Everlean Culture

Read time: 1.5 minutes

There are two categories of exercise literature. One is based on athletic development, like competitive sports and bodybuilding. The other is based on getting sick people to become healthy, or (more popularly) on preserving health in a population that’s slowly killing itself.

As personal fitness trainers, we tell our clients and the public that exercise prevents obesity, insulin-resistance, diabetes, bone loss, and cardiac disease — as if those who don’t exercise will automatically get fat, become diabetic, and die of heart disease. Before Gold’s Gym and 24-Hour Nautilus, how in the hell did people manage? How do people in cultures that don’t exercise live to be 100, without suffering obesity and degenerative diseases?

Folks like the Okinawans, Sardinians, people of the Nikoya Peninsula, and the Seventh-day Adventists live long lives free of degenerative diseases, yet they never lift a dumbbell. Instead they eat wholesome food and participate in natural, relatively gentle activities like gardening and gathering food. Of course there are other factors to the good health, longevity and overall leanness seen in these populations, but formal exercise isn’t one of them. These people are void of the modern diseases seen regularly in populations whose diet comprises heavily of grain-based processed foods and who must rely desperately on formal exercise to preserve their volatile state of health.

According to data presented in Good Calories Bad Calories, inactivity might not be the cause of overweight. Rather, inactivity and overweight might both be symptoms of the same cause. And the cause, as overwhelming evidence suggests, might be the consumption of refined sugar and grain-based carbohydrates, which retards our ability to burn calories for fuel, resulting in the propensity for not just overweight but also inactivity.

This may explain why for most people exercise is very difficult; fuel remains locked inside fat cells and cannot reach the muscle. Overweight people, therefore, who force themselves to exercise should be commended for their mental strength and physical effort despite suffering energy sparsity. Good health and a lean body ought not to be so unnaturally brutal. Alas, people believe it is the penance for eating brutally unnatural foods.

Inactivity might not be the problem. Instead, the problem might be that grain-based processed carbohydrates is damaging the body’s ability to utilize calories and thus depressing its propensity for activity.

It’s time the overweight and the obese abandon the empty promises of conventional weight-loss diets and exercise programs, throw out the calorie-counting and the treadmill, and try something different: eliminate grains and sugar and return to pre-agriculture real food.