You are.

At least, in your natural state – the way nature designed you to be – you’re a Lean Green Human Being.

Over the last 4+ million years, Mother Nature’s been tweaking the design, refining, making improvements and adaptations. Some form of hominid has been on this earth though, for at least this long and you’re the result of their trials and tribulations.

But, before we go any further, let’s move away from any “Paleo-Romanticism”. Your ancestors were not faced with an easily available, abundant food supply that would just leap on to the end of their spear, with little effort. They weren’t all built like Greek Gods and Goddesses and there were a lot of bigger, hairier, tougher creatures out there with sharper teeth that wanted to eat them. Life wasn’t a picnic for these guys. It was tough and everyday they would face the harsh struggle for survival.

Which is exactly why you’re here, walking and talking and thinking in the way you do. The selective pressures of nature drove evolution in a certain direction and the evolutionary compass-needle points directly at you. And you, my friend, are truly amazing!

Ok, so you may not feel amazing right now but take a moment to think about it. You’re the culmination of over 4 million years of evolutionary trial and error. That’s a long time to experiment, make mistakes and then iron out the kinks. Also, Nature’s clever, in a way that humans will never be. It stands to reason that, after all this time, she’s going to come up with something pretty special.

Your default state is to be fit, healthy and happy.

You can move beautifully and freely in three dimensions, squatting, lunging, bending, pushing, pulling, twisting, walking and running [1]. You can crawl, climb, jump, swim, wriggle, roll, attack, defend (all of which are made up of a combination of the first 6 movements incidentally) and perform exquisitely intricate movements like threading a needle, typing on a keyboard or brain surgery.

You can talk by the age of two, building up to a vocabulary of 20,000 words by the time you’re just 5 years old, just as easily in two completely different languages, if necessary.

Perhaps most important of all, you have this big, incredible brain capable of something that may be unique to humans, called imagination. This creative intelligence gives you the ability to project into the future, conceive wonderful plans and concepts and then make them come true, if you so desire. Essentially, you can create your own reality.
Cyber Tracker founder, Louis Leibenberg believes that this capacity of imagination was born on the savannahs of Africa whilst early hunter-gatherers persistence hunted prey. Because they couldn’t keep the animal in sight for the duration of the hunt, they would have to track it. When the tracks became obscured or unreliable, the hunters had to put themselves in the place of the animal and project into the future, “imagining” what it’s next moves would be. According to Louis, this is the origin of deductive reasoning and the whole scientific process [2].

The beauty is that all of these amazing abilities all come as standard, built in and pre-loaded with the average human model, straight out of the box. Of course, it takes a little practise to master the controls, but the ability is there, right from the first breath. At some point between the ages of 6 – 12 months, you could do a perfect squat. You didn’t have to think about this or concentrate on your technique. You could just do it because that’s what you’re designed to do.

You really are a miracle. You’re arguably the most advanced, sophisticated being that has ever walked the surface of planet Earth.

You’re Nature’s flagship model…

… for the time being,

but, are you throwing it all away? Do you realise it in the first place? Are you wasting your evolutionary gifts and living a life below your potential? Are you in pain, unhealthy, exhausted, overweight, depressed or chronically ill? Unfortunately, nowadays, the answer is probably a yes to more than one of the above.

Instead of being the fit, healthy, functional, happy manimals that nature intended, even designed us to be, the norm has become much different.

We should be able to move easily and freely, without pain or injury, over a variety of terrains and using all of our natural movement patterns. We should be fit, strong and have great endurance. We should be healthy, lean and energetic, looking and feeling great inside and out. This is how we’re meant to be.

The modern reality is quite different and a lot more depressing.

• Obesity is running rampant and by 2025, just 13 years time, an estimated 47% of men and 36% of women in the UK will be obese – not just overweight but obese.
• Approximately 1 in 5 10 to 11 year olds are obese
• 7 out of 10 men and 8 out of 10 women fall below their ‘age appropriate activity level’
• Obesity and physical inactivity cost the UK £10.7 Billion each year
• Obesity increases the likelihood of: type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, narrowing and blockage of blood vessels, cardiovascular disesase, cancer, disability, reduced quality of life and can lead to premature death.
• Since 1996, the number of people diagnosed with diabetes has doubled. It’s estimated to double again by 2025.
• Around 3 people will be diagnosed with diabetes every 10 minutes (17 people every hour, 400 every day)
• Obesity accounts for 80-85% of the overall risk of developing type 2 diabetes
• Type 2 diabetes reduces life expectancy by up to 10 years
• Diabetes costs the NHS: £27 million a day, £1 million an hour, £17,000 a minute, £286 a second
• Type 2 Diabetes can largely be prevented by improving health, nutritional and lifestyle factors

These are just a handful of figures I’ve chosen for obesity [3] and diabetes [4], two of the biggest problems facing modern, westernized society. I haven’t even started on cancer and heart disease.

Perhaps the worst part of it all is that these ‘diseases of civilisation’: obesity, type 2 diabetes, high-cholesterol, high blood pressure, coronary heart disease and even some forms of cancer, are largely preventable. That means that you can prevent them from happening with nutrition, exercise and lifestyle modifications.

This means that these alarming epidemics are self-inflicted.That’s right, folks, we’re doing it to ourselves.

After countless millions of years of evolution (eons if you go back to the very beginning) and all of the challenges faced by our ancestors, struggling to survive against the odds and ensure the continuation of their genetic expression, modern man has decided to kill him self off, along with the planet which gave him life in the first place.

And they call us Homo Sapiens…

Time To Wake Up

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s not too late to change direction and clean up our act.

No matter who you are, how unhealthy, overweight or unfit you may be, you’re designed to be fit and healthy, energetic and happy. You have the ability to move better, lose weight, boost your energy levels and dramatically improve your health. You have the capacity to improve your life in all areas. You may have just forgotten how to do it, or resigned yourself to the fiction that good health and a beautiful, functional body is something only other people can achieve.

This is simply not true.

I firmly believe that your default state is to be fit, healthy and happy and that anyone has the ability to change the way their body looks and feels. It’s also a lot simpler that you might think, if you have the right information and resources for the job and that’s why I created Lean Green Human Being.

It’s my mission to show you how to take control of your health and fitness, once and for all. I want to show you how to build vigorous health and the body of your dreams, that looks and performs the way you’ve always wanted. I want to free you from the idea that you’re born somehow lacking, without everything you need to live life fully.

Most of all, I want to remind you who and what you are and show you what you’re capable of. I want to change the way you think about health and fitness, for good and help you discover and unleash your true potential.

References

1.Paul Chek’s Primal Patterns® as described in Movement That Matters, C.H.E.K. Institute

2.Tracking, The Origin Of Science, Louis Leibenberg, South Africa

3.Statistics On Obesity, Physical Activity and Diet: England 2012, The NHS Information Centre, Lifestyle Statistics

4.Diabetes In The UK 2012: Key Statistics On Diabetes, http://www.diabetes.org.uk, accessed 10th July 2012