By: Michael Beiter

For most of human history, famine was the default state when it came to the food environment. Most jobs entailed physical labor of some sort. When it came to exercise, it was mandatory to get by.

Advancements in the last century have eliminated our famine and daily labor problems. Our problems are obesity and sedentism - the complete opposites of what we used to deal with, which is good; it represents progress. I like to say we’ve traded up. 

Rather than a day in the fields or mines and coming home to scarce food choices, we have days in chairs and offices and leave work to thousands of food options. 

The condition of our food environment being abundant and our work being knowledge-based rather than labor-based is so new. Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying believe the struggles produced like obesity and sedentism result from hyper novelty. I’m with them. 

Our environments are improving so rapidly that our evolution and adaptation systems can’t keep up. It’s easy to see this playing out in America today in fitness and nutrition. 

Our bodies adapted to conserve energy because food was scarce, and we might need the power to catch animals to eat or survive a life-threatening situation. Part of those adaptations was to store energy for later as body fat and conserve energy as much as possible with sedentism. 

People are wired to store fat and choose to be less active when given the opportunity. We just never knew we would have the chance not to be active at all and still get by, which is very much the case today. 

For example, I’m a fitness professional, and I can make a living sitting in a chair all day long after getting out of bed, driving in a seated position to work, and reversing the trend to get home. Physical activity shifted from a necessity to a choice so fast that our bodies don’t know what’s going on. Combined with a body adapted to famine with fat storage as its go-to mechanism, we live through the consequences. The result? Two out of three Americans are overweight; obesity rates exceed fifty percent. The statistics for kids are just as scary. 

Hyper novelty explains this issue well, but it doesn’t provide solutions. That’s where my work comes in. Because our environment is changing faster than our biology can adapt, we must choose to be physically active daily and use a system to manage our eating habits. With these two behaviors in place, we can buck the trends of obesity. 

The first idea is simple but not easy. Strength training is the most beneficial activity, followed by cardio and stretching. The difficulty is that we have to use willpower and energy. For an hour every day, we need to choose to move our bodies. 

The second idea is also simple but even more challenging. We have to systemize our eating or fall victim to the abundant food environment and our body’s wiring to store body fat. I’ve been studying ways to do this for over a decade, and with each passing year, I grow more confident the only way we can do this is with the very thing that changed our world so quickly: technology. 

Using your smartphone to manage your eating represents the cutting edge of technology.

With a food scale and an app, we can be stupidly effective at managing the inputs of our food. We are using hyper novelty to our advantage in this case: the tech to track macros accurately and quickly has only been around for a decade.

Hypernovelty has allowed people to trade up in their problems. It’s a sign of progress, and while it has made our world much easier to live in we have a responsibility to those who came before us who didn’t have it as good to choose to exercise and log our food. Why? Because they didn’t even have the option. They were too busy figuring out where the next meal would come from and breaking their backs at work.