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By Mark Lundegren
An important goal of HumanaNatura is to make the principles of progressive natural health understandable and simple in practice. We do this in a number of ways.
One is the organization of our natural health system into four parts, translating a diverse and often abstract body of science into a clear and practical set of techniques. Another way is HumanaNatura’s OurPlate healthy eating guide, which turns the often confusing topic of optimal natural nutrition into a simple image that is easy to remember and apply. And our HN-100 Program gradually introduces the HumanaNatura system and our key natural health practices in small weekly steps spread over 100 days.
HumanaNatura’s OurPlate Healthy Eating Guide
The fact that we use these and other tools to make natural health and fitness promotion less complicated should tell you something – that the topic and underlying science of achieving modern natural health and quality of life are at once simple and not so simple.
Simple Takeaways From Nature’s Complexity
Sure, there are a few basic principles that can allow us to become much healthier and fitter than most people in our time. These include the crucial HumanaNatura ideas that optimal health today is closely related to earlier human life in nature and that modern health science is made more effective when it begins with and seeks to build on the health conditions we once had in nature.
But these principles are born out of hard-won and often hard-to-decipher research occurring over many years, research that both draws from and impacts wide-ranging fields of health science in ways that few people appreciate. Indeed, today many mainstream nutritional and exercise scientists remain mired in the past complexity (and past orthodoxy) of their fields and have not yet embraced these simple, cross-disciplinary, and transformative natural health principles.
A great article by the natural fitness instructor Vin Miller, Optimizing Your Metabolism for Fat Loss, makes this point about underlying complexity of health science quite vividly. In his new article, Vin walks us through some of the important recent research essential to the design of an optimal natural diet and exercise program, focusing on the task of achieving healthy weight loss.
Vin’s piece offers a trove of valuable and well-documented research insights, many of them counter-intuitive and challenging current popular and professional thinking. His article will be of special interest to more technically-minded NaturaLife readers and HumanaNatura practitioners.
In keeping with our theme of making health science simple, and in case you are not planning a deep dive into this topic, here is a quick recap of Vin’s excellent article:
> Fewer Calories Are Not Always Less – though mainstream nutritionists still focus mostly on calorie amount, there is growing research to suggest that both calorie amount and type (proportion of fats, proteins, and carbos) matter in weight loss and healthy weight maintenance…with lower glycemic but adequate calorie diets leading to: 1) improved health and well-being, 2) reduced hunger, 3) improved metabolism and energy use, and 4) a sustained healthy body weight (including a lowered probability of the rebound to earlier weight levels that often occurs from our common practice of intense calorie-restricted dieting followed by a return to high glycemic and thus unnatural eating patterns).
> Achieve Fat Loss & Not Muscle Loss – this new and more natural approach to nutrition – emphasizing restrictions in sugars and other unnatural carbohydrates, rather than calories broadly – appears to have another important benefit…it promotes fat loss rather than muscle loss during body weight reduction. Vin cites research suggesting that a third of weight loss in common dieting approaches is in the form of muscle loss, not the shedding of unwanted body fat, and that this can be prevented or substantially reduced through a natural diet with adequate protein. Again, the result can be a physiologically healthier and physically fitter body, as well as easier and more stable weight control over time.
> Promote Dietary Fat Utilization – another important benefit to a lower glycemic diet (for HumanaNatura, by limiting non-fruit carbohydrates) is that this more natural pattern of human eating improves our ability to utilize the fats we eat for energy. Not only does better dietary fat utilization circularly reduce cravings for unnatural and hunger-elevating carbohydrates, and help to stabilize our body weight and promote fitness and health, considerable research suggests that it substantially reduces metabolic syndrome and our risk of a number of widespread chronic modern diseases (all largely absent among hunter-gatherer people eating a natural diet).
> Natural Exercise Is Critical To Fitness– Vin’s article also underscores science stressing the importance of regular natural exercise in optimizing our health and fitness – improving quality of life, metabolic functioning, weight loss and control, and dietary fat utilization. Importantly, Vin highlights research suggesting that excessive exercise provides diminishing returns and may even have negative health consequences (in addition to an increased risk of injury), as can exercise amidst a poor-quality diet. These and related findings underlie HumanaNatura’s focus on a foundation of re-naturalized eating, along with moderate-paced daily walking and regular moderate-intensity calisthenics.
Overall, Vin’s new article, Optimizing Your Metabolism for Fat Loss, makes a strong and well-researched case for a naturally low-glycemic diet with adequate lean proteins and moderate daily exercise – whether our goal is to become optimally fit or to stay this way. We would encourage you to check out Vin’s great article and fitness website.
Taking Action
If you are ready to take progressive new steps to increase your health and fitness, now and throughout your life, you can begin to promote optimal natural health and quality of life through HumanaNatura’s revolutionary natural health techniques – Natural Eating, Natural Exercise, Natural Living, and Natural Communities.
Together, these four crucial techniques make understanding and achieving progressive natural fitness accessible to scientists and non-scientists alike, and are introduced in our detailed but easy-to-follow Personal Health Program.
If you want to start more simply, by learning about HumanaNatura and your opportunities for more natural modern life and health, go to The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.
Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.
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