Maximizing Effort in Daily Life: Your Most Powerful Health Lever
We know we need to move—a lot—to stay healthy. But our instincts and social norms constantly push us toward the opposite: minimizing effort at every turn. There’s a simple (though far from easy) mindset shift that can turn this around: Consciously seek to maximize effort in your everyday activities. A Real-Life Example: My Commute Each […]
Why does health require so much movement? Or: your body is dependent, not just adapted.
Why does health require so much movement? Why Does Health Require So Much Movement? Last week, we went over the official WHO’s physical activity guidelines, which are much higher than people generally. But why is that? Why does our body require such a high level of physical activity to be healthy? To answer, we must look […]
You’re Not Extreme. The Sedentary Norm Is. And the WHO backs you up.
Ever been called “obsessed” for taking the stairs? Have you ever been called “obsessed” for taking the stairs? Or “extreme” for choosing to walk a short distance instead of driving? I’m sure most of you are familiar with family and friends being subtly (or not so subtly) judgemental about our “obsession” with movement. But are […]
Stimuli to get across domains and the strategies to get them
As we’ve explored in previous posts, our bodies require specific stimuli to stay healthy, similar to the ones our early Homo Sapiens ancestors experienced through their lifestyle and environment. To better understand and incorporate these stimuli into our modern lives, it’s helpful to classify them into four domains: physical, nutritional, mental, and environmental. The Four […]
Principles for a Foresighted Lifestyle: the Environmental & Mental domains
What are the target stimuli to achieve? Apart from the lack of pollution of all kind of course, here are other stimuli that were part of the environment: Strategies & Principles to adopt Get more connection with nature Spending time in nature has demonstrated benefits, most of them on our mental health, with countless academic […]
Principles for a Foresighted Lifestyle: the Nutritional Domain
What are the target stimuli to achieve? The nutritional stimuli that have shaped our biology can be summarised as: Omnivorous Diet Early Homo sapiens were opportunistic eaters, consuming a wide variety of foods available in their environment. This varied diet included: Nutrient-Dense Foods The foods available to early humans were generally more nutrient-dense than many […]
WHO Guidelines on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour
The WHO guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behavior align perfectly with those recommended for a foresighted lifestyle!
Our societies & norms are also the results of our instincts
In our previous discussions, we’ve explored how our natural instincts and modern social norms work against our health. Now, let’s step back and look at the bigger picture. How did we end up in this situation? The answer might surprise you: our current lifestyle is, in many ways, the product of our instincts’ triumph. The […]
Breaking Free: How Social Norms Limit Our Health and Movement Potential
Our current social norms reinforces the impact of our misguided instincts. We really are up against both as significant obstacles to stay fit and healthy.
Our Natural Instincts are a Major Obstacle to Health & Fitness
Our natural instincts still operate as if we lived in a hostile world of calorie scarcity and (forced) movement abundance. And it’s having dramatic impacts.
Why Our Bodies Need Specific Stimuli to Stay Healthy
Our bodies evolved to require these stimuli to function optimally. When we don’t provide our bodies with these necessary inputs, our health suffers.
The lifestyle & environment of the early Homo Sapiens shaped our anatomy and instincts
Human bodies were shaped to perform the tasks of a very specific lifestyle in a very specific environment. Not for different lifestyles or environments.
The mechanics of evolution: the link between natural selection & health
Our bodies have evolved for a single purpose: reproduce. While we don’t need to retrace the full story of human evolution, understanding its fundamental mechanics is crucial.
A foresighted lifestyle : taking advantage of progress while accounting for our human nature
Since the human body requires many of the stimuli it naturally got through the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our early Homo Sapiens ancestors to simply stay healthy, and since our typical modern lifestyle doesn’t provide it with enough of them, what should be our approach? We’re not advocating to go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but […]
Our modern lifestyle: the victory of our natural instincts over our biological needs
Our current modern lifestyle is making us sick That our current modern lifestyle is making us sick is becoming less and less debated. The only question is how sick and how much of it is preventable through lifestyle change. It’s well known that the health trends in our modern societies are more negative than positive. […]
Our specie, Homo Sapiens, appeared around 300.000 ago. What are the implications for our health today?
Evolution is a game of reproduction, which is in turn a game of health Every single human being on the planet today belongs to the animal specie named Homo Sapiens, which diverged from the other Homo species around 300.000 years ago. Our body is, for all intent and purposes, essentially the same as the one […]
Is “natural” always beneficial for our health?
What is natural for us, as Homo Sapiens? And is everything natural automatically beneficial for our health? These two questions are key to adjusting our lifestyle to improve our health. What’s natural for us? To answer the first one, we need to go back to the time Homo Sapiens diverged from the other species in […]
Daily physical activities of the evolutionary lifestyle
If we are to try and get our bodies some of the physical stimuli they had through an evolutionary lifestyle, then we need to understand in a quite detailed way how our ancestors moved. I have tried to summarize below the most salient features, based on a numerous sources. I have indicated at the end […]