Why I Wear Natural Foot Shoes

An Army runs on its feet.

My wife says, women pay no attention to what men wear . . . except their shoes and watch. This information concerns me.

I don’t wear the handsomest, most fashionable shoes. I did, but I stopped because of pain.

When I wear “regular” shoes—heel, padding, stiff sole, narrow toe box—I get what feels like electrical shocks with every step. As if the nerves that run between my metatarsals slide to the bottom of the bones to be pinched between my feet and the ground. This sometimes causes my left leg to lose tension. Not safe or pleasant.

I thought this was just something I had to life with. When I mentioned it to a doctor years ago, he recommended wearing orthopedic shoes, custom made. Something like this:

I’m sure the ladies would be impressed, but, no. I’d bear with the pain.

In 2015, though, I was reading Antifragile by Nassim Taleb, and I came across this paragraph:

Tonight I will be meeting friends in a restaurant (tavernas have existed for at least twenty-five centuries). I will be walking there wearing shoes hardly different from those worn fifty-three hundred years ago by the mummified man discovered in a glacier in the Austrian Alps.¹

A bit more research revealed that the shoes Taleb wears are Vivobarefoot’s Gobi desert boots:

Maybe not the most stylish shoe, but they beat the pants off of the doctor-recommended pair.

This led me to more research. I learned how the common shoe shape (torpedo) changes the shape of the natural human foot (pizza slice). After decades of wearing “fashionable” shoes, your feet look anything but fashionable.

Left: a natural-shaped foot from natural shoes. Right: a deformed foot from wearing fashionable shoes.