You probably won’t become obese, even if your genetics make you prone to obesity, as long as your environment makes it necessary for you to work hard, or food is scarce.

Sort of. People are naturally inactive, as we talked about in The Power of
Rest Threat. Survival requires that we conserve energy. And for people prone
to obesity, tasty food is particularly hard to resist, as we talked about in The
Power of Genetics Threat and The Power of Food Threat.

The thing is the people of yesterday were just like us. They had the same
love of food and the same love of leisure as we do. It just didn’t matter, because
the environment they lived in forced them to exercise and made tasty high
calorie foods unavailable to most people.

Given a chance, our ancestors would behave exactly as we do today. We
are them and they are us.

A good example historically is how rich people have been overweight.
Rich people in the past lived like most everyone can live today. They didn’t
have to do hard physical work to survive and they could afford large quantities
of the best food. When given a chance, they became overweight by
moving less and eating more. So, has the character of people changed, or
is it more likely that more people are now able to live the life they naturally
prefer?

What has changed dramatically in the last 50 years is the environment.
Modern technology has given us the world we most desire. Food is cheap,
available everywhere, served in monster portions, and comes filled with large
quantities of wonderful tasting fat and sugar. You can’t escape food. Food is
everywhere you look.

At the same time, we have engineered physical activity out of almost every
aspect of our lives. Most jobs today require little activity. We spend our leisure
time watching TV, movies, and playing video games. We drive everywhere.
We buy labor-saving devices and, if we can, hire other people to do the hard
work. It all adds up to a lot less work than even a person two or three generations
ago would have done to survive.

Today, if we wish to eat less, we have to make ourselves eat less. In the
past the environment didn’t provide enough food for most of us to become
overweight. And today, if we wish to exercise, we have to make ourselves
exercise more. In the past the environment demanded we exercise in order
to survive. Now the responsibility for your weight is completely yours.

Four of the Power Threats (Power of Genetics, Power of Food, Power of
Rest, and Power of Environment) conspire together. If one threat weakens
you, then your chance of being overweight increases, which is why obesity is
such a difficult problem to combat and understand. You’ll likely stay lean if
you aren’t genetically predisposed to be obese no matter how tempting the
environment. Even if your genetics makes you prone to obesity, you probably
won’t become obese as long as your environment makes it necessary for you
to work hard or keeps food in short supply.

But what happens when we turn lose people who are prone to obesity into
a world where little activity is required and great tasting food is available for
next to nothing everywhere you look? You get exactly the world we see today.
Isn’t expecting any other outcome a bit unrealistic?

Can we make ourselves exercise more and eat less? Much of the time,
we can. But can we consciously make ourselves exercise more and eat less,
24 hours a day for the rest of the lives?

Most of us can’t. If you have to rely on willpower 24 hours a day for the
rest of your life, then your chances of staying on your diet are very small. You
just have to look at the very high failure rates (up to 95%) for diets to see the
likely results.

What you need is an approach that doesn’t rely on continual conscious
control for success. That’s why this book introduces the strategy of Weight-
Proofing. You are in a good position to control your weight once you can
create an environment in which you don’t have to rely on a constant supply
of willpower.