Exercised Quotes

“Although the hunter-gatherer strategy is a boon to our reproductive success, it selects against wasting calories on discretionary physical activity.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“If we evolved from chimpanzee-like apes that are unusually sedentary, what happened to make humans so much more active, and how does that legacy affect how much we move? The answer, which we will learn about in later chapters, is that climate change spurred our ancestors to evolve an unusual but extremely successful way of life, hunting and gathering, that demands more work. In terms of physical activity, hunter-gatherers are only very active for a few hours a day, but they nonetheless walk five to ten miles a day, carry food and infants, dig for many hours, sometimes run, and perform myriad other tasks to survive. In order to cooperate, communicate, and make tools, our ancestors were also selected to have large expensive brains. Last but not least, we evolved to be highly active to fuel a unique and unusually exorbitant reproductive strategy.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“In fact, there are many lines of evidence to suggest that apes were specially selected to have unusually low levels of physical activity to help them thrive in the rain forest. As we saw, apes usually don’t need to travel far to get food, and their highly fibrous diet requires them to spend much time resting and digesting between bouts of feeding. In addition, their adaptations to climb trees make them outlandishly inefficient at walking. A typical chimpanzee spends more than twice as much energy to walk a mile as most mammals, including humans.23 When walking is so calorically costly, natural selection inevitably pushes apes to spend as little energy as possible schlepping about the forest so they can devote as much energy as possible to reproduction. Apes are adapted to be couch potatoes.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“So if, as you read these words, you are seated in a chair or lounging in bed and feeling guilty about your indolence, take solace in knowing that your current state of physical inactivity is an ancient, fundamental strategy to allocate scarce energy sensibly. Apart from youthful tendencies to play and other social reasons (topics for later chapters), the instinct to avoid nonessential physical activity has been a pragmatic adaptation for millions of generations. In fact, compared with other mammals, humans might have evolved to be especially averse to exercise.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“Decades of research show that hunter-gatherers generally manage to avoid starvation and maintain about the same weight throughout the year.18 That doesn’t mean hunter-gatherers don’t face tough times. They do. In fact, they frequently complain of being hungry. But one of the ways hunter-gatherers survive is by not foolishly squandering scarce calories on unnecessary activity.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“Stated simply, we evolved to be as inactive as possible. Or to be more precise, our bodies were selected to spend enough but not too much energy on nonreproductive functions including physical activity.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“No sensible adult hunter-gatherer wastes five hundred calories running five miles just for kicks.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“Here’s another, startling way of thinking about these numbers: if you are a typical person who barely exercises, it would take you just an hour or two of walking per day to be as physically active as a hunter-gatherer. Even so, few Americans or Europeans currently manage to achieve those modest levels of activity. The average PAL of industrialized adults in the developed world is 1.67, and many sedentary individuals have even lower PALs.23 These declines, moreover, are relatively recent and largely reflect changes in how we work, especially the growth of desk jobs that glue us to our chairs. In 1960, about half of all jobs in the United States involved at least moderate levels of physical activity, but today less than 20 percent of jobs demand more than light levels of activity, an average reduction of at least a hundred calories per day.24 That modest amount of unspent energy adds up to twenty-six thousand fewer calories spent over the course of a year, enough to run about ten marathons. And outside our jobs, we walk less, drive more, and use countless energy-saving devices from shopping carts to elevators that whittle away, calorie by calorie, at how much physical activity we do. The problem, of course, is that physical activity helps slow aging and promotes fitness and health. So those of us who no longer engage in physical labor to survive must now weirdly choose to engage in unnecessary physical activity for the sake of health and fitness. In other words, exercise.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“FAO scientists decided to measure people’s energy expenditures using the simplest metric possible, the physical activity level, or PAL.20 Your PAL is calculated as the ratio of how much energy you spend in a twenty-four-hour period divided by the amount of energy you would use to sustain your body if you never left your bed. This ratio has the advantage of being unbiased by differences in body size. Theoretically, a big person who is very physically active will have the same PAL as a small person who does the same activities. Ever since the PAL metric was conceived, scientists have measured the PALs of thousands of people from every walk of life and every corner of the globe. If you are a sedentary office worker who gets no exercise apart from generally shuffling about, your PAL is probably between 1.4 and 1.6. If you are moderately active and exercise an hour a day or have a physically demanding job like being a construction worker, your PAL is likely between 1.7 and 2.0. If your PAL is above 2.0, you are vigorously active for several hours a day. Although there is much variation, PALs of hunter-gatherers average 1.9 for men and 1.8 for women, slightly below PAL scores for subsistence farmers, which average 2.1 for men and 1.9 for women.21 To put these values into context, hunter-gatherer PALs are about the same as those of factory workers and farmers in the developed world (1.8), and about 15 percent higher than PALs of people with desk jobs in developed countries (1.6). In other words, typical hunter-gatherers are about as physically active as Americans or Europeans who include about an hour of exercise in their daily routine. In case you are wondering, most mammals in the wild have PALs of 3.3 or more, nearly twice as high as hunter-gatherers.22 Thus, comparatively speaking, humans who must hunt and gather all the food they eat and make everything they own by hand are substantially less active than average free-ranging mammals.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“Dancing isn't running, but it's usually more fun and such a universal, valued form of human psysical activity that we should consider it another gait akin to running.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“Chief among these myths is the notion that we are supposed to want to exercise.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

“better [to] sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
― Daniel E. Lieberman, Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding