Fit2Thrive is a site about pursuing your best life while using what you were born with to get there. I chose the name because of the many meanings it can convey.

Firstly, I wanted a life that fit me like a glove. I am at my best when I am the best me that I can be. To achieve that life, I must start by figuring out what my ideal life would be and then go about making that life a reality.

Secondly, I need to adapt to life. Put another way, I need to fit the life I want to live in order to be the best me.

This includes the Darwinian notion of the fittest being able to survive, and for me, this means adapting myself to live the life that fits me best. I am basically accepting that to get the life I want, I must do the necessary work to make that happen.

Another way of looking at this is that I need to be fit enough to survive whatever life throws at me. Better than that, of course, is that I need to be fit enough to thrive no matter what is thrown at me. This is where the modern view of fitness comes in, but being me, I’ve tried the modern fitness approach and found it wasn’t for me. I tried a bunch of others, and true to the first principle of being myself no matter what, I adapted it to suit me and my personality.

When I started this journey, I noticed how fitness in the running around and gym-type sense was an important part of living any form of happy, healthy life that is in balance

So in Bringing these two things together the adaptations that are required have a lot to do with the principles of fitness. However the decades of research and practice have taught me that modern fitness is lacking so to fill in the gaps I have explored many other approaches and just plain studied, experimented and got on with life to find an approach that works for me.

Third and finally, everything has to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, and so far, all the theories do not fit. Particularly, the modern approach of gyms and pills reflect problems with our normal daily lives and lifestyles, so we need to understand better how everything fits together. 

I need a life that fits me in terms of who I am and who I want to be, and I need to learn how to fit into that life. So, I have to do both of these things to find the right lifestyle, and I have to do this continually throughout my life, adjusting as I go.

Through this continual process of taking steps I learn through experience which steps to take to achieve the growth I want and need and overtime I build the lifestyle that I have always wanted.

That’s what all the greats do so I will follow that. 

I see this as a continual journey through life, asking the questions:

• who am I?
• what do I want to be?
• what do I have to be?
• and what is right for me?

These are the pressures I face like anyone else.

The next questions I ask are

• how do I become these things,
• how do I recover from where I am,
• and how do I adapt to what I want to be.

This final part is growth. Life is about growth. How do I grow into the life I want? Each day is an opportunity to grow. I then break down the growth into steps. Each day, I try to take a step towards the future I want, and I see this as an investment in my own personal growth.

 Life. It’s about life experience. Experience comes when you go through situations and apply different approaches or theories to see the outcome. Sometimes, you do this In a controlled, thought-out way, but usually, you just get on with it. This is how life is, which is why I base my approach on building up life experience. I do lots of learning and theory, but I also test against real life and see what works for me, and I plan to keep it up throughout my life and never stop learning. 

That said, the point here is not to give you a cookie-cutter template that just works for you because that is not how life works. YOU ARE different to me with different needs, wants, genes, responsibilities and many other things so the point is firstly to inspire and motivate and also to share and give you ideas. I have learnt at least 90% of this from others and made a good living from doing the final 10% myself, so that is my message here. I will introduce you to my thoughts and also to many of the people who have helped me to inform you on your journey.

A life that fits you

You only get one life, so make the most of it.

The concept underpinning this blog is that you can change everything in your life but your body. You only ever get one. Yet it is your vehicle to all the good times. The better you take care of it the more fun you can have throughout your life. So I have dedicated my life to learning how it works so I can take care of my body so I can get the most out of my life. My blog is about sharing this with those I care about. Paying it forward.

For decades now, I have been using all the knowledge I have learned and still learn, to improve my life day to day, week to week and start living the dream.

A life of plenty

When I envisaged a full and happy life, I pictured a life of plenty but not necessarily one with lots of money or possessions, just a life where I felt like I had plenty. I have never had lots of money, and to be honest, I have noticed over time that my decisions revolve more around getting the most out of what I have so that I can do a lot with a little instead of having far more than I need.

This approach to life was instilled in my childhood and served me well at school because to excel, I learnt I just had to put a little effort in each day, and that investment would add up over time to an abundance. At school, it meant that academic work became easy, so I felt I had plenty of ability in my little brain. At the same time I knew I was no better than anyone else I had just put my time to good use, invested in my skills diligently over time and that had paid off.

All I had done was invest a little each day, and that investment had grown into a feeling of plenty, and something had become easy as a result. I am forever grateful for learning this at such a young age because it saved me from the pain and frustration that I saw many other people go through at school, thinking they were not good enough and not knowing where to put their effort.

You are human; you have plenty

So, my journey to living my best life started with the belief that I should regularly invest in myself over time and that I am plenty; I just need to use what I have well. I am the foundation on which I build that life, and what I have already is plenty.

The core idea is that humans aren’t broken. The 20th century has brought many amazing advances but also the idea that humans can not thrive without all sorts of help and I disagree. I believe we just need to know and accept ourselves and learn how to fit our hunter-and-gatherer needs into the modern world.

You are what you are.

You need to find out who you are and then learn how to be yourself each day. That can take a lifetime of searching, but it sure beats fighting yourself every day because, in the end, you are what you are. Remember, it’s not the best-adapted who thrive but those most able to adapt. The better you learn how to make the best of what you have, the better you learn how to thrive.

I have been studying for decades, and I am still learning and having a great time doing so. Every year I master new concepts and skills and I’m better for it. I’m really inspired by what I’ve achieved from what I’ve learnt, and I started this blog to try and pass on some of this knowledge and also carry on learning from the comments and feedback I get.

Over a decade ago, I asked the question What factors make us kick the bucket? because there were so many contradictions in what I had read and heard that it was quite confusing

Over time, I have discovered so many great people and ideas and written hundreds of posts related to them, but I have always struggled to explain how they all link together. I knew in my heart, but I could not find the words to explain to anyone else. Finally, I think I have a way to explain why the posts on my site cover such wide-ranging topics and go from incredible detail in some areas to very simple content in others.

Plenty of time

In the same way that I learned I could be good at school by using my time well, I wanted to learn to achieve good health and fitness the same way: by making each day an investment in my future, or you might say a step towards the goal.

What I saw in the world was the opposite of that constant mantra that there are not enough hours in the day, our lives are too short, and all sorts of attitudes telling me that life is hard and time is scarce. I got sucked in, too, when I followed people with these mindsets because I did not know where to find the people who knew how to use their time well.

I don’t want to add more tasks to my day I just want to use my time better than I currently do to get a better outcome. So how can I use the coming months and years better so that I end up where I want and look back at happy memories?

Plenty of money: Your budget is fine

Whatever resource you have is enough. It still feels strange to say that because we are all trained to feel we need more but everyone who has truly succeeded got their because they used their resource well. To think of it another way, history is littered with people who had everything and lost it all because they did not know what to do with it.

History is also littered with people who came from nothing and gained everything. By everything, I do not mean material wealth or even fame; I mean happiness and contentment that the life they have led is the best they could have led. Yes, that is subjective, but it is also attainable because I am talking about normal people living normal lives who have inspired me through their contentment and their achievements.

I say this as much for myself as for you, the reader, to remind me that the best people living the best lives are so often not those you hear about because they are too busy having a nice contented time.

Plenty of opportunities

If you think about it every day is an opportunity to try something out and learn.

How do you have the best life?

The basic question I started with is how anyone can have the best life they can, given the time, resources, and constraints they have. The more you think about it, the bigger and more intimidating the question can be, so it is nice to have so many other people in the world we can refer to.

To distil my philosophy, I have reduced it to 4 words for different aspects of life, and they are:

• Life: Consider the whole. What life are you living now and what life do you want to live?
• Pressure: Competing demands, what are the pressures on you in your life?
• Balance: Recover your balance; how do you recover from these pressures?
• Growth: Prepare for tomorrow; how do you grow from the life you are living into the life you want to live?

In brief I have noticed that life is full of pressure from putting food on the table and a roof over your head. Each pressure knocks you out of balance in a different way, requiring its own specific action to restore balance. As life continues it learns how to keep its balance better under the pressures it faces and to adapt to new and different pressures over time. This experience is growth and makes an organism better prepared for the future and able to live a more comfortable life.

That was quite a philosophical explanation, and that is where I wanted to start because I have found that the philosophy you chose underpins the life you live, so it is essential to determine how you want to live your life and what you want from it so that you can put the right plans in place. It has always been important to me to understand the small parts, such as cells, in order to understand the whole to have both a bottom-up and a top-down view and look at the whole.

As we grow, we learn how to keep our balance better

Life is everything

The first and fundamental point to make is that I consider life to involve everything around us because we are as affected by the people and culture we grow up in as we are the genes and cells that make us up. So, while humans have erected boundaries to explain the world through science, I feel it is just as important to acknowledge that life is interdisciplinary because nature does not recognise these boundaries. Only humans do. So, while I believe strongly in science and its teaching, I am also aware of its limitations particularly that in the modern sciences, there is very little joined-up thinking because we have so many disconnected disciplines/specialities or whatever term you use.

I have learnt on my travels that philosophy is the original discipline of science and the science method from Socrates and others was born out of a time when one person could understand all that humanity understood, and so it was possible to have joined-up thoughts and conversations that jumped from what we now consider to be physics, biology, psychology and whatever else was relevant because like it or not life works and it is linked to everything else in the universe whether you want to accept it or not.

So it follows that with this philosophy, I enjoy looking at the rich interconnections in any situation and learning over time how all these apparently separate situations in my life are ultimately connected.

This wide perspective is the same as taking in a landscape and seeing how each part is related to the other, including the clouds and the shadows they make as they pass over the land and the roads as they wind through the landscape, going in and out of view.

We are all used to looking at the same landscape from different perspectives, like at the top of a valley where you can see for miles, and everything seems so small. From such a high perspective, you can see how the roads and waterways meander on their route and ultimately get where they are going.

When you are at the bottom of this valley in the village, your perspective is from much lower down. You can see the same roads and waterways, but you can’t see their whole route, so if you had not been at the top of the valley, you would not know how they trace their path through the landscape, and you may not believe it is possible.

So, you may ask, what is the point of this analogy?

You have everything you need, Use what is in front of you