Reconsidering Shoes

There is a lot to be said about “the way nature intended things.” We humans are so smart, sometimes to our own detriment. We have everything we need to survive and be happy at the most fundamental level yet we live in a society where we slowly kill ourselves and dope up on anti-depressants. This is nothing new, so I won’t go on and on about it.

But, I read an article yesterday that made me think about our feet and what we’re doing to them. Thanks to conscious thought, we took it upon ourselves to improve upon nature and so we wear padded shoes because apparently nature didn’t know enough to design our feet with support of it’s own.

I’m not talking about covering up your foot for protection, I’m talking about the shoes we all buy with the arch support, toe support, heel support, basically any shoe you buy, thinking that for some reason we need all of that because our feet are fundamentally flawed.

Feet are smarter than we give them credit for. Consider this: The sole of each foot has over 200,000 nerve endings in it, one of the highest concentrations anywhere in the body. Our feet are designed to act as earthward antennae, helping us balance and transmitting information to us about the ground we’re walking on. We need to be listening to our feet. Not wrapping them in padding and telling them to shut up.

You know how animals can sense a storm coming, and there have been reports that they’ve sensed an earthquake coming something like 24 hours in advance? Maybe it’s because those 200,000 nerve endings pressing right into the soil of the Earth puts them in touch with nature and (this is a stretch) senses the electromagnetic fluctuations enough to where they know something is wrong.

Anyway, I’m going to try out this barefoot shoe called Vivo Barefoot.

Vivo Barefoot is a revolutionary, back-to-basics design based on the simple principle that being barefoot is the healthiest way for you and your feet to be. An ultra thin puncture resistant sole allows your feet to be as millions of years of evolutionary design intended – Barefoot!

I also read an article in Men’s Health once about how a top runner from the U.S. couldn’t keep up with a group of runners from a small tribe in South America, because the tribe didn’t wear shoes when they ran and therefore hit the ground and propelled themselves totally different — ya know, how humans have been doing it since day one.

I’ll let you know how it goes.