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Your most frequent questions answered succintly.
Our Foresighted Community is where you will find a raft of resources shared by others sharing the same vision of a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle.
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On one page, the main actions we recommend if you want a lifestyle optimized for health, capabilities and sustainability.
This series lists 8 Mental Shifts you can practice right away to adjust your lifestyle towards a more active one. They will unlock training opportunities in your busy life.
How Natural Movement training improves your physical, mental and practical capabilities.
This series covers the fundamental concepts we’re using. From evolutionary biology to the underlying logic and elements behind the Foresighted lifestyle.
This series gives you training tips that wil let you get the most out of your training time.
All our published articles are collected on this page, grouped by category.
Our bodies are anatomically and biologically the same as the bodies of the first homo sapiens humans who appeared 315.000 years ago. Their bodies (which means our current bodies) had evolved to stay healthy under the stimuli and constraints of their lifestyle. This also means their bodies needed these stimuli to develop and grow healthily.
Since then, the human body hasn’t evolved much, though it did evolve on the margin, mainly through positive selection of genes enabling us to cope with the new stimuli associated with farming (lactase persistence for instance).
From this, we can draw two consequences:
The first step towards improving our health then, is to understand the lifestyle of the early homo sapiens and the stimuli applied to their bodies. I will call them “evolutionary stimuli” because these are the stimuli to which our bodies adapted to through evolution.
We can group them into 3 areas: physical, nutritional, environmental. Here are their main characteristics:
I will concentrate below on the Physical and Nutritional domains, as they are the ones we can more easily control.
Our current lifestyle has been shaped by the technological innovations of farming first, and then of the industrial age and the rise of specialization, convenience and sedentariness. This means that our bodies are now subjected to both an explosion of new stimuli and a radical decrease in the evolutionary stimuli that are so beneficial to them.
Industrial age stimuli can be characterized as such:
Not only do we subject our bodies to negative, foreign stimuli, we deprive them of the positive stimuli they need to develop and age healthily. These are the stimuli notably absent from our standard modern lifestyle:
This sounds logical enough, but at this stage, the first question most people ask is “Wait a minute, how come life expectancy has increased so much recently, then?”.
The exact answer is a bit more complex, but what happened in the past 100 years or so is that modern medicine enabled us to solve many issues that impacted the average life expectancy. It has been extraordinarily efficient at preventing and treating communicable diseases and birth mortality, along with all the traumatic injuries being treated by surgery.
Unfortunately, that didn’t prevent these stimuli from being detrimental and since medicine is making less progress now (it solved a lot already), the underlying trends are emerging. With obesity and diabetes rates steadily rising in most of the world, their effects are being noticed more clearly. Already, life expectancy is decreasing in the US, and it won’t be long for other modern developed nations to follow, as well as emerging nations, since diabetes are exploding in some of these countries.
What’s more, average life expectancy has improved compared to the life expectancy of 300 years ago, 1000 years ago or even 10 000 years ago. When we compare it, we always compare it to the life expectancy after humans transitioned from hunting/gathering to farming. All the evidence available point to the fact that life expectancy decreased after the invention of farming, even though populations exploded.
As we’ve just seen, if your goal is to be and remain healthy in fit for the long-term, aging while maintaining your physical capabilities and decreasing your probabilities or getting sick, then doing nothing is not an option.
If we pursue with the same standard Western lifestyle, our health will follow the average trends: declining life expectancy, increasingly early disabilities and older days that will in all probability be less than fulfilling.
A radical option would be to go back to the early Homo Sapiens lifestyle, which is to say live as a cavemen were. That would actually work for our general health, but:
That’s not for me and probably not for you either.
A better option would be to adjust our modern lifestyle to take out as much of the industrial stimuli as possible, while increasing the evolutionary stimuli.
In terms of nutrition, that means avoiding processed foods, grains & sugar mostly, along with choosing the optimal options for other choices.
In terms of physical activity, that means both increasing the volume of it as much as possible and again choosing the best activities to get these evolutionary stimuli in.
Well, the first chapter anyway… We’re writing a book and we’d love to get your feedback on Chapter 1 plus all the other chapters as they are written.
You get the full book for free and we get early feedback. Plus you’ll get our newsletter. Are you in?
Well, the first chapter anyway… We’re writing a book and we’d love to get your feedback on Chapter 1 plus all the other chapters as they are written.
You get the full book for free and we get early feedback. Plus you’ll get our newsletter. Are you in?