“Everyone has a hard time catching a mouse in the kitchen,” says Wills, founder of The Wills System. “If we can’t catch a mouse in the kitchen, it’s impossible to catch a squirrel in nature. We never ran after our food. Instead, we outsmarted our prey.” Using this example, Wills maintains that humans were never meant to run marathons.
Running Dulls the Mind and Simulates Death
“In nature, for the last 400,000 years, the only time we ran was when someone was trying to kill us or eat us,” says Wills. “When we start to run, our bodies go into fear and flight mode. Our front cortex shuts down and we use our rear brain, which is 15% less intelligent.”
Wills says that in fight or flight mode, digestion shuts down because the body expects to be eaten. “Cortisol [an adrenal hormone] goes through the roof, and cortisol wears down the heart lining,” he says.
Wills says that scientists have found that when humans run, the same part of the brain lights up as when they experience a spiritual moment. The brain makes endorphins, which make it less painful to die. So the more people run, the more their bodies sense that they’re going to die. They’re simulating death on a daily basis. Simulating death, according to Wills, causes stress, which increases cortisol.
Exercise Stimulates Hunger, Encourages Overeating
John Cloud, in the August 2009 Time article “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin,” says that although most people agree that exercise is necessary to burn calories and to lose weight, exercise actually stimulates hunger.
“That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued,” Cloud says. “Exercise, in other words, isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It might be making it harder.”
In addition, Cloud and Wills believe that exercise can actually reduce the amount of willpower available to the dieter. In his Time article, Cloud says, “Because exercise depletes not just the body's muscles but the brain's self-control 'muscle' as well, many of us will feel greater entitlement to eat a bag of chips during that lazy time after we get back from the gym.”
Another interesting point raised by Cloud is that strenuous exercise can actually make a person more sedentary than they might otherwise be. “If I exercised less, I might feel like walking more instead of hopping into a cab; I might have enough energy to shop for food, cook and then clean instead of ordering a satisfyingly greasy burrito."
So what’s a dieter to do? Wills suggests a 20-minute walk, twice a day, six days a week and weight training, combined with a diet based on the Glycemic Index, which rates the speed at which different types of carbohydrates raise sugar levels in the bloodstream. Wills says this type of exercise provides great cardio training without simulating the running effect of approaching death.
