You Were Lied to About Exercise

I'm so sorry

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xx Erin

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Calories in, calories out.

Eat less, move more.

As a girl who grew up in the mainstream culture in the 90s and later pursued a career in fitness, I’m not unfamiliar with these tropes. They have been the battle cries of naive personal trainers (myself included) and seedy magazines for decades, even as far back as the early 1900s when physician Lulu Hunt Peters released her (unfortunate smash-hit) book Diet and Health: With Key to the Calories, where she wrote:

"Hereafter, you are going to eat calories of food. Instead of saying one slice of bread, or a piece of pie, you will say, 100 calories of bread or 350 calories of pie."

She strongly associated dieting with morality, and, unsurprisingly, had an eating disorder.

With the wild success of the book, calorie counting was born, and the seeds of diet culture as we know it were planted.

Since then, exercise has largely been reduced to mere calorie burning.

“Burn more than you eat” has been the gold standard for weight loss, the simple formula for health, human health reduced to simple math, for generations.

And it’s wrong.

The Exercise Paradox

In the modern lexicon, “exercise” is mostly about body composition: losing weight and keeping it off, often simply looked at as “burning calories”. In order to lose weight, you must be in a calorie deficit, i.e., burn more than you consume. One way to increase your calorie deficit is but reducing the number of calories you consume. But who wants to do that?

On the flip side, though, you can simply move more, or with more intensity—the more movement you get, the more calories you burn, thus increasing the deficit.

This is what exercise has been reduced to, for a large portion of the population.

But it doesn’t really work that way.

To learn why, we can look at the seminal work (← highly recommend giving this a read) of anthropologist Herman Ponzer, who studied how the total daily calorie expenditure of modern hunter-gathers (specifically, the Hadza in Tanzania)—who are often lauded as paragons of an active lifestyle—compared to sedentary populations in the United States—paragons of an inactive lifestyle.

What he found was shocking:

When the analyses came back from Baylor, the Hadza looked like everyone else. Hadza men ate and burned about 2,600 calories a day, Hadza women about 1,900 calories a day—the same as adults in the U.S. or Europe. We looked at the data every way imaginable, accounting for effects of body size, fat percentage, age and sex. No difference. How was it possible? What were we missing? What else were we getting wrong about human biology and evolution?

The two populations burned virtually the same exact amount of calories.

How was this possible? The equation was set in stone: move more, burn more. Or so we thought.

Ultimately, what this study uncovered was that the body adapts to high activity levels. So when you start exercising more, your body doesn’t just keep burning more and more calories on top of your baseline. It reallocates energy from other processes to compensate.

For example, unseen tasks such as managing inflammation, stress response, and cellular clean-up and repair are all energy-intensive activities.

At a certain point, energy expenditure plateaus: people with extremely active lives burn about the same as those with moderately active lives.

(If you’re interested in learning more about this further, I again highly recommend reading Ponzer’s article in Scientific American—linked above— or picking up his book Burn.)

Reframing Exercise

Ok, so moving more doesn’t necessarily mean burning more. As a calorie-deficit-weight loss-strategy, it’s bunk.

But that doesn’t mean exercise is pointless—it means we’ve been measuring its value completely wrong.

Exercise isn’t just about calorie burn—it cannot be reduced to simple math, because it’s so much more than that.

It’s about cellular communication. When we move our bodies, cells become more sensitive and responsive to insulin, allowing glucose (energy) to enter more easily. It reduces inflammatory signaling. And it enhances mitochondrial function, which, for some reason, the only thing we all collectively remember from high school biology is that the mitochondria (say it with me) is the powerhouse of the cell. Stronger mitochondria = more cellular energy with less waste, which = less fatigue, less brain fog, faster recovery, and slower aging.

It’s about hormone regulation. Most people don’t know that muscle is an endocrine organ. When you move, contract, and build muscle, it releases signaling molecules—called myokines—that reduce inflammation, improve brain function, help regulate mood, metabolism, and immune response.

It’s about brain function. Movement increases Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF)—essentially Miracle Grow for neurons—which promotes neuroplasticity (making the brain more adaptable), increases neurogenesis (the growth of new neurons) to support memory and learning, regulates mood through modulating serotonin and dopamine, and shields neurons from oxidative stress. Without so many words, movement makes you a smarter, happier person, for longer.

Movement is medicine.

Exercise is a full-body systems upgrade, not a punishment for what you ate.

It’s a mind-body connection tool. A hormone-balancing, brain-enhancing, mood-regulating pharmacy in your own body.

So you tore your ACL playing pickleball

We all know this person: they consider themselves to be decently fit, they go to the gym a few times a week, maybe they run… and they blew their knee out playing pickleball. Or snapped their achilles during a “friendly” game of pick-up basketball. Or slipped disk sneezing.

We simply chalk these things up to getting older, but that’s not really the full story.

Just because something is common doesn’t mean it’s normal.

Bad backs, knees, and hips are rampant in our society, plaguing people as early as their 30s. Sometimes earlier.

But for groups like modern hunter-gatherers, while they do experience some wear and tear, they aren’t experiencing nearly the same levels of cataclysmic or chronic overuse injuries as we do here in the Western world, staying remarkably pain-free despite being more active

So… why?

It’s because they get a balanced diet of what I call Movement Nutrients.

Most people are getting the junk-food equivalent to movement: mostly sedentary, then spending a little time in the gym—albeit sporadic and inconsistent—doing bilateral, fixed movements in the sagittal plane (meaning, no rotation or lateral movement). Using weight machines and treadmills, maybe some barbell and dumbbell exercises for the more serious gym-goer. Or just hopping on the treadmill or stationary bike.

These things are like the human equivalent of a hamster wheel. Enrichment activities for the animals of the human zoo.

This isn’t bad, per se, and it’s definitely better than nothing. But if you want to live a long, pain-free life where your body is not a limiting factor for anything you might want to do, it’s not going to get you very far.

A rung above that, you have your fitness enthusiasts. This group is getting a better nutritional profile than the junk-food crowd. They might be “weekend warriors”: runners, bikers, or hikers, and take cross-training seriously. They might do a “functional fitness” class like CrossFit. They’re in the gym doing sled pushes, dynamic, powerful movements, maybe some kettlebells. They consider themselves to have an “active lifestyle” and make the gym a priority.

But there’s a problem: This subset of people is probably the most likely to hurt themselves. They’re still largely sedentary throughout most of their days, then overtraining, going too hard in the gym, not using proper periodization, or giving the body enough rest, leaving their bodies ill-equipped to handle the sudden high demand.

Pop goes the meniscus.

This is because, even when we’re “fit”, we’re still not giving the body the nutrient-dense movement that a resiliant and truly functional human body requires—the movement it was designed for.

Movement Nutrients

These movements are:

Walking (the most restorative, nutrient-dense movement of them all)

Squatting

Hanging/brachiation

Climbing

Crawling

Carrying

Jumping

Running

Sprinting

Throwing

And dare I say, dancing.

In a perfect world, one designed for the human animal (ironic, since we designed our own environment), we would just naturally engage in these activities. No gym required. But, since we do not live in such a world, it’s worth thinking about exercise as a way to restore these functions. Anything you want to do on top of that—lifting weights, calisthenics, yoga, biking, etc.—might be considered a supplement, just as the purpose of dietary supplements is to support an already nutritious diet.

The Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania don’t experience modern injuries because they engage in these activities regularly. They get a wide variety of movement that naturally distributes demand across different tissues and ranges of motion. They have natural rest cycles built into their lifestyle. There are no chairs, no cars, and no treadmills. They squat, kneel, and sit on the ground instead of chairs or couches. They walk barefoot, and move on natural terrain that challenges proprioception and joint mobility.

Because they’ve moved this way since birth, their movement patterns are efficient, not corrupted by years of sitting, phones, shoes with arch support, or gym machines.

And before you come at me with any of this, “yeah, but they suffer from devastating injuries from falls, bites, and punctures”. Yes, obviously, it’s not a perfect life without danger or injury. There are significant hazards to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. What I’m saying is that there are lessons to be learned here. Being a human is risky business, no matter what lifestyle you live or where you are in the world. But they’re not suffering from the same afflictions we are, and it’s worth examining.

If you want a less extreme example, we don’t even have to go to the extreme lengths of hunter-gatherers to see this play out. We can look to the Blue Zones—areas around the world where people are living healthier, for longer.

I often hesitate to bring up the Blue Zones, which officially include Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia, Italy, Ikaria, Greece, Nicoya, Costa Rica, and Loma Linda, California, because they’re cherry-picked, shrouded in controversy via poor record keeping and pension fraud, and the narratives around their actual lifestyles are often distorted to fit a narrative (mostly in regards to diet). But in this instance, they’re a good example of people living simply, getting tons of nutritious movement that’s baked into their lifestyles.

One thing that all of the Blue Zones seem to have in common is that these people are walking EVERYWHERE. They walk to tend gardens, visit friends, go to markets, herd animals, or get water, often in minimal or barefoot shoes (or just barefoot period) and over steep and uneven terrain. If you take nothing else from this, start walking—whenever and wherever you can. If you already walk, walk more.

They sit on the floor, especially in Okinawa and Nicoya. We like to demonize sitting in the Western World, some even say “sitting is the new smoking”, but it’s actually been found that even hunter-gatherers spend nearly as much time resting during the day as Westerners, it’s just that they’re not resting in chairs in couches. They’re sitting on the floor, kneeling, stooping, and squatting.

Sitting on the floor is one of the best ways to increase joint mobility of the lower limbs, and constantly getting up and down off the ground improves strength and balance. In these cultures, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” is not a thing (falls and fall-risk is the #1 reason for going into assisted living facilities). The ability to easily get up and down off the ground (without hand assistance) is a near-perfect litmus test for your body’s overall functionality. Do it when you’re done reading this and see how you fare.

Aside from sitting, they also just live close to the ground. In gardening, cooking, cleaning, and food preparation, people in the Blue Zones are getting into kneeling, hands-and-knees, or forward-folded positions. They use full-body, rotational, and squat-based movements to prepare traditional meals or tend to animals. These crawling-type movements are foundational to how human movement develops from the time we’re infants. The problem is, most of us leave them behind, never to return, even though they’re foundational patterns for functional movement that support us throughout our entire lives.

They carry heavy loads like wood, food, and tools, often up hills and stairs. They do manual labor— lifting, pulling, and digging. All things that increase overall strength, but especially grip strength, which has a strong correlation with longevity.

And finally, they dance. They get together and dance, sing, and play, moving and regulating in community. Arguably just as, if not more, medicinal and nutritious than walking.

These people don’t think about calories—consuming, burning, or otherwise.

We’ve designed our world to exist between our hips and our shoulders. Rarely do we need to bend over, crawl, squat, reach, climb, or lift. In this world, movement has become a choice—a conscious, intentional, sometimes radical act. But the body will give you what you ask it—if you don’t ask for much, it won’t give you much.

When we’ve engineered out so much healing, nutritious movement, it’s up to us to decide how to want to proceed. Do we want to punish ourselves, reduce our bodies and what they can do to math? Do we want to subscribe to a culture that cares much more about how a body looks than how it feels and functions?

Or, do we want to see movement as a celebration of what the human body can do? A celebration of simply just being alive, despite the impossible odds of even being born? As a way to connect with our humanness and relate to the lineage of thousands of generations of humans that have come before us? At the very least, it’s a way to feel good in our bodies and in our lives.

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