If you’ve ever found yourself at the grocery store behind someone who is overweight, unloading chips and sodas from their cart, and thought: “Why on earth is that person buying that junk?” You might be surprised to learn that it is you—the daily crossfitting, yoga mat-carrying eater of vegetables—who are the anomaly in the situation. You are the one going against your evolution-bequeathed natural tendencies, not the object of your derision.
It turns out that dieting and exercise are actually really weird things, and they’re hard for most people to do. In fact, the grocery store aisle, with its glossy promises of belly-fat busting on one side and a literal four-foot wall of chocolate and candy on the other, is a great place to pause for a moment to seriously think about our ideas about health and fitness—and where those ideas come from.
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