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Healthy Eating: Drop a dress size with top fitness coach Oliver Selway

Take a tip from your ancestors to maximise your health and vitality levels says top fitness coach and author Oliver Selway

Take a tip from your ancestors to maximise your health and vitality levels says top fitness coach and author Oliver Selway
In the battle to stay fit and healthy do you ever find yourself working against your best interests, sometimes sabotaging your own efforts? I know I do. It might be a sneaky sausage roll from Greggs or simply lounging on the sofa when I know we should be taking the last opportunity of the day to get some exercise.I don’t think I’m alone in this though. Most of the readers of this magazine know what we should be doing, yet resolutely sticking with good habits turns out to be so much trickier than making quick resolutions for self-improvement.

This can be quite discomforting. As humans,we like to think we have the qualities of free will and self-determination. After all, we’re not animals, devoid of the power of self-awareness and rational thought.

But of course, we are animals. We conveniently forget that we are human animals.It’s so easy to see that our animal cousins have certain built-in responses that cause them to act predictably in a variety of circumstances.

Salmon will swim upstream to spawn at a precise time of the year; most animals will fight anything that threatens their offspring; a cuckoo chick will always try to push its ‘siblings’ out of the nest to their deaths. It’s almost like they are acting out a script written hundreds of thousands of years ago,working through their factory programming.

Nobody blames these animals for any of these actions –they are just playing out the instincts that nature built into them.

One such human example is when we find ourselves reaching for yet another slice of chocolate cake even though we made a solemn promise to ourselves only yesterday that we wouldn’t do this.

All too easily we find ourselves acting against our own interests in a compulsive, almost self-destructive way. Our willpower, our freedom and our ability to control our destiny is just over-ridden in the presence of certain stimuli.

This phenomenon starts to makes sense however in the light of our status as animals.Thousands of years ago these impulsive, instinctual actions were undoubtedly the right ones for our natural environment. Without them we would have certainly perished.

9 ways to get the right balance

Try these top tips to incorporate basic instincts into your daily routine…

Rest whenever possible:

The world we live in today offers us few of the physical challenges of the natural environment. Our jobs,daily chores and even our leisure activities offer up little requirement to be active, leaving our inherit desire to rest and relax whenever we can do woefully out of balance with the necessities of survival.

Solution:

Build movement into your day and rest enough to feel relaxed.

Eat whatever is available and tastes good:

In a modern context this edict is disastrous. Modern, processed food is designed to titillate the palate and over-stimulate the brain’s pleasure receptors in a way that natural food doesn’t. The chemical reactions elicited in the brain set up a chemical dependency and psychological addiction that that fires up the same areas of the brain as hard drugs.

Solution:

Only fill your house with natural food and don’t even visit the supermarket aisles that sell modern Frankenstein foods.

Put on weight whenever possible:

Our ancient relatives’craving for calories was essential for survival because they could never be sure when the next meal was coming.

Solution:

Avoid heavily processed carbohydrate, the macronutrient that is most responsible for the obesity epidemic. Additional muscle you develop burns fat through the day and is one of your best defences against frailty, ill health and obesity.

Crave sweet foods:

One of nature’s ways of telling us something is fit for consumption is by making it sweet. This instinct encouraged us to eat fruit and honey when it was available seasonally. Today, nearly all packaged food tastes tantalisingly sweet because it’s artificially enhanced with added sugars and sweeteners (not to mention the other MSGs and various carefully selected addictive substances the food industry has knowingly adopted).

Solution:

Avoid sugar and artificial sweeteners that destroy the palate and feed food addictions.

Crave Fatty Foods:

Our desire to consume fatty foods makes perfect evolutionary sense. We evolved to use this as our main fuel when we were big game hunters on the African savannah. However many products today contain fat mixed with sugar in way that nature never provides. Ice-cream, for example, gives us the fat we crave while filling us with addictively high levels of sugar that damages our palate and disrupts our blood sugar levels and metabolism. The two tastes often become confused by our corrupted palate. We end up eating sugar and heavy,processed carbs to quench our thirst for natural, healthy fat.

Solution:

Avoid vegetable oil, sugar and trans-fats.Stick to healthy fats like olive oil, coconut oil and ghee.

Crave salty foods:

Our drive to consume food with a salty taste would have led us to consume salty meats, sea salt or shellfish – all highly beneficial foods.Our love of this taste may have evolved to guard against a lack of minerals in our diet like sodium, magnesium,calcium or potassium. Nowadays however, it drives us to consume any sort of processed garbage that’s been covered in cheap salt.

Solution:

Avoid added salt in meals but don’t be frightened of saltier cuts of meats. Fulfil your appetite for these three tastes through a diet based around meat, fish, fowl, fruit, seeds, nuts and veg. Re-sensitise yourself to the subtler tastes of good, natural food.

Eat whatever looks shiny, bright and healthy:

The brightest and shiniest food stuff now in the shops is likely to be man-made, genetically modified or artificially enhanced to fool us with its good looks. The instinct that used to guide us to the brightest, ripest fruit now drives us into the cereal aisles where the best packaging is to be found.

Solution:

Learn to read labels and to see through fancy packaging.

Wake up when it’s light and sleep when dark:

The advent of artificial light entices us to stay awake latei nto the night allured by TV and the internet. Where we were once relaxed, rested and alert, many of us are now buzzing and ‘wired’ –or dead on our feet.

Solution:

Go to bed when you first start to get tired between 9-11pm. Sleep with the curtains open and wake up slowly and naturally when the morning light streams into your bedroom. Avoid excessive time spent in front of a screen as this will affect your ability to sleep deeply and wake rested.

Copy the posture and movement of those around us:

Today our naturally balanced bodies are contorted and pained by modern furniture, sedentary living and the exaggerated swagger, stoop or gait of culturally prominent stereotypes.

Solution:

Look for better role models – like some athletes and non-westerners who still move with the grace and poise that we all should.

Going back to basics

I would propose that there are a few basic, primal instincts that drive our behaviour. Each of these served to ensure our day-to-day survival as cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers.

In the modern world however, each of these drives now causes a host of modern problems. Instincts, once finely balanced against the harsh reality of surviving an ancient world, now inadvertently wreak havoc in our everyday lives.

Though I begin to offer some basic solutions above, by simply becoming aware of these instincts, you can start to respect them more – and look for ways to defend them against deliberate exploitation by technology, advertising and big business that only have their own interests at heart.Like an unsuspecting fish hooked on a lure more appealing than its natural prey, we fall for the artificially attractive offerings served up –not for our wellbeing –but for the wellbeing of those profit-driven big businesses.

To find true health in the modern world we need to understand the nature of our innate human instincts forged in a Stone Age environment. We need to find ways to realign those drives with the stimulation, challenges and nutrition that our bodies evolved to thrive on.

Our challenge as health conscious individuals is to take these unchangeable human instincts and reharness them to new, healthy habits based on natural ways of living in ways that align with our evolutionary history.

Article by

Oliver Selway

Fitness coach and author

Oliver Selway is a top fitness coach and author

Discover more

Article by

Oliver Selway

Fitness coach and author

Oliver Selway is a top fitness coach and author

Discover more