Convenience shapes the world, which means you exercise less and make more fattening food choices. You burn between 100 and 200 calories fewer per day because of modern conveniences.

Something is more convenient if it takes a less time or less effort than it did before. Why do we love convenience so much? Perhaps it has something to do with The Power of Rest Threat: We naturally do as little as possible to save energy.

Time Pressures Drive the Convenience Trend

Americans lead busy, stressful lives. There never seems to be enough time so people look for every convenience. Many people might want to exercise more and eat better, but they don’t think they can find the time.

If you are a parent shuttling your kids around and you have 10 minutes for lunch, where will you eat? A fast food restaurant. If you have spent 10 hours at work and two hours commuting where will you pick up the family dinner? A fast food restaurant. The pressures to eat poorly are enormous because the easiest course of action is always to do what is the most convenient. If what is convenient also happens to taste the best, serve giant portions, and is inexpensive, how hard must people work to go against the convenience driven fast food lifestyle?

Whatever the reason greater convenience is a hot selling point in every area of life. That’s why convenience literally shapes the world you live in. The world you experience has been created to be ever more convenient and this force shows no sign of slowing.

More Convenience Means Less Exercise

Physical activity has been engineered out of our lives because of our love of convenience. We want it now and we want it easy. Businesses know we like convenience and work hard to make life as convenient for us as they possibly can.

Think about how much our lives have changed as a result of innovations like dish washers, cars, remote controls, lawnmowers, drive-through services, electronic games, elevators and snow blowers. Communities and businesses are designed to be drive-through so we can save time. Everything can be delivered, bought pre-assembled, pre-packaged and pre-made.

How many fewer calories do you think we burn each day because of these conveniences? It’s estimated that when added together the changes due to mechanization in our non-work lives, we burn between 100 and 200 calories fewer per day. That’s enough calories to account for much of the rise in obesity.

If you aren’t burning calories from work, then you’ll need to burn calories from some sort of regular physical activity. Usually we think of regular physical activity as either exercise or play. But people aren’t exercising or playing very much.

Less than one-third of adults exercise moderately at least 30 minutes several days a week and about 40 percent of adults do not participate in any leisure time activity. Unless the environment demands we work, most of us won’t work on our own.

All is not lost. You can include more activity naturally without relying on a formal exercise program. In later strategies, we’ll talk about this interesting approach.

More Fattening Food Decisions

The love of convenience also impacts on the food choices available to you and those you make.

The “fast” comes first in “fast food restaurant” for a reason. In our busy world, we are always looking to save time, and eating quicker meals is a major convenience.

The problem is fast foods are less healthy. They have more fat and sugar because the ingredients are cheap and people like the flavor. In The Restaurant Threat we’ll learn eating fast foods is associated with weight gain and account for half of all meals eaten away from home.

Food is available virtually everywhere, and this is an amazing convenience. In an urban/suburban environment tasty, cheap, high calorie food can usually be had in fewer than5 minutes. But you don’t have to wait that long, because there’s probably food near you in a gas station, drug stores, vending machines or just about anyplace you turn.

By seeking convenience we are almost automatically deciding to eat a less healthy, more fattening diet. You can say it doesn’t have to be that way; people can make different choices. But these are the choices people are making. This book attempts to deal with how people really behave and how they really are, not how we want to them be under ideal conditions. Convenience is enormous factor in modern life, to expect people not be drawn to convenience is not very realistic.

Is convenience bad? Not at all. But we need to remember it comes with a cost.