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Introduction

I started Fit2Thrive years ago in the hope of finding a lifestyle that fits me like a glove. One that inspires me when I wake up, comforts me when I am having a bad day, nourishes me while I live out my dreams.

That was a long time ago and I am still learning and improving every day but for several years now I have been in a place where it all makes sense and my lifestyle is on course to achieve what I set out to do. While on the surface this may seem like a simple thing to achieve anyone who has chased the perfect lifestyle knows just how elusive that dream is which is why I shared my journey in the first place. I knew it would be hard and I knew that millions of other people are on the same journey so if we share our collective knowledge then eventually we will learn how to find the right lifestyle for each of us.

I had a basic set of requirements for a life that fit me including:

• Freedom,
• Value (don’t cost too much, get a lot for a little),
• fun.
• time (spend it wisely you can;t get it back),
• Life (pragmatic fit the life I live, resources and time I have)

I couldn’t find anything and after a long period of research, trial and error I have arrived at an approach which supports these requirements.

In the beginning

When I started this journey I had no riches, I had time and I had a passion for understanding human nature and everything related but I had only recently discovered the internet and most of the knowledge I needed was hidden away in books or across the world in peoples heads and other places I could not reach.

I knew that in the last few hundred years humans as a whole had shifted from living in the country to living in urban areas with the rise of industrialisation which had fundamentally changed the way people could live. This means that ordinary people could have regular food for little effort and for most people in the industrialised world life got easier. At the same time health in general got better and common diseases like smallpox and cholera were largely eradicated while several rare of disease started to become more common including;

• Heart disease,
• Diabetes,
• Osteoporosis
• and Obesity.

So as our lifestyles changed we found that we changed how we suffer and despite the tremendous advances we have made in the last couple of centuries we find that these modern ‘lifestyle’ diseases are getting worse.

What I noticed when I started this journey is that all the approaches to lifestyle seemed very rigid forcing you to fit their way, they often required extra time and money on top of your normal life instead of being integrated into the life you actually live. In essence you had to live two lives, your normal unhealthy life and a healthy life to balance your normal life and there was no emphasis on learning how to merge the two into one balanced happy life. Even worse was that the evidence showed that lifestyle diseases were on the rise and none of these healthy lives were actually solving the problem they were just a sticking plaster covering up the real problem.

No joined up thinking

My advantage is having come at this problem from a completely different angle which enabled me to get a completely different result and more recently In have begun to learn how to explain what I do differently and why it has lead to a wonderfully balanced lifestyle true to my nature.

What I could see from my vantage point is that there was no joined up thinking about how humans work built on a basic understanding of human nature. This knowledge was spread across different industries from pharmaceuticals and medicine to the military, aviation, teaching and many others so there was no single point of knowledge where you could study everything related to being a human. This separation of knowledge and experience means that;

• medicine does not know that aviation and the military have great knowledge and research on the benefits of sleep,
• nutritionists are oblivious to the functioning of a cell and its cell wall, they assume nutrients easily flow in and out of cells completely ignoring the millions of complex and ancient mechanisms that distribute nutrients and maintain life.

So no one seemed to be aware of the history and complexity of human nature and how that applies to the modern world. Each expert made their recommendations based on their limited knowledge so no one approach could fit everyone.

History has the answers

History also teaches us that at all times across the world there have been people living very well and there always have been with the most famous of all in current times being the Mediterranean lifestyle.

As my research continued I could see that across the world and throughout human history there had been so many different lifestyles and approaches to health which all had something to teach us. Over time the patterns that have emerged are very much the same patterns I had read about years earlier.

I found that humans are incredibly well made and versatile creatures able to adapt to any environment and situation. At the same time humans will suffer in predictable ways depending on the environment they are in and how their lifestyle adapted to that situation.

So there are patterns and there are always people who do very well in one situation and others who do not. and while sometimes the reason seems to be pure luck, maybe genetics, but most often the answer is the difference between bad habits and good habits.

Finding balance

All life is built around the principle of ‘Homeostasis’ which originates from the Greek word meaning staying the same’, and involves the balance and consistency of certain conditions. An example is the control of body temperature by thermoregulation in warm blooded animals like humans. Over billions of years complex multicellular creatures like humans have incredibly complex mechanisms in place to maintain the necessary conditions for life in all the trillions of cells that make up a typical human.

What this means is that humans are built a certain way so they need to live a certain way and and as the environment changes they often need to adapt their lifestyle to that environment in order to maintain good health by supporting homeostasis.

“We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.” 

Carl Sagan

Each of the thousands of individual cultures that used to exist had adapted their ways to the environment and as things changed then over generations their lifestyles have evolved accordingly. The speed at which modernisation has occurred has meant that our lifestyles on a global scale have not yet adjusted to the radical changes made to our environment and the lifestyles our human nature are now subjected to,

Good and bad habits

What is needed therefore is the same process that has happened time and again as each civilisation has adjusted to a new era which is to learn which habits are good and support homeostasis and which are bad and disrupt the homeostatic processes of healing and restoring balance to the system.

Each civilisation had tools, culture and opportunities available that can be used as part of these habits and the modern world has an abundance of opportunities because all the worlds have now combined through globalisation.

This is my way of saying that we just need to do as individuals what our ancestors have always done which is;

1. pursue lifelong learning to adapt to the seasons and challenges as they come and go.
2. Accept our strengths and limitations and learn who we are, our true nature
3. and then explore which habits are good for us and which are bad.
4. Then just keep working the problem as life changes we adapt and so our habits adapt.

All the while gaining experience and wisdom as time and challenges pass so that we can make our present and future better than our past.

What is right?

This is my very simple answer to the complex problem of finding what lifestyle is right. Dedicate yourself to understanding your nature as a process of lifelong learning and keep asking yourself simple questions to direct your learning.

Questions such as:

• Bad habits lead to bad health so what are bad habits?
• Good habits lead to good health so what are good habits?
• Good habits can balance bad habits so how do you live each day well?

The structure of this site is more akin to a reference library because I have shared many of the lessons, ideas and articles I have uncovered through my journey as notes to my future self and to others who are on a similar path. I am currently in the process of looking back over these notes and organising them into a philosophy now that I have learnt how to share what I have learnt about our nature.

I have attempted to explain my long term dream before.

Theory and practice

Theory and practice are for start here because you apply each of the following to each topic. , steps, balance, fun, theory, practice, 

They are questions or ways of looking at things; How do I achieve balance with cell, in business, under pressure, Where is the fun in this topic, what do I enjoy, what gets in the way of my enjoyment. Fun itself is play but that has a theory and practice element. The theory behind the value of play. It’s just play, cells and pressures are the core topics. The others are more advanced and nuanced. And are ways to link play, cells and pressures. To think wider. The core analysis is about play, cells and pressures and once you start understanding these things you can focus on wider elements. 

The basics in order to explain the principle are 

Steps learning over your lifetime

Balance: Balance is everything so start learning how to bring balance to things 

Fun: You keep doing things you enjoy so  

These are ways to analyse the topics. So start here is about getting you to think aout your lifestyle.

Just about lifestyle fitting in one day and building balance in. Not as an after thought. Not spending extra money and time fixing things or supplementing but building it in from the ground up. Back to nature. 

Balance is theory and Moments are practice. Spend time (moments) each day learning how to find balance. Over time expand your understanding balance and what it means to you and your nature.

Moments and Dreams

The topic life’s moments is about how each moment affects balance. Over time each moment changes our balance and as this change builds up we must recover over time or we will fall over. 

Remember it is all about how you set your life up so that you live your dreams. That means that you live well, that you live long because who wouldn’t want to. But it’s about self directed lifestyles where you pick your dream and the site shows you have to make that journey good for you. Live your dreams. Hence questions are

Are you will to learn something every day for the rest of your life?

Do you understand how to bring balance to your life in all situations? Do you want to learn?

What do you do for fun? Imagine your dream life what would that be? I won’t be you rich but but I can help you achieve your dreams with the best health possible

Where are you now? what pressures do experience on a daily basis? Do you want to learn how to deal withese pressures in way that makes you stronger and builds towards you dreams?

These are the questions I asked myself and I work on every day. I am very honest to myself and the site covers so many of the thoughts and ideas I have had much of the theory and practice that I have done. 

Basically the start here is a chance to filter people and say specifically do you want to live a heappuy life and be the best you can be? 

Learning platform

It’s also clear to me that I just enjoy studying human performance and that is what fit2thrive is because it is a study of evolution and life sciences This is the one sentence The more I study this the more I understand how everything fits together, the Life sciences as a whole not as separate disciplines. so I live in less pain because I can fix problems sooner so my health is better. I can live sustainably within a 24 hour cycle and not leave injuries and problems to build up

So I want to find or create a learning platform to share with other like minded people Ftt. One way to think about it is as time. It’s about how your past, present and future are influenced by daily activities.

Don’t leave life to dumb luck

People just don’t know how they work so the results they get are often dumb luck. Are you prepared to learn how you actually work and learn to apply that to your own life?

It also works the other way because each step and article contributes in different ways. I need to carry on with the reorganisation to consider what I include. For each area. 

Understanding how we work

My entire site is about the value of educating myself about how we work, mind, Body, spit works. I am so glad that I am obsessed with learning how the human body works and I use it to live the best life I can. Here’s how. 

Stop micro managing

Should this be in the balance section. We need to stop micro managing the body as if it is weak and needs support like a child. We do this through ignorance of its true strengths so if we learn how capable it is then we can learn to empower it instead. 

You have infinite potential

YOu are born with infinite potential and the modern world can enable this potential but you have to learn how to blend the two. Learn about the outer world and the inner world of the body. What is see and what is unseen and learn how to bring the two together. 

The way your nature works is that your cells are born with given characteristics and abilities then respond to what is asked of them, the demands they are given so as a human you are born with certain characteristics and abilities but these are either developed through use or wither through neglect over time. These are your habits. 

Examples: EndMyopia So your eyes adapt to how you use them,If you don’t look beyond your walls then you lose the ability to look beyond your walls. So if you spend most time indoors and use screens and books a lot then you will have great short sight but poor long sight. 

Obesity is energy being stuck inside your cells when  it should have been released back into the environment through metabolic processes. So your metabolism needs to be used properly so that this energy can be released. Humans were cave people but they still had to go outside and move. It is in your nature. 

Heart disease relates to bad heart use. Change your habits to use your heart better. 

Osteoporosis means poor bone use, you are not treating them right so you need to learn how to.Poor bone use could lead to heart problem. (Need to check this up or publish as a research article including article) due to calcium and phosphorous leaching

Diabetes, CHD and obesity are linked through poor use of metabolism. 

Key articles

Link activities to existing articles to develop both. There are some core articles that I may want to reference here as they are referenced throughout the site. Get busy living or get busy dying for example. Which articles should people have read after visiting this page, why and what order?

Find the list of articles and background  relevant to each activity. 

The good habits lead to balance but there is more to learn. Children are generally healthier than adults because adults have learnt lots of bad habits which children have not yet learnt and kids have such a great approach to life because they know they have so much to learn and just get on with it. So remembering our inner child and the natural way we used to go about life is a valuable approach to have.