Nothing special.

This was a little rant I posted on Facebook yesterday, a little similar to my post here about modern weight problems:

so apparently a colleague is shopping around around for a publisher for his book, and the feedback he got from one publishing house was that his work was “sane, levelheaded, with proven advice” and as such they weren't interested as they didn't think it was saleable.

Meanwhile I just found out that "paleo water" is a thing. You can buy some sort of filtration device that makes your tap water more closely resemble water our primal ancestors would have drunk. I dunno man maybe they get a guy 200 metres up stream to take a shit in it or something. Sounds WONDERFUL.

All these stupid fkn gimmicks people make a buck with. The next one (I swear to god I am not making this up) is going to be this DNA test where now thanks to the miracle of science your trainer can get a report back from the lab that let's them build an exercise program that will work.

It blows my mind. All this stuff works on the principle that you can only be in shape and healthy under very specific circumstances. You need this very specific diet, very specific exercise program, if you get the wrong one... it might work for someone else but not for you depending on your DNA. 

It is actually ridiculous. Being OUT of shape is what requires a special and unusual set of circumstances. People have been in shape and healthy for aeons without doing anything special about it. The more complicated you make something, the more can go wrong. Why would we even need a complicated approach to produce a result that is our default condition anyway?

Nothing special or complicated is required. So many of my people will tell you how much better results they got, and how it "felt like it just happened by accident" when they stopped trying to follow all of these complicated and restrictive approaches.