Why solving Fitness problem is so tough?
The fitness industry is booming everywhere. In India, the forecasted Cumulative Average Growth Rate for the next five years is ~9.5%. Stats apart just by looking around, we can notice the ubiquitous rise of fitness apps and gadgets.
We can’t help but ask ourselves what’s all this fuss about? What’s the problem they are solving? And more importantly, what is the fitness problem anyway?
Fitness & Health
Fitness is a relatively new concern for humans. For a large part of the civilization, how to maintain a fit lifestyle was not a top of mind question for our kind. Even the first gyms who came in the 1900s focused on the body’s strength and aesthetics rather than general health. It was only recently that fitness became synonyms to healthy living after the discovery of a strong correlation between lifestyle and chronic health issues. The fact that fitness is a problem of abundance and not scarcity should be enough to highlight its modern origin.
Fitness: An Evolutionary Paradox
Humans have evolved in a world where food was hard to get. Early Homo Sapiens had to put in immense efforts to obtain the caloric intake of a Big Mac (which is 600 Kcal).
Given the harshness of the world at the time of our origin, natural selection has designed our body and instincts to assume that :
- energy resources are precious (hog on calories and preserve them as much as possible)
- physical labor is a given in the process of acquiring food so avoid putting too much effort (expect sports which were possibly part of a mate selection ritual)
In a nutshell, the problem of fitness is that our evolutionary design is now archaic.
In the modern world, calories are readily available and physical hardship is no longer needed for survival. In fact, I know quite a few people who are thriving while taking less than 500 steps a day. The conditions have inverted, and our natural instincts (what behavioral scientists call System 1 thinking) are no longer suited to help us with our lifestyle choices.
So what next? System 2 and its Tech Team
In the world of jungle, we are very much primed for extinction now. Our bodies and instincts are outdated for our habitat. The time is suitable for a new human species to appear in the evolutionary timeline — one who is more adept to handle these abundance issues.
But not all hopes are lost yet. We have the most evolved brains in the animal kingdom with a capacity to do rational thinking (what behavioral scientists call System 2 Thinking). Like it has done in the past, our rational mind can give us a lot of leverage when it comes to adaptability. The only irony is that our forefathers were adapting to the world bequeathed upon them and we will be adapting to the world created by us.
In any case System 2, can help us make plans to avoid the pitfalls of our instinctive thinking. After all, it is System 2 that compels us to wake up and go for a run or say NO to a jar full of delicious candies. But here is the catch our System 2 needs a lot of will power(energy) and whenever we can’t muster it our instincts take over.
And here, in this small space, the entire fitness industry lies. They are the support system for our System 2. They build solutions that may reduce the trouble of going to a gym, or provide ways to visualize our hard work. They even look up ways to maximize the effect of the precious workout time our system 2 steals from system 1. In the battle of the brain, the fitness industry is cheerleading the underdog, System 2.
Solving fitness involves solving a behavior problem — especially one which is encouraged by our evolutionary design. And that is why solving our fitness problem is tough. It is not a struggle between man and matter but man and his mind. And as anyone who has sat in for even 10 secs would know, the mind is crazy and hard to master.
