Maintaining Your Physical Health
Monday, September 28th, 2009(Only be Afraid of Standing Still: Practical lessons from the lives of Children pg. 209)
As soon as you are ill, your body never returns to its original state, even when you are “fully recovered”. With every illness, something is lost that is irretrievable, your life becomes shorter. With each illness, you deplete your bank. Therefore the best way to maintain your physical health is to ensure that you are not ill, and if for some reason you are, you intervene early to reduce its impact.
Two things are necessary:
• Enhance your health reserve
• Manage your calories
Here are some tips:
Enhancing your health reserve
First step is to understand your body.
Your body is best suited for particular activities at particular times because it has its own rhythms. Understand those rhythms so that you align your activities. How many hours of sleep do you need? What time of the day are you most alert? When are you tired? Are you hungry before you eat? Or do you simply eat because it is time?
Since your body is a system of rhythms its habits are predictable. All the organs slow down just before sleep; making it necessary to take a rest rather than drink coffee. Coffee may keep you awake but you’ll be flogging your tired organs, making it more difficult for them to truly recover, when you eventually have to rest. It is like continuing to drive when you have a flat tire; you wreck the tire and the wheel. You stress the organs and shorten your life when you work without adequate rest.
Your entire system is most alert after you are fully rested. This is the best time to contemplate important issues. Your food enzymes act up when you are hungry and shut off when you are no longer hungry. Therefore it is best to eat only when you are hungry, rather than out of habit, in order to encourage efficient digestion.
Meet your basic needs.
To be in balance, your body must meet some basic needs. If you sense that you need eight hours of sleep at night, don’t try to make do with six. Not only will you function inefficiently, your body will break down in time. Besides, you may give room for diseases that you would have otherwise avoided. Ten hours of sleep in place of eight is also not beneficial. Beyond your optimum amount of sleep, your body begins to deteriorate. This same principle applies to everything else – food, drink or exercise. Adequate water provides good health, but excessive fluid can drown just as easily as dehydration can kill.
Know that your body is under constant siege from outside and from within. Many infections are contained without your being aware of it or with minimal discomfort. Millions of people have one form of cancer or the other that their body quietly deals with. The more you are in rhythm, the better your body’s ability to cope with these silent attacks. That night of sleep deprivation may turn out to be more expensive than your realize. Diseases only manifest when your body’s innate defenses have been overwhelmed.
Make efforts to be in tune with needs of your body. Otherwise over time you hasten its wear and tear and weaken its defenses.
Know your history
Know the history of your ancestors and your family. What diseases were prevalent? If there has been cancer or heart disease especially in the immediate family, be aware of them and take preventive measures. You should be adopting a life style that minimizes your risk for disease. If you come from a family of asthmatics, it makes no sense to smoke. Not that it ever makes sense to smoke. In this particular situation, you destroy your lungs faster. Know the food and activity habits of your ancestors. Were they predominant meat eaters or vegetarians? What was your mother likely to have eaten when she was pregnant with you? The materials they needed to form your body may be useful in your maintaining that same body.
Self and family knowledge allows you to sensibly plan your life. If you cannot function on a little sleep to the point of debilitation, then you probably should not contemplate a career in night-time security. If everyone around you has Alzheimer’s disease, perhaps you should not be planning for retirement into your eighties. One more thing – two people from different parts of the world will process the same food differently, even when they both appear to tolerate it. The way food breaks down and the clearance for each individual will be different, leading to different impacts on their respective bodies. Over the long term, one person benefits more than the other. It may even be harmful to the other. Lions thrive on meat. But you’ve never seen one die from high cholesterol. Your bodies handle the same foods differently, depending on where you come from. Some one that has grown up on a rice meal processes rice differently from someone one that has grown up on a meat culture. Even when there is no immediate adverse effect, the cumulative by-product may be harmful. If a lion and a goat decided on salad for supper, guess who comes out the better for it.
Establish a pattern
Consistency helps to maintain your rhythm. Do the same things at the same time every day. Your body automatically adjusts to best handle the tasks at those times. If you consistently study at the same time and place every day, chances are that you would be better able to assimilate things rather than if you were erratic. A consistent eating pattern ensures that your enzymes function maximally at those times. If you are consistent with your pattern of sleep, your body soon recognizes the pattern and winds down in readiness for sleep as that time approaches. You then will wake up at particular times, fully rested. Consistent and smooth activity through the day is superior to the usual frenetic activity followed by periods of lethargy. Consistency is the basis for acquiring new habits. You form a habit in three to four weeks. If you want to start a new exercise program simply allot the same amount of time at the same time everyday to your program. Your body adapts in about three weeks. If you tried to stop, your body becomes uncomfortable at those times, encouraging you to continue. This applies to any new venture you undertake.
Maintain balance
It is best to see your body as a system of balances. For it to function optimally it has to maintain balance in both the internal and external environments. The internal balance ensures that the body’s internal ambience changes only slightly in different conditions, in order to allow the hormones and enzymes to continue to function. For example, when it is cold, the body shivers to generate heat. When it is warm, the body sweats to lose heat. The body also shows the need for external balance. This is especially in regard to your food and drink. If too many calories are ingested, the body must work to expend it or it accumulates as fat. If too few calories are ingested, the body uses up its reserves and becomes wasted.
Your health is good or bad to the extent that you can maintain these balances.
Children are incredible in the maintenance of these balances. Feeding is only indicated by hunger, drinking by thirst. A hard play is followed by a restful sleep, all in appropriate timing and amount.
Be aware of the effects of your environment
Your environment affects your health in the same way as weather affects plants. This is because, in the final analysis, your body is made of atoms, no different from the atoms in trees and rocks. This is why weather changes can induce migraine headaches, mood changes or rashes in susceptible people. Your body is best suited to the climate of your birth. Those born in the tropics do best with a tropical climate. The same applies to those in temperate climates. Therefore, if you originate from a warm tropical climate but spend most of your time in the temperate regions, you are likely to become ill and shorten your life. This is no different from how a tropical plant reacts to a temperate climate. The same also applies to those who have origins in temperate areas but decide to move permanently to warmer regions. These changes are more apparent in plants and animals because they are usually fully exposed. Tropical plants hardly survive temperate climates. Changes in humans are less obvious because our adaptive aids slow down the process. But it is not completely stopped. It eventually catches up with us. Those who permanently move from their birth zone to a totally different one invariably shorten their lives. In these days of rampant migration, people must maintain connections with the zone of their birth, if they wish to remain healthy.
Intervene early
It is incredible how much we take our bodies for granted. Many people take better care of their cars than their own bodies. On the average, people only seek medical assistance after they have become ill, at which point the damage is established. But they diligently take their cars for servicing before a breakdown. What is not obvious is that a cure of an illness does not restore the body to its previous state, even when it appears to function normally. Something is always lost – for good. Therefore, it makes sense to have a medical checkup once every two years before the age of fifty and yearly thereafter. Be aware of what your genes and environment predisposes you to. If your father died of a stroke, it is sensible to take precautions for heart related diseases. Early intervention is the key. Most acquired diseases can be cured or ameliorated with early intervention. It is your best chance to preserve your health reserve, before it becomes depleted. Recognize the subtle signs of stress and take steps to reverse them. Your stress hormone increases your heart rate, cholesterol, proneness to strokes, and reduces your immunity. Staying permanently in a stressful situation is similar to letting yourself bleed to death slowly. Some amount of stress is good; it improves your impetus for performance. But overwhelming stress breaks down your defenses. There are other warning signs you must pay attention to – restlessness, anxiety, non satisfaction, feelings of “emptiness” and, of course, pain.
Pain is a universal warning sign, many times, a late one. When something is painful, it means it should be dealt with. But be careful not to respond to every bit of discomfort. Your body will go through some wear and tear as part of normal aging, even when you take excellent care of it.
Take primary responsibility for your body, it is your most valuable asset.
Stay tuned for the next excerpt: Creating a Purpose for Your Life
