Resilient Health!

Play with your cursor on the above word “Resilient.”  What will happen is a lively, chaotic dispersion of the letters to your cursor’s movement, but when you take your cursor away the letters magically reassemble like nothing ever happened.  When we are truly healthy we have a natural resilience to destructive forces.   In fact, we have the means to literally reboot our mind and our body. Much like a computer, which has a BIOS (Basic Input Output System) so too does each cell in the body. Our cells respond to environmental signals, the biggest one being the food we consume or in some cases the food we don’t consume.   We have all experienced our personal computer getting “hung up.” Likewise, our bodies can get stuck in a state of disordered physiology, whereby we create a negative feedback loop, and our physiology ends up like a cat chasing its proverbial tail.  Doctors call this process of a stuck physiology “disease.”  However, it does not have to be this way!

Our bodies evolved over thousands of years to adapt to an ever changing environment giving us “feast or famine physiology”, yet today we live in a culture of 24 hours/day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year access to high caloric, high glycemic, nutrient depleted, pesticide laden, GMO “Franken-Food”. The effect of this disordered living has had devastating consequences on our health as a nation.  We spend almost twice as much annually per capita on healthcare in the US but are not the healthiest nor do we live the longest.   Our rate of obesity compared with all other countries is alarming.  Until the 20th century, over-nutrition was a transient condition for most humans, and life was characterized by cycles of feast and famine.  We still have within us our Paleo ancestral  genes that are primed feast or famine physiology, cold temperature, predators and more.  

When there is uncoupling of our sleep/wake cycle, lack of fresh air and sunshine, prolonged sedentary behavior, along with unbridled access to toxic food without a time for metabolic rest and recovery, the results are disastrous:  chronic fatigue, brain fog, obesity, diabetes,  heart disease, Alzheimer’s  and premature death. NO magic medication can reverse this metabolic disharmony with our ancestral genome.  We evolved to be outside, pretty much naked, 24/7 where we endured the elements and we actually hunted and gathered our food depending upon the season (sometimes with success, but often with failure which meant we had to live off of our fat).   Our survival required the need for dynamic metabolic flexibility or Resilient Health, and this is encoded in our genes which have evolved to adapt to an ever changing environment. (See: Network Robustness by Albert-László Barabási).  My mission is to help show you how you can recapture health and resilience in today’s unhealthy environment in which we all live.