Exercise: Fact And Fiction

We should all be having moving experiences

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First of all, why exercise at all? Only around 3% of the population takes any meaningful form of regular exercise, so clearly it’s a minority pursuit. This is due to the fact that during the vast majority of our evolutionary history calories were scarce and uncertain, so we evolved to do as little as possible, both physically and mentally, in order to conserve energy. It’s natural, therefore, for us to be indolent and in our world of modern conveniences and surrounded by a superabundance of calorie-rich foods, the result is that most people are fat and a staggering proportion are obese. But does it matter? Surely our health systems can provide us with pills, painkillers, and operations to rectify the consequences of a profoundly unhealthy lifestyle? Why should we exert ourselves in an attempt to perform adequate self-administration when we can simply decide our health is really someone else’s problem?

There are several reasons why we need to re-think our present habits of indolence and self-indulgence. The first is that no nation can spend the majority of its GDP attempting to mitigate the hugely expensive health issues that are a direct result of poor lifestyle choices. The USA, for example, now spends more than 18% of its GDP on healthcare and related costs, yet its citizens grow less healthy with…