YOUR DYNAMIC BODY
By Jamie Lynn
Understand that your body is a complicated machine. It has many levels of functionality in a very systematic system. It has glands, blood circulation, breathing apparatus, heart beat pulsation, a brain, nervous system, endocrinal system, and a hormonal system. Your body is a functional system. As a functional system, it requires care. It requires cleaning, tuning, fuel, movement, rest, and attention.
This body houses you. It moves you around, it determines your moods, it is capable of miracles. It takes in food, uses what it needs, and excretes the waste in a wondrous maze of plumbing and chemical reactions. At any moment in time, there are complicated processes occurring that you rarely even consider.
You see, it's not that it's ‘natural' and ‘normal' for your body to degenerate at a certain age. Your body is built to last a long, long time and in good health. What determines when your body will balk at abuse (as well as what your body will view as abuse) is the personality of your physical constitution. Some people will begin to degenerate much younger than others. Some will ‘look good' and then be struck, seemingly out of the blue, with a terminal disease. Men in their 40's-50's suddenly keeling over from a heart attack after a nice long run, having run their entire adult lives, has their friends and family perplexed. "He was really healthy", I've heard folks say, "and could eat anything he wanted. Then one day, he was gone!" No one can ‘eat anything they want' and not suffer some consequence at some point, no matter what you look like on the outside. The body is a chemical machine with very fine functioning, and nothing goes un-noticed.
"I don't know how many times you can go through the red light. Forget about the policeman, I am talking about the accident." Yogi Bhajan
The body will give you cues that it is getting ready to break down. It will start exhibiting aches and pains, leaks in the system - hormonal imbalance or blood sugar disturbances, high blood pressure, cholesterol imbalances, immune system issues, weight gain, and then move on to diseases. If you do not stop and tend to the body in the early stages (frequently people begin medicating all the early symptoms) then the body will work harder to get your attention. Once the big diseases hit, there is no going back.
But it doesn't have to go that way! You can, at any point, turn your system around by tending to your body.
Your body is a biologically dynamic unit. It is constantly changing and adapting. It truly WANTS to be a finely tuned, well oiled, high performance machine thriving on quality fuel. It will not resist your finest efforts.
So what's The Magic Answer?
There is one! And it's not a secret! You've seen it everywhere - in the unreliable media, from your doctor, in health publications, from health aficionados everywhere. It goes like this:
EAT REAL FOOD AND MOVE AROUND.
That's all! In reality, of course, the confusion and questions pop up immediately. What is ‘real food'? How much do I eat? How often? What about carbs? What about ice cream? Coffee? How much should I move around? How often? Isn't there a pill I can take?
Ideally, a person would figure all that out for themselves through trial and error and hit upon a way of eating that fuels them and a level of exercise that delivers the desired results, making alterations as they progress through all the changes life poses, adapting food intake with new/different physical demands...
Most of us don't feel we have time for that. So we turn to diets, and supplements, and the current Next Big Thing. We've all been fed so much misinformation out there that we are overwhelmed and unsure what to believe or where to turn for reliable help!
The Problem With Diets...
Low calorie dieting slows your metabolism, making it progressively more difficult to lose weight and keep it off. The failure rate of most diets is astronomical - yet we keep trying diet after diet, chasing that illusory magic answer...and the gyms are full of folks who are low calorie dieting and doing hours of cardio, even further lowering their metabolisms and becoming increasingly frustrated that they don't look or feel any differently.
The body's natural response to a shortage of metabolism-fueling calories is to conserve fat. This is a basic human survival trait from your very early ancestors. It's called the ‘starvation response' and it results in hormonal changes and, eventually, muscle loss. Once the ‘starvation response' is activated and the body goes into famine mode, it will conserve fat and begin to break down muscle tissue for fuel.
When a person loses pure fat every pound lost is noticeable. Five lbs of fat is the size of a large loaf of bread. 5 lbs of muscle is about the size of one large fist. When longtime dieters heal their metabolisms and lose FAT for the first time, they are always amazed at the difference in their physique. It's a completely different world. The eyes are bright and shiny, the skin is clearer, the person feels and looks better than they ever have.
Life is good. Respect your body, and love your soul. It's never too late.
