Friday, March 25, 2011

Nicolay the poet

One of my favorite bloggers, Richard Nicolay at Free The Animal can come off as a bit caustic, direct, and harsh to some peoples' sensibilities. He's not as poignant as Lierre Keith, and not as technical as Peter at Hyperlipid or Nora Gedgaudas at Primalbody-primalmind.com, but he's poetic today. Here's the quote that prompted my post:

"You were lied to. A naturally fit, normal body is your birthright, just as it is for any animal so designed. Sacrifice and penance is not only an unnecessary, pernicious lie overshadowed by unearned guilt, but it delivers the exact opposite result for most people: it's not the key to Heaven, but a Rocket Sled straight to Hell."


Birthright. What a word. It is natural selection's contention that your predecessors were more suited/adapted/fit to survive to/and successfully reproduce than those contemporaries of theirs that failed to pas on their own genetic information.


There's a pop song by Jason Mraz that claims "It's our godforsaken right to be loved." The US Declaration of Independence claims that it is a self-evident truth that our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are self-evident. But Nicolay is far more accurate in his analysis of what you are entitled to as a function of being born.


I've spent the past few years treating my body (to the best of my abilities) the way it was built to be treated. Feeding it the fuels it was designed to run on, attempting to provide it the stimuli to which it has been conditioned over its 2.5 million years of human development to favorably respond, and I can testify that it has responded by looking and working better than I ever imagined it could. I didn't ever imagine that I was weak, chubby, quick to sunburn but slow to suntan, and otherwise utterly physically worthless because I was subjecting my body to a set of circumstances diametrically opposed to those for which it was equipped.


Next post will be about the pertinence of "hacks" in your lifestyle.