Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding

A multiyear analysis of almost five thousand Americans found that people who broke up their sitting time with frequent short breaks had up to 25 percent less inflammation than those who rarely rose from their chairs despite sitting the same number of hours.

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.

How can something so ancient, universal, and ordinary as sitting be so unhealthy?

Put simply, regular movement, including getting up every once in a while, helps prevent chronic inflammation by keeping down postprandial levels of fat and sugar.

When my colleague Dr. Aaron Baggish attached accelerometers (tiny devices, like Fitbits, that measure steps per day) to more than twenty Tarahumara men, he discovered they walked on average ten miles a day. In other words, the training that enables them to run back-to-back marathons is the physical work that is part and parcel of their everyday lif

Okay, so exercise is paradoxical: salubrious but abnormal, intrinsically free but highly commodified, a source of pleasure and health but a cause of discomfort, guilt, and opprobrium. Why did this realization motivate me to write this book? And why might you wish to read it?

1 One prominent physician has declared that chairs are “out to get us, harm us, kill us” and that “sitting is the new smoking.”2

Expert consensus is that we need 150 minutes of exercise a week, but we also read that just a few minutes of high-intensity exercise a day is enough to make us fit.

Without seeming like a madman or an idiot, how would I explain to a hunter-gatherer, a farmer in Pemja, or even my great-great-great-grandparents that I spend most of my days sitting in chairs and then compensate for my idleness by paying money to go to a gym to make myself sweaty, tired, and uncomfortable on a machine that forces me to struggle to