Paleo Quick Tip of the Day Train your FEET, your NECK, and your EYES!

Today’s podcast is near and dear to me- Most people do lip service to exercise, since everyone knows (at last!) that physical exercise is vital to health and wellness.  Most older people, however, just walk at the mall, in highly cushioned shoes, or walk on a treadmill or around their neighborhoods- again, in highly cushioned walking shoes that are guaranteed to put your feet into a foam “cast”, and thus make them ever weaker.

In terms of health and wellness, if your feet are in constant pain and discomfort, who cares what your 10K time is, or how much you can lift?  Work out for a lifetime, I say, and that means first taking care of the basics!

Every morning, during my Perfectly Paleo Exercise routine, I do several exercises especially for my feet!  In addition, since I always work out barefoot in the living room, and wearing my Xero sandals when in the basement, my feet are constantly involved in whatever exercise I am doing, stabilizing with my toes, strengthening my arch, and twisting and bending as they are meant to do!  And, I also massage my feet with my hands, routinely, as part of my workout.  It doesn’t take long, but the results are so worth it... even my hands and fingers are strengthened by that massage!

In warmer weather, I sprint once per week in the yard, barefooted.  5 or 6 hundred yard dashes or so, sometimes longer, for maybe 10-15 minutes.  But build up to this!  Start by just walking around your house either barefoot or in stockinged feet- never wear shoes in your house!

OK- that’s your feet, becoming their paleo, healthy selves for a lifetime!  Now, on to your neck...

The neck is the other part of the body that, when it hurts or is unnaturally weak, will really ruin your life!  Think about the last time you had a sore or stiff neck- you couldn’t do anything physical at all.  So, during your daily morning workouts (I suggest working out daily, or almost daily for at least a short while) take some time to manually resist moving your head against your hands- push your forehead against your resisting palms, then backwards, and then from side to side.  Push with perhaps a 70-80% perceived maximum resistance level, for a few seconds duration each way- that’s it!  It doesn’t take long at all, and can really make a long term impact on your health- do you really want to be one of those elderly people that is permanently hunched over?

So, you’ve saved your feet, and you’ve saved your neck!  Now, how important to you are your eyes??

It’s not widely known, but the eyes are like the feet- use them naturally, as they are meant to be used, and they will become stonger!  If you constantly wear eyeglasses or contact lenses, your eyes are essentially locked in casts- the will become weaker and weaker over time.

Don’t wear your glasses indoors, unless you really, really need to.  Hold books out to where you can barely read them, at the edge of your focus, and read them there. Don’t make the print on your computer so BIG that it looks like the first letters on an optometrist’s eye chart- make your eyes work.

And above all, make a habit of looking off into the distance, and then back at something close up, and then back into the distance- exercise your eyes.  Consider getting a weaker prescription, not a stronger one next eye Dr. appointment.  Go to a behavioral optometrist, where they believe as I do- they will work with you to get gradually weaker prescriptions to strengthen your eyesight.  A standard optometrist will try to sell you on a stronger prescription, with expensive lenses and frames each and every time you visit them.

It’s a great business model for them, just like selling prescription drugs is great for the drug companies... but it will make your vision progressively worse.  Just as the prescription drugs will mask the symptoms, while making your health progressively worse.

So treat the cause!  Don’t walk with cushioned shoes, which lead eventually to a cane, and then a walker.  Go the other way- to LESS technology- walk barefoot!  Exercise your feet.

Exercise your neck, and while you’re at it, your spine and the rest of your body via Perfectly Paleo Exercise.  Be physically healthy the rest of your life- try going glasses free as much as possible too!

We were created to be perfectly functioning humans.  We evolved to match an environment that we have unwittingly turned toxic, through too much ease and comfort on the one hand, and too much stress and unnaturalness on the other- toxic city water loaded with chemicals, endless job responsibilities, outrageous taxes and overbearing government control.

We need to go back as much as possible!  Our future is in our past.
Try to live in the real world, the paleo world.  Anything else is madness.

Check out this episode!