The answer is so simple it is not seen. Scientist who study the behavior of people who get lost (literally, like in the woods or ocean or mountains) can help us understand how we could possibly have gotten so "far off the path." Laurence Gonzales has written brilliantly about this in "Deep Survival", a must read. Those who get lost in the wilderness rarely backtrack. We'll come back to that idea. Like in any field, you have to start with definitions, and the students of what humans do when they get lost were no different. One definition of lost that got a lot of traction was "the inability to make a mental map match the environment." As we all know, feeling lost is a very uncomfortable state. Having no working mental map is experienced as a loss of self. So we do some elaborate mental gymnastics to avoid acknowledging being lost. In orienteering lingo this is called "bending the map", trying to make reality mesh with what you want to see. Wilderness expeditions that get into trouble are usually characterized by this phenomenon. The lost party slogs forward convincing themselves that "this must be right" and rarely backtrack after thinking "I'm not seeing what I expected according to my plan, I must be off course." So when you're lost, you're not so much in the wrong location as in a compromised state of mind. And the efforts we make to reassure ourselves that we couldn't be lost take us further into the dark woods.
So, here we are in 2010, overfed, undernourished and dying of diseases that we have brought upon ourselves, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into health care for medications when we know what caused the illness and how to prevent it. Sounds lost to me. And there surely has been some serious map-bending. How many of us have normalized or pushed out of consciousness the fact that much of our food is poisonous in the sense that it is not only not nourishing but causes diseases that kill us? We are complacent because we don't realize that we are in the wilderness. We will not be rescued. We must find our way by seeing what's in plain sight but obscured by our wish that it is not so. They say that in the end, everyone who gets lost in the wild dies of confusion. Time to retrace our steps.
How Often Should I Exercise?
If I had a buck for every time I was asked this question I'd be a rich man. It's a great question and exactly where I'd like to start today because it will begin to frame our conversation about what it means to be fit.
My response to the question is to pose another; How often do you eat? I don't ask this to suggest that if you're taking in calories you better burn them or they will be stored as fat, although it's true. I ask because it reminds me of our early life as a species and why Homo erectus didn't need a gym membership. He was moving all the time. And the main motivation to move was to eat. As a hunter gatherer, eating was inseparable from moving. We grazed and chased. And moving is the most important element of exercise. To be sedentary is to be sick. 2 million years of evolution designed us as exquisite movers unlike any other mammal.
The evolution from Australopithecus to Homo erectus is an interesting story because it describes our birth. And believe it or not, it is all about our ability to move and what that allowed us to eat. Australopithecus was a pea-brained brute (brain 1/3 the size of ours) with a huge jaw to chew tough fruits vegetables and tubers. He stood a diminutive 4 feet tall, but he stood! This was progress and freed up the hands for future tool use. Enter Homo erectus, big brained and biped, long legged and armed with sharp teeth to tear meat. It was the addition of meat to the diet that provided the dramatic increase in calories, fat and protein to fuel the development and maintenance of a big brain. One can't help but wonder how vegans feel about this tidbit.
Now you might ask, how exactly did he get the meat on his plate? A very reasonable question that created significant trouble for anthropologists for a long time. Remember, there were no fast-food joints and the first spear head dates back to around 20,000 years ago and H. erectus is enjoying his carnage 2 million years ago. To make a long and fascinating story less long, H. erectus practiced what is known as Persistence Hunting whereby he chased down his prey until it collapsed from hypertthermia. Not bad for a biped. The ability not to die in a similar fashion as the prey derives from our cooling system. Unlike the animals that were being chased and had to pant to cool, we sweated. Panting is perfect for sprints and that is what all mammals with coats need to survive, short bursts of extreme speed that require intense oxygen delivery to the muscle. The way this is achieved in these four legged creatures is by yoking the stride to breathing. So for instance, when a lion is galloping along, when its front feet strike the ground its guts slog forward compressing the lungs forcing a full exhalation and when it extends its legs, the guts slog back pulling the diaphragm back sucking in a turbocharged breath of air. This is great in the short-term but not sustainable. The beauty of sweating is that it allows for a disconnection of breathing, cooling and running. This is why, given sufficient distance, a human can outrun a horse, and in fact does, most Octobers in Prescott, Arizona in the 50-mile Man Against Horse Race.
Now this may have been a long journey but the bottom line is that we were made to move everyday. That is the first and most important message. Your body doesn't care how you do it, but it will reward you if you do. You don't stop moving because you're old. You're old because you stop moving.
My response to the question is to pose another; How often do you eat? I don't ask this to suggest that if you're taking in calories you better burn them or they will be stored as fat, although it's true. I ask because it reminds me of our early life as a species and why Homo erectus didn't need a gym membership. He was moving all the time. And the main motivation to move was to eat. As a hunter gatherer, eating was inseparable from moving. We grazed and chased. And moving is the most important element of exercise. To be sedentary is to be sick. 2 million years of evolution designed us as exquisite movers unlike any other mammal.
The evolution from Australopithecus to Homo erectus is an interesting story because it describes our birth. And believe it or not, it is all about our ability to move and what that allowed us to eat. Australopithecus was a pea-brained brute (brain 1/3 the size of ours) with a huge jaw to chew tough fruits vegetables and tubers. He stood a diminutive 4 feet tall, but he stood! This was progress and freed up the hands for future tool use. Enter Homo erectus, big brained and biped, long legged and armed with sharp teeth to tear meat. It was the addition of meat to the diet that provided the dramatic increase in calories, fat and protein to fuel the development and maintenance of a big brain. One can't help but wonder how vegans feel about this tidbit.
Now you might ask, how exactly did he get the meat on his plate? A very reasonable question that created significant trouble for anthropologists for a long time. Remember, there were no fast-food joints and the first spear head dates back to around 20,000 years ago and H. erectus is enjoying his carnage 2 million years ago. To make a long and fascinating story less long, H. erectus practiced what is known as Persistence Hunting whereby he chased down his prey until it collapsed from hypertthermia. Not bad for a biped. The ability not to die in a similar fashion as the prey derives from our cooling system. Unlike the animals that were being chased and had to pant to cool, we sweated. Panting is perfect for sprints and that is what all mammals with coats need to survive, short bursts of extreme speed that require intense oxygen delivery to the muscle. The way this is achieved in these four legged creatures is by yoking the stride to breathing. So for instance, when a lion is galloping along, when its front feet strike the ground its guts slog forward compressing the lungs forcing a full exhalation and when it extends its legs, the guts slog back pulling the diaphragm back sucking in a turbocharged breath of air. This is great in the short-term but not sustainable. The beauty of sweating is that it allows for a disconnection of breathing, cooling and running. This is why, given sufficient distance, a human can outrun a horse, and in fact does, most Octobers in Prescott, Arizona in the 50-mile Man Against Horse Race.
Now this may have been a long journey but the bottom line is that we were made to move everyday. That is the first and most important message. Your body doesn't care how you do it, but it will reward you if you do. You don't stop moving because you're old. You're old because you stop moving.
How Often Should I Exercise?
If I had a buck for every time I was asked this question I'd be a rich man. It's a great question and exactly where I'd like to start today because it will begin to frame our conversation about what it means to be fit.
My response to the question is to pose another; How often do you eat? I don't ask this to suggest that if you're taking in calories you better burn them or they will be stored as fat, although it's true. I ask because it reminds me of our early life as a species and why Homo erectus didn't need a gym membership. He was moving all the time. And the main motivation to move was to eat. As a hunter gatherer, eating was inseparable from moving. We grazed and chased. And moving is the most important element of exercise. To be sedentary is to be sick. 2 million years of evolution designed us as exquisite movers unlike any other mammal.
The evolution from Australopithecus to Homo erectus is an interesting story because it describes our birth. And believe it or not, it is all about our ability to move and what that allowed us to eat. Australopithecus was a pea-brained brute (brain 1/3 the size of ours) with a huge jaw to chew tough fruits vegetables and tubers. He stood a diminutive 4 feet tall, but he stood! This was progress and freed up the hands for future tool use. Enter Homo erectus, big brained and biped, long legged and armed with sharp teeth to tear meat. It was the addition of meat to the diet that provided the dramatic increase in calories, fat and protein to fuel the development and maintenance of a big brain. One can't help but wonder how vegans feel about this tidbit.
Now you might ask, how exactly did he get the meat on his plate? A very reasonable question that created significant trouble for anthropologists for a long time. Remember, there were no fast-food joints and the first spear head dates back to around 20,000 years ago and H. erectus is enjoying his carnage 2 million years ago. To make a long and fascinating story less long, H. erectus practiced what is known as Persistence Hunting whereby he chased down his prey until it collapsed from hypertthermia. Not bad for a biped. The ability not to die in a similar fashion as the prey derives from our cooling system. Unlike the animals that were being chased and had to pant to cool, we sweated. Panting is perfect for sprints and that is what all mammals with coats need to survive, short bursts of extreme speed that require intense oxygen delivery to the muscle. The way this is achieved in these four legged creatures is by yoking the stride to breathing. So for instance, when a lion is galloping along, when its front feet strike the ground its guts slog forward compressing the lungs forcing a full exhalation and when it extends its legs, the guts slog back pulling the diaphragm back sucking in a turbocharged breath of air. This is great in the short-term but not sustainable. The beauty of sweating is that it allows for a disconnection of breathing, cooling and running. This is why, given sufficient distance, a human can outrun a horse, and in fact does, most Octobers in Prescott, Arizona in the 50-mile Man Against Horse Race.
Now this may have been a long journey but the bottom line is that we were made to move everyday. That is the first and most important message. Your body doesn't care how you do it, but it will reward you if you do. You don't stop moving because you're old. You're old because you stop moving.
My response to the question is to pose another; How often do you eat? I don't ask this to suggest that if you're taking in calories you better burn them or they will be stored as fat, although it's true. I ask because it reminds me of our early life as a species and why Homo erectus didn't need a gym membership. He was moving all the time. And the main motivation to move was to eat. As a hunter gatherer, eating was inseparable from moving. We grazed and chased. And moving is the most important element of exercise. To be sedentary is to be sick. 2 million years of evolution designed us as exquisite movers unlike any other mammal.
The evolution from Australopithecus to Homo erectus is an interesting story because it describes our birth. And believe it or not, it is all about our ability to move and what that allowed us to eat. Australopithecus was a pea-brained brute (brain 1/3 the size of ours) with a huge jaw to chew tough fruits vegetables and tubers. He stood a diminutive 4 feet tall, but he stood! This was progress and freed up the hands for future tool use. Enter Homo erectus, big brained and biped, long legged and armed with sharp teeth to tear meat. It was the addition of meat to the diet that provided the dramatic increase in calories, fat and protein to fuel the development and maintenance of a big brain. One can't help but wonder how vegans feel about this tidbit.
Now you might ask, how exactly did he get the meat on his plate? A very reasonable question that created significant trouble for anthropologists for a long time. Remember, there were no fast-food joints and the first spear head dates back to around 20,000 years ago and H. erectus is enjoying his carnage 2 million years ago. To make a long and fascinating story less long, H. erectus practiced what is known as Persistence Hunting whereby he chased down his prey until it collapsed from hypertthermia. Not bad for a biped. The ability not to die in a similar fashion as the prey derives from our cooling system. Unlike the animals that were being chased and had to pant to cool, we sweated. Panting is perfect for sprints and that is what all mammals with coats need to survive, short bursts of extreme speed that require intense oxygen delivery to the muscle. The way this is achieved in these four legged creatures is by yoking the stride to breathing. So for instance, when a lion is galloping along, when its front feet strike the ground its guts slog forward compressing the lungs forcing a full exhalation and when it extends its legs, the guts slog back pulling the diaphragm back sucking in a turbocharged breath of air. This is great in the short-term but not sustainable. The beauty of sweating is that it allows for a disconnection of breathing, cooling and running. This is why, given sufficient distance, a human can outrun a horse, and in fact does, most Octobers in Prescott, Arizona in the 50-mile Man Against Horse Race.
Now this may have been a long journey but the bottom line is that we were made to move everyday. That is the first and most important message. Your body doesn't care how you do it, but it will reward you if you do. You don't stop moving because you're old. You're old because you stop moving.
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