Exercising

There is a lot of good in Arthur De Vany’s method… In addition to useful, general comments such that “the human heart having to be irregular, chaotic rhytm”, his dieting and exercising regimen contains lots of other useful tips. For example jogging is verboten. Jogging is rythmic, only exercises twitcher muscles, not the big muscles - so after hours of exercise you end up with some sweat, but healthwise, whole lot ‘o nothing. The fact that American streets are littered with people following this flawed exercise says nothing about its correctness.

Yet our TV screens are covered with commercials that try to sell us odd looking machinery that force us to do robotic movements, in order to “exercise”. When I see such machinery, I can see another effect of industrial age; a time when for work, people went to factories and performed rhytmic moves that all looked the same, day in and day out. The logic follows, when the time came to “exercise”, it would be natural to give these people another set of “machinery” into which they would be “plugged in”. They would then perform the functions that machinery would “want”. Just look at informercials demonstrating one of these comical beasts (my favorite is the one that makes you walk on air), you can see thie “processing” mentality very clearly.

Our bodies still have not evolved to suit into this “modern” age filth.

And they probably never will.

300+ years in human evolution is a drop in bucket. Our genes are still suited for hunting and gathering, not for modern life. A hunter’s movements differed wildly, from stillness, to immense effort, and sometime walking. A hunter could go on for days without food, sometimes he bled and lost blood. De Vany’s and other “caveman diet” approaches to living all try to replicate this “unindustrial” way of life. People following these methods lift free weights, with irregular, nonmechanic moves, they climb, sometimes they fast for a day, randomly; and some days they feast. They donate blood to replicate blood loss. They try to be outside when it is sunny.