Keeping our primal senses through physical exercise

In modernity we often lose the sense of hunger and thirst. Of course the idea is not to starve or stop drinking water. Rather, keeping our primal senses means experiencing them for a short period through being in nature. There are two types of hungers. One is it’s lunch time and you’re still in a meeting. The meeting runs long, or the food is late, or you’re driving through some place without a restaurant or place to eat. Then at 2pm you’re in a position to eat. You hear people say “i’m starving”. They might have been sitting on a chair the whole time. It is one type of starvation.

Another type of starvation is when you’ve been running for 2 or 3 hours, or have been on the bike, or have been hiking. When we do this, we consume our energy stores differently. The body has multiple energy stores and runs like a hybrid engine. While your car may consume a mix of gas and electricity, our body stores energy in the form of glycogen inside our muscles. That glycogen is ready to use, and very efficient in transforming itself into energy. When we do sprints and quick efforts at high intensity, it’s the fuel our body uses first. Then as we run out of glycogen, the body starts using fat. That’s why it can be hard to lose weight. You have to train your body to use fat as fuel, and that can only be done if we stop snacking. In other words, we have to feel comfortable with a lower ratio of carbs, so that we can use our other fuel.

Sports reconnect us to our natural senses

Back to reconnecting to our primal senses: civilization is just a thousands of years old. It can feel like we’ve always lived that way. Even at the times of ancient writings, people stored food. They had methods to cook and store food, and hunt animals for as long as writings have been around. But life on earth is 2 billion years old. 5000 years of civilization, compared to 2 billion years, is a split second. The rest of time, most of the time we’ve existed, we had to hunt. We had to face times of fasting because we didn’t have anything to eat. We ran in hot weather, we sweated, and got thirsty. Doing sports reconnects you to that time. We get hungry and thirsty in a way that eating late or skipping a meal while sitting all day can’t compare. Keeping our primal senses reconnects us with our inner self.