We have food that is ready in a minute, cars that drive us, mini-computers in our pockets, and more.

No matter how hard you think you’re working, your nervous system is subconsciously trying to make things easier for you by adapting to limit the amount of calories your body burns and thus expending the least amount of energy possible, according to a new study. Share your fitness tips with us. We can also thank our half-starved hunter-gatherer forefathers for the fact that we love fat and sugar. What if, instead of burning all those calories and expending all that energy, our nervous system is tricking us by teaching our bodies to move in the most conservative ways possible?

You’ll be relieved to hear that choosing the couch is only human. This allowed the researchers to discourage people from walking in their usual way by making it more costly to walk normally than to walk some other way. We find the shortest route for walking to a destination, sit for hours rather than stand, etc. The researchers found that laziness is evident even in movements we do constantly, like walking.

“Here we have provided a physiological basis for this laziness by demonstrating that even within a well-rehearsed movement like walking, the nervous system subconsciously monitors energy use and continuously re-optimises movement patterns in a constant quest to move as cheaply as possible”, Donelan said. “The nervous system is capable of doing this energy optimization and does it below the level of your conscious awareness to such a fine degree”, says Donelan.

In a study that appears this week in Current Biology, researchers asked nine volunteers to wear robotic exoskeletons – similar to leg braces – that offer resistance when they walk.

‘In terms of walking, they’ll change fundamental characteristics of their gait to save energy’.

Donelan, lead author Jessica Selinger, and their colleagues wanted to understand why people move the way they do, given that there are countless ways to get from point A to point B. This is partly a question of evolution and learning. “Any walking strategies that may have developed over evolutionary or developmental timescales are now obsolete in this new world”. Since our body is awesome, they found out that we can.

The experiments found that people can within minutes adapt their step frequency to converge on a new energy expenditure pattern.

Though they only studied walking, the researchers think that the nervous system’s tendency to hoard calories applies to many movements.

And despite changing walking habits that may have formed over a long time, researchers say, in some cases the energy savings made were very small – “the calorific equivalent of peanuts”.