Resilience
Adaptability is a fundamental biological principle that makes our body more resilient. Discover why optimal adaptation requires proper nutrition, adequate recovery, and a lifestyle aligned with our evolutionary needs.
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Adaptability is a fundamental biological principle, a core characteristic of every organism. Fortunately. Because it means that our body simply adapts. Perhaps some of you know this from sports. Or perhaps not.
In the ideal scenario, the enzyme framework of our personified chemical building kit constantly changes in ways that allow us to cope as well as possible with environmental stress. Ring any bells? If it stops doing this, our body—and we—no longer grow with the challenge, but slowly decline because of it.
Well-developed adaptability ensures that under stress, we become stronger and better. Tendons that are stressed become more resilient over time. Bones that we stress build up and become stronger. Kidneys that must work harder actually grow larger (no joke!). Mental stress automatically makes us psychologically more robust; we automatically handle stressors much better.
We also know the opposite: burnout. An athlete calls it overtraining. And certainly, each of us has felt overwhelmed by the demands we're facing. Why this happens can have three main reasons:
This last point is particularly interesting. In a way, it determines how much the other two factors can influence us. And it determines accordingly, how quickly and how well we adapt to any given stress.
It's also interesting that we modern humans very frequently show either maladaptations or no adaptations at all. Even when the stimulus is there—even if we have stress at work, for example—our biological wonder-machine shows no biological response in the sense of good adaptation to the situation.
So: it becomes clear that in the modern 21st century, we challenge our bodies so much that we often bring them to their knees. That's reason-1 why we absolutely must emulate (not copy) a lifestyle that matches our millions-of-years-old equipment. The bakery and its sweets certainly don't fit that picture.
Reason-2 why we need the right lifestyle is that we drastically underestimate our wonder-machine. We grow up believing that it's normal for a body to eventually become sick. We grow up with a scarcity mindset right from the start. We fundamentally don't understand what a normal body can actually do.
From this "superstition," many modern coping mechanisms emerge. People no longer focus on their innate robustness, but on how best to project their victim role onto their lives. That's often the topic with us: then viruses are to blame, other people, evil corporations, or whoever.
This thinking, this attitude, also shapes how our media landscape presents information. Vitamins are useless, vitamin D will kill you, protein damages your kidneys, there's nothing you can do for your immune system, your brain will inevitably get sick, mental suffering has nothing to do with lifestyle ... and many others.
It's unfortunate that it's precisely this complacency that, ironically, causes our body to not adapt. We lose our adaptability because we don't understand that we must supply our body with resources so it can even adapt at all. We force ourselves into helplessness without realizing that every organism in the world adapts optimally when you feed it well.
Every animal knows that.
So: whoever eats cookies all day and tanks trans fats, whoever fills their body with heavy metals, whoever thinks they don't need to follow the "rules of life," will inevitably succumb to every challenge and get sick. And then you don't need to read another book about resilience (= the ability to get through difficult life situations without lasting impairment).
Jack LaLanne was the fitness icon of the USA for many decades until his death in 2011. Feel free to google it. His many guiding principles still hold true today:
That's the way it is.
