Why I Do All This Walking ... (by Nassim Taleb) (opens in new tab)

From the article: "Let me explain. If you consider your diet and exercise as a simple energy deficits/excesses, with a straight calorie-in, calorie-burned equation, you will fall into the trap of misspecifying the system into simple causal and mechanical links. Your food intake becomes the equivalent of filling up the tank of your new BMW. If on the other hand you look at food and exercise as activating metabolic signals, with potential metabolic cascades and nonlinearities from network effects, and with recursive links, then welcome to complexity, hence Extremistan. Both food and workout provide your body with information about stressor in the environment. As I have been saying throught, informational randomness is from Extremistan. Medicine fell into the trap of using simple thermodynamics with the same physics-envy and with the same mentality and the same tools as economists did when they looked at the economy as a web of simple links. And both are complex systems."

So let's setup a system whereby a customized email is sent to users every morning: "Today was a great day! You walked 25 miles before a thrilling and ultimately triumphant encounter with an aged caribou that took 30 minutes of fierce running. Clean water was extremely scarce, but you managed also to find some grubs along the way. Feast away, the meat rots in 24 hours. Injuries included minor laceration to the left quadriceps and some blistering of the feet. Your search for a mate goes empty handed."

It's left up to the user to replicate the salient details in reality. Although perhaps with a mobile device, this app could be real-time.

Venkatesh Rao (ribbonfarm) came to a very similar conclusion here: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/02/10/health-and-the-happy-ha...

"I wander around the Metro DC area as I work, covering as many coffee shops as I can, attempting to work up to the ranging average of 10-30 miles per day of our hunter-gatherer ancestors."