Obesity only became a major problem in the 1960s when the world and his wife began to exchange horse power for muscle power. By this time most households could afford a washing machine, which meant that energy was no longer expended washing clothes by hand. Gardens came to be tended, not with hand tools, but with hedge cutters and motor mowers. Factory workers no longer carried out repetitive manual tasks on long production lines, but sat down twiddling the knobs on increasing complex automated machinery. Instead of walking to work, thousands switched to commuting by car. In London, a survey revealed that the average white collar worker was now travelling less than a mile a day on foot. With fully half the bus journeys in the city being less than one mile in length, a journey that can generally be covered more quickly on foot, Londoners will rather wait for a bus, in rain and howling gales, than exercise their legs. This hypokinetic shift is a major cause of the current obesity plague. We get fat, not necessarily because we eat too much, but more particularly because we exercise too little. Labourers in Victorian times ate plenty of junk food, and drunk lashings of beer, yet if you look at the old photos of farm labourers, coal miners and deep sea fisherman you'll notice that none of them had a weight problem.
At one time it was believed that middle aged spreads arise because muscles have an inherent tendency to turn to fat. That's total twaddle. If we eat too much, and exercise too little, it's inevitable that we'll grow fat. At the same time we're bound to lose muscle bulk, but these two metabolic changes are contemporaneous, rather than causally linked. All too often our problem is, not that we eat too much, but that we exercise too little. And that has a knock on effect. People say they're sick and tired of being overweight, when what they really mean is that they're sick and tired through being overweight. Anyone who's overweight is likely to be prone to breathlessness, ready fatigue and rheumatic aches and pains. Fat folk fade fast. This means they're more likely to take it easy, and maybe give themselves a boost by taking some sugary foodstuffs when their spirits droop. Motion pictures of a group of girls playing volley ball during a summer camp showed that those who were overweight were standing still for nearly ninety per cent of the game compared with just over half for those who weren't carrying a load of excess fat. The truth is, you can't be fit and fat.
One way of turning this vicious circle into a virtuous circle is to start building up your muscle mass. Shun the escalators, do some form of daily exercise and walk whenever you can. The more muscle you build the trimmer you'll look, for muscle is far more compact than fat. It will also dispose of some of your surplus calories, for a kilogram of muscle burns up approximately three calories a day, compared with the one calorie required to maintain a similar weight of fat. If in the next few weeks you can increase your muscle mass by just three pounds you'll burn up about an extra 200 calories a day, which is equivalent to a loss of roughly a pound of fat every 18 days. What's more, you'll burn up extra calories every time you boost your activity levels, and this can continue even when you're watching TV, or lying asleep in bed, for the level of body metabolism remains raised for four to six hours after exercise is taken. All these benefits, and their just a muscle twitch away.
