement and smell disease which indicates weakness in animals and identifies prey that can be hunted with the expenditure of less energy. We humans also developed psychological mechanisms to help us achieve our biological purpose. Faced with life and death decisions that must be made quickly and without the developed mental capacity to understand the big picture and reason through such a decision, our bodies developed what are called biological feedback systems to help us remain on the path of success, leading us to thrive and reproduce. All medically educated people learn about many biological feedback systems our bodies continually use to subconsciously keep our bodies functioning properly without having to think about it.
Douglas Lisle, in his book The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health & Happiness calls one set of biological feedback systems he has identified the “motivational triad.” These feedback systems operate subconsciously and help us to thrive and reproduce without us even knowing about it. The motivational triad involves three very simple biological feedback systems; seek pleasure, avoid pain and conserve energy. These basic genetic instincts drive our behavior as human beings and lead to either success or failure. The motivation to seek pleasure is why eating is pleasurable, eating food with more calories is even more pleasurable, and is why pleasure is involved with our drive to reproduce. Avoiding pain keeps us away from activities like eating toxic foods that do not help us thrive and reproduce. Emotional pain or being unhappy is also associated with activities that make us less desirable to the opposite sex and decrease the likelihood of reproduction. As developing Homo sapiens, the genetic instinct to conserve energy is what prevented us from wasting the calories we fought so hard to gather on meaningless physical activity.
We did not exercise for exercise’s sake. Our bodies were honed and kept in excellent condition by the basic requirements of survival. When we exercise or do work, we use fuel in our bodies called carbohydrates. We get these carbohydrates in our bodies by consuming food in the form of calories. When we consume more calories than we need, our bodies store this extra energy in the form of glycogen or fat so that we can use it at a later date. Ancestors without this ability to efficiently store large amounts of energy in fat would not have lived to reproduce. We are all descendants of individuals with a highly developed ability to store energy this way. Getting fat easily doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. It means that you are a descendant of a very successful human being. Human beings that did not gain weight easily have no descendants; that is a fact that cannot be argued!
In our original environmental context of scarce resources, the motivational triad helped us become the most successful animals on the planet. But what allowed us to be successful in a context of scarcity now betrays us in a context of plenty. We are hard-wired to crave the most calorie-dense foods, and we are predisposed to avoid exercise. That is the exact opposite of the weight-loss equation!
These psychological and physiological mechanisms developed synergetic relationships. The high-calorie hard-wired human mind seeks the most calorie-dense foods available. The feedback mechanism needs to be strong enough to force an individual to drop a berry with carbohydrates yielding four calories a gram when it sees a nut with fat yielding nine calories a gram. Not every day of gathering was a good one, so the body developed a mechanism to store calories as glycogen in adipose tissue for later use. Rather than waste energy when we consume fat, it will most likely be stored as such, while carbohydrates are far more likely to be immediately burned for fuel. Since breaking down fat to burn as fuel takes far more energy than burning carbohydrates, it is more efficient for the body to store that fat and burn the carbohydrates. This is a subtle example of a physiological application of the energy conservation mechanism. What we despise as love handles could easily sustain an individual through a week or two of limited calorie intake. Thus the individual adapts to use times of feast to survive through times of famine by using the synergetic relationship between the physiological and psychological responses of the motivational triad. Ancestors without this ability to efficiently store large amounts of energy in fat would not have lived to reproduce. We are all descendants of individuals with a highly developed ability to store energy this way. Attached to this motivational feedback system are the feelings of pleasure and pain, which act as guideposts that indicate whether the decisions we make will increase or decrease our chances of biological success. When working in the context in which they were developed, this feedback mechanism is key to survival, but three very recent innovations have changed that context.
Anthropologists all agree that humans have undergone three very significant changes that can be described as “revolutionary,” all of which directly impacted the context in which we found ourselves as a developing species. The rudiments of language were first introduced roughly 150,000 years ago. For millennia human existence was like several million years of “Groundhog Day.” Imagine Bill Murray having to wake up every morning and rediscover fire. With no way to communicate how to best hunt, or what bush yields the best berries at what time of year, or how to best avoid the saber tooth, every generation was more or less on its own. With the advent of language and the application of the conservation of energy, we see tools like fishing hooks start to develop in complexity. For the very first time, humans start to master their environment instead of being at its mercy. “Linguistic abilities gave our ancestors a decided advantage over lesser endowed competitors. An accumulation of know-how that took a person a lifetime to learn could be passed on to another in a matter of hours or even moments of conversation. This ability allowed for geometric increases in human adaptive ability.”
The second revolution took place at about 8,500 B.C. Jared Diamond, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Guns, Germs and Steel” tells the story in great detail of how somewhere in the area between modern Syria and Iraq, a group of nomads stopped wondering and planted grain. They also herded groups of animals and raised them. It was terribly efficient, and small communities developed, which allowed for specialized labor and a trade economy. Facilitated by linguistics, the agricultural revolution laid fundamental groundwork for civilization.
In 1720, a man by the name of Thomas Newcome decided to tackle the problem of mine flooding by using a steam engine as a pump and unwittingly started the industrial revolution. Since the agricultural revolution, the specialization of labor had continued and increased, but the economy was still based on human labor. With the invention of the steam engine, everything changed, and from then on, the emphasis would be on machine-driven labor. Around this time, some uniquely specialized laborers with extra time on their hands decided that they’d organize questioning and experimentation into a stepped process called the scientific method. Together these formed the third great innovation, the technological revolution. With the discovery of eclectic current and the advent of computers, it became the revolution that never ended, for we remain under its influence today.
With each innovation, we moved farther and farther away from the context in which our survival mechanisms were created.
Today many people don’t consider our food grown in soil; it’s purchased from a warehouse. It isn’t cooked or prepared by loving human hands; it’s processed in mega-batches by impersonal machines. There’s an entire generation now that won’t eat food unless it has been properly processed.
The problem is that even though we’ve removed ourselves from the original environmental context we developed in, the motivational triad remains active in us. The world of scarcity within which our biological feedback systems developed does not exist in wealthy industrialized countries anymore. There is no time of famine, only feast, and the motivational triad upon which we relied now betrays us, leaving us fat, empty and sick. In a world of plenty, the pleasure we derive from consuming calorie-dense foods leads to mindless overconsumption, and our psychology even deceives us with positive feedback for doing so. Our biological feedback systems don’t know they’re out of context. Remember that in terms of our two football fields of time, all three revolutions are brand new. There’s been no time to recalibrate the biological feedback systems; all this just happened. In the twinkling of a star, our context changed. We’ve been in a battle to survive, a war against nature and in our zeal to subdue our world, we’ve disassociated from our original environmental context altogether. We are caught in what Lisle and Goldhammer call the “pleasure trap.” Outside of our original context, we are fooled by the motivational triad into self-destructive behavior that predisposes us to chronic illness. Fast-food represents the perfect storm; it tastes good–pleasure, it’s cheap–pain avoidance and it’s easy and fast–energy conservation. Fast food rings all three motivational triad bells at once!
So, this is all very cool stuff, right?. But how is all of this cool stuff going to help me today?
The first thing is to stop blaming yourself for the situation you are in. It is true that all of us that are overweight do it to ourselves, and we need to take responsibility for that, but we are not to blame, and we are not bad people. All of us that never met an apple fritter we didn’t like, always look for the closest parking spot to the door, and like to have pizza and beer while bingeing “Homeland” or “24” for the third time rather than eat a tofu sandwich on dry whole wheat after an afternoon of high-altitude mountain climbing, are responding to our instincts to seek pleasure, avoid pain and conserve energy. Without the genes we fat people inherited, there would be no human race! In 2021, fat people represent the most successful human beings on the planet. Those who do not retain fat easily, exercise needlessly, and have an impaired instinct to consume calorically dense foods represent individuals who would not survive in the context in which we lived just 15,000 years ago! If you are overweight and trying to do something about it, enough with the loathing and self-pity. You are an evolutionary rock-star; start acting like one and dig yourself out of the mess you are in!
Second, you need to approach eating with the motivational triad in mind. I love to hear somebody say that they don’t like French fries or ice cream or pizza or even nuts, really? I now know why I am hard-wired to yearn for those calorie-dense foods. I now step into every convenience store armed with the knowledge that I will see, smell and touch foods that I can’t eat, and I know why. Worse than that, I cook stuff I can’t eat every day at the Hometown Cafe)! Everybody has to develop their own way of dealing with the eating challenges the motivation triad places on you. The first step is to know exactly what that challenge is and what you are willing and able to do to overcome that challenge.
Third, you need to approach exercise with the motivational triad in mind. There is absolutely nothing about exercise that we are meant to enjoy. We are hard-wired as Homo sapiens to avoid all meaningless expenditure of calories. That is what the instinct to conserve energy is all about. The ancestor that decided to walk over the mountain, spending 5,000 calories while doing so, just because it was there, maybe doesn’t come out the other side of winter in such good shape. The ancestor that walked around the mountain, spending only 500 calories, comes through winter in better shape, wins the mate in Spring and passes their more valuable genes down to the next generation.
Be aware of your instincts and environmental context and use them to your advantage!
Have a great week!
Here are the references for today’s Healthy Eating Tip:
Lisle, Douglas J. and Alan Goldhammer. The Pleasure Trap. Summertown, TN: Healthy Living Publications, 2003.
Also available on a DVD that is both informative and entertaining! https://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Douglas-J-Lisle/dp/1570672822
Diamond, Jared M. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1999.
Also available on a DVD that is both informative and entertaining! https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-and-Steel/dp/B0009GX1EM