Couch Potatoes Can Feel Good About Themselves?

There is an interesting opinion piece by Daniel Lieberman, who offers reassurance to people who have found motivating themselve to take exercise in the Covid-19 lockdowns difficult (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/05/exercising-human-evolution-moving-covid-psychology). It is worth noting that some 50% of people in the UK, claim to have put on weight in lockdown. Lieberman (an Evolutionary Psychologist) has studied hunter-gatherers in a variety of locations, including Tanzania. He notes that the energy expended in obtaining sufficient food is high for such people but that adults, in these locations, have a 'universal instinct' to avoid physical activity that is unnecessary or unrewarding. So, they are a bit like birds of prey, spending a lot of time 'sitting around', interspersed with short hunting bouts of intense physical activity. In deed, Lieberman notes that adult hunter-gatherers in Tanzania spend almost 10 hours a day just sitting (like me by the computer). He suggests that such cultures (and our ancestors) would find it very difficult to understand why someone would 'pay' to exercise or to join a gym. Training, he notes, initially came in inorder to improve the fighting capacity of troops and rather later for sport. Because few of us have to expend lots of energy to feed ourselves, exercise has become important for our mental and physical health. We should not, however, regard ourselves as 'lazy' simply because we find it hard to motivate ourselves.