Am I B.L.U.E.? (Bored, Lonely, Uncomfortable…Ever)

One reason there’s an obesity epidemic is that humans evolved in a world of caloric scarcity: getting enough food wasn’t easy for most of the population for most of human history. It still isn’t easy for many, many food-insecure people.

However, the people who are food secure find themselves in an evolutionary conundrum: our instincts tell us to eat a lot whenever we can because there may not be food later. If we follow our instincts, we get fat. To stay fit, we have to make an unnatural choice: stop eating even though there are still calories available.

This conundrum is relatively new. We’ve had decades to get used to calorie-convenient things like supermarkets, fast food, frozen food, microwaves, and food delivery. We’ve also had decades of fitness gurus telling us to exercise (the first one I remember was Jack LaLanne) and diet after diet, all trying to help us fight our instincts.

Someday, medical science may develop ways to tweak our metabolisms to crave less food as easily as we use glasses to tweak our vision: wouldn’t that be nifty?

The second paradox of choice

Unlike cheap calories, we haven’t had all that long to get used to cheap information. The commercially available internet has only existed since the 1990s. Social Media became popular with Myspace 15 years ago. Smartphones, which made cheap information available everywhere, started with the iPhone just 12 years ago.