Our bodies evolved thousands of years ago to survive uncertainty. Food might be plentiful one day and hard to find the next. Movement was part of getting through the day, and every calorie mattered.
People spent a lot of their day moving, searching, hunting, gathering, and figuring out where their next meal would come from. If you found a bush covered in berries, you ate them because you had no idea when you’d find more. If your people caught an animal, you ate as much of it as you could.
Your body learned to make the most of those opportunities. Store energy. Save calories. Eat when food is available. Those instincts were incredibly useful. They helped humans survive.
Now place those same instincts in today’s chaotic world.
Whether it’s sitting at a desk for eight hours or spending an evening on the couch, our daily lives require far less movement. And getting food requires much less effort — fast food establishments are on every corner, and ordering food is now a push of a button on our phones. Our environment has changed, but our biology is still working from the old playbook.
Modern food adds another layer to the problem. Many of the foods we encounter every day combine fat, salt, and sugar in ways that keep us going back for more. Our ancient programming doesn’t know that another meal is coming in a few hours. It recognizes an opportunity for energy.
This helps explain why weight and health can be such a difficult struggle. We’re not making choices in the same environment our biology evolved to handle. Think of it as bringing an ancient survival system into a world of convenience, oversized portions, constant stimulation, and very little physical effort. The system is doing exactly what it learned to do; it’s just doing it under completely different conditions.
You don’t have to spend every day fighting your ancient programming.
Start by changing the conditions around you:
- Make healthier foods easier to choose. Remove unhealthy foods from your pantry and don’t rebuy them at the grocery store. If those potato chips you’re craving aren’t in the house, you can’t eat them. And you probably won’t drive to the store to get more in that moment.
- Pay attention to portions. Request a takeout container at the beginning of your meal at a restaurant. This way you won’t overeat in one sitting.
- Create boundaries around distracted eating. Eat at the dinner table or turn the TV off so you can be fully aware of the food in front of you.
- Build movement into your day. Take the stairs instead of the elevator, walk while on a call, or park farther away from the store entrance.
We can’t change the programming that helped humans survive for thousands of years. But we can change how we respond to it. By taking small steps toward optimal health and wellbeing, building healthy habits, and using Your LifeBook, we can make healthier choices easier.
You aren’t working with a broken system. You’re working with an ancient system in a modern world. Stop fighting your biology and start designing your habits, environment, and choices to work with it.