Evolving Backwards

The amazing Danielle Fryer’s fitness and nutrition practice, Metamorphosis, has a slogan: “evolve healthy”. I think that that’s perfect. Being healthy is a lifelong process.

But really, to “evolve healthy,” a lot of it is about evolving backwards. Evolving… moving forward… but moving forward in terms of becoming smart enough to go backwards. Learning to reclaim things we’ve lost.

We live in a time of heretofore unimaginable scientific achievement, where sickness and health can be diagnosed and affected with greater accuracy than ever before.

Doesn’t mean we don’t do a lot of things wrong.

This article goes into detail about things we do that we’re not evolutionarily prepared for. In a lot of big ways, we don’t run our bodies or our lives the ways they’re designed to be.

There are quite a few things that we could benefit from going back to.

• Eat natural foods. Ones that our great-grandparents would recognize.
• Eat frequencies and portion sizes they’d recognize. (Look in an antique shop: you won’t believe how oversized dishes and utensils have become.)
• Value our extended family and let them know it. Whoever they are: blood or otherwise. Find our tribes and love them hard.
• Spend time with people of all ages.
• Value our hometowns. Get to know the people in them.
• Avoid sitting whenever possible.
• Let ourselves get bored. (That’s when the magic happens.)
• Look at screens less.
• Don’t watch violence.

I’ve acted like I can tell you what to do, so I should also be honest. There are several of these that I’m worst at.

• I stare at screens. (While sitting.) (If not laying.) (Hi, I’m a blogger.)
• I eat when I’m not hungry.
• I don’t tell people who should know it how much they mean to me.

It sounds like I need to move more, be more brave, and eat less. That’s a to-do list worth attacking. How about you? What evolving backwards would help you?