Exercised. Why something we never evolved to do is healthy and rewarding, Daniel E. Lieberman (ISBN 978-0-525-43478-8, Vintage Books)

I heard about this book in a podcast about running. 2 journalists discussed their own running habits and struggles and one of them mentioned this book as a good one to read. I definitely found it interesting as it gives insights from an evolutionary perspective to why so many people struggle to exercise even though everyone knows it is good for your health and quality of life. The author is a paleoanthropologist and professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. The book is well written and researched with many references to research papers. I learned a lot about human body, the muscles and processes that go on when you move, converting food into energy and so on. The other aspect that is prominent is the evolutionary one explaining how people lived and evolved over a long period of time, adapting the human body to the environment and how this all changed in very short time in 200 years since the industrial revolution resulting in a physical disconnect between our evolved physiology and our environment. Certainly well worth reading but the last part/quarter is mainly a rehash of what came before and in hindsight can be read diagonally as far as I am concerned. It certainly took a bit of the pace out the reading for me and I put the book aside for a month before finishing it.