Why is it hard for most people to eat healthy or get good sleep or even workout if ultimately this will be good for our health and survival ?
In: Biology
Because when your metabolism evolved sugar was very scarce. Meaning your brain hardwired itself to find it extremely enjoyable. Now that it is not scarce, you’re stuck with a brain desperate for foods which you can easily acquire in excess.
You can try starving yourself for a few days, and then try to eat a food you normally dislike. It will taste much better. Im slimming down a bit, and just smelling bread triggers something in my brain after just a few days running a calorie defeceit.
I believe it’s because it cares much more about the here and now and making sure we take advantage of things now.
We evolved where things were scarce and having too much of stuff is a relatively recent thing. Delayed gratification is considered to be quite an advanced thing to do and I can see why. We’re humans, we know logically the benefit of these things yet we still do things that will be easier short term
It goes against our nature to see say a bunch of food when we were living in less plentiful times and to not eat it. Why would you do that?
In the environment that we evolved, it was beneficial to our ancestors to make the most of any opportunities to
1) rest (be lazy)
2) eat high calorie foods (be greedy)
3) interact with social events (social media addiction)
4) have sex (sex/porn addiction)
I’m sure there’s many more I missed. Also we have found many ways to simulate the chemical changes in the brain that serve a purpose for survival, and the short term highs they give us can make us less motivated for long term changes.
It’s not that we aren’t good at forming habits. It’s more that the modern world, due to capitalist pursuit of satisfying consumers short term interests, has effectively hacked our programming to seduce us in just the right way to exploit our biological mechanisms.
Our bodies evolved to an environment of relative scarcity, not the current one of food availability/surplus (in many places), and it took us very little time to reach this point on a geological time scale.
In the past, like 300k+ years ago, it was not difficult to stay in shape and eat healthy because it was a necessity. People simply didn’t have enough sugar/fats available to need to make healthier choices daily. And they had to exert much more physical energy to survive, they couldn’t sit around all day like people can nowadays, whether it be at a job or during leisure time.
Evolution works slowly to adapt to an environment, but we’ve changed ours so rapidly that the human body hasn’t had time to adjust. Also, as others have pointed out, evolution doesn’t care as much what happens after reproductive age, as most people have already passed on their genes by then (if they do at all), which is the driving force behind natural selection.
Our instincts are geared toward traits that made us more likely to survive 10,000 years ago. Our environment has changed significantly since then but evolution hasn’t quite caught up yet. If you go over habits that are “unhealthy” today you’ll find that for the most part they made perfect sense back then.
Why do we love salt, fat and sugar so much? Because salt is rare in nature, and fats and sugars are high-density energy sources. When you’re struggling to get enough food they are excellent for survival. It’s only in the past hundred years or so that we have so much access to it that it becomes a problem. In addition, a lot of junk food consists almost entirely of the stuff that our bodies associate with high nutrition because they’re often found together in nature, but without the actual nutritional value that we need.
Why are we lazy? Because activity costs energy, and again, up until recently we were operating on a tight energy budget. Our bodies want to conserve fuel unless we push them not to. “Exercise” wasn’t really a thing in the distant past because we needed to perform a lot of physical activity to survive at all. Today we don’t and our bodies haven’t caught up to the change.
Stress is basically a result of our bodies reacting to pressure in the way that they would have reacted to pressure in the wild. Back then, the reason you’d be under stress is because there were dangers nearby, and it would be a bad idea to sleep since you’d have to be ready to fight. Today, staying awake and being ready to fight isn’t really a good solution to our problems, but it is the only way our body knows how to react to trouble, so we have to fight against that natural impulse and use our brains to take more useful steps.
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