Episode 1. Your Amazing Body
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Whether we realise it or not – God has given us a truly amazing body – a body that many of us are abusing through our diet and lack of exercise. And as things turn out, it’s the only body we …
Whether we realise it or not – God has given us a truly amazing body – a body that many of us are abusing through our diet and lack of exercise. And as things turn out, it’s the only body we have, so what we do with it, matters.
The body we live in is something that we take largely for granted, it’s just kind of there. It’s been there as long as we can remember and sometimes we live as though it’s going to go on forever. But this body that you and I are encapsulated in is not going to go on forever. You know what they say there are two certainties in life – death and taxes. One day your body, one day my body will quite literally give up the ghost.
Over the last couple of years I’ve been doing a lot of reading about diet and food and in particular our digestive system, how we process food. See, I’m now in my mid fifties and for most of my adult life, no, no, for all of my adult life except the last couple of years I have struggled with my weight.
When you get to your mid-fifties you kind of know you’re getting to the pointy end of this whole healthy-eating, healthy-living thing because it’s at this age that many people suffer heart attacks, many people discover they have diabetes, many people end up with cancer, the three big killers in western society and in any country that’s adopted elements of the western diet
We’re going to talk a lot about that over the coming few days but today we’re going to kick off by just realising how utterly amazing your body is. If we’re going to lead a healthier lifestyle which many, many people need to do there’s this decision that needs to be taken about how we eat, how we live, how we exercise and how we sleep.
Healthier living is a deliberate decision that we need to take and when we do all of a sudden within just a few weeks we start feeling so much better that we can’t even imagine going back to the old ways of living. And part of making that decision I think is realising how incredibly precious this body is that each one of us is living in.
So let’s kick off by taking a look at just a handful of amazing facts about your body. Are you ready, here we go? Did you know that you produce twenty-five million new cells every second 24×7 for the whole of your life? Ha, twenty-five million in a second, that’s more than the population of Australia and each of the 2.5 trillion red blood cells in your body can circumnavigate your body in under twenty seconds.
Your nerve impulses travel at over 400 kilometres or 250 miles per hour and just one sneeze generates a wind gust of a hundred and 66 kilometres or 100 miles per hour. Today your heart is going to beat around a hundred thousand times or in an average life of seventy-five years that’s about 2.75 billion heartbeats.
And your lungs with a surface area big enough to cover a tennis court are going to inhale around two million litres or half a million gallons of air each and every day without you ever having to think about it. Your eyes can distinguish over a million different colours and take in more information than the largest telescope we’ve ever built which I’m presuming is the Hubble Telescope out there in space.
And as if that weren’t enough, do you know that your nose is your own personal air conditioning system? It warms cold air, it cools hot air, it filters out impurities. Take a look at your hand for a moment, just imagine one square inch right there in the middle of your hand, there you have nine feet of blood vessels, 600 pain sensors, 9000 nerve endings, thirty-six heat sensors and seventy five pressure sensors and when you touch something those sensors send a message to your brain at around 200 kilometres or 124 miles an hour.
Your eyebrows are there to keep sweat out of your eyes and you’re going to make a litre of saliva today and every other day of your life. And if you were able to stretch out your DNA, all the DNA in your body from end to end, it would be enough to take you to the sun and back 700 times.
Now I haven’t even begun to talk about the amazing chemical factory that your body is. It has the most finely tuned, complex processes that scientists and medicos are really only beginning to understand. Systems for regulating your temperature, systems for complex body functions, appetite, sleep. Do you know that science doesn’t even yet fully understand what sleep is all about? They have theories but actually they don’t yet know.
And all this in a body that’s made up of 70% of plain simple old water. My friend we’ve just scratched the surface in the last few minutes of how amazing your body is. Go ahead look in the mirror, this is you that we’ve been talking about here, your body, the only body that you’ve been given and as amazing and robust as this body of yours is it’s also so incredibly fragile.
If you lose the main chemical factory in your body, your liver, you have only seven hours of life left because without it you can’t function. Yet a rapidly increasing proportion of our society, particularly those who are overweight, have fatty liver syndrome that can lead to cirrhosis that can then lead to cancer of the liver. All totally preventable.
Somewhere between 60% and 80% of adults in developed economies are overweight or obese, that’s up from 20% at the beginning of the 20th century and right there you have heart disease, diabetes and increased cancer risk. People, something has to give, this finely tuned precious complex glorious body in which you live needs some looking after.
Now perhaps you’re one of the small minority who exercises and who has a healthy weight and a healthy diet and that’s great but chances are, the statistics tell me, that you’re not.
Over these coming few days and weeks we’re going to be chatting about how you can start to look after your amazing body, how you can get into healthy living and increase the odds of you living to a ripe old healthy age. Is that just moderately interesting to you? The way our society and our health is headed, people something has to give and what I’m hoping is that it’s not going to be your body that’s going to give up the ghost sooner rather than later.
What I’m hoping is that over these coming few weeks we can talk about some things that will get you excited about healthy eating and healthy living. Because not only is your body going to thank you but if you’re someone who knows you need to do something about this you’re going to feel so much better, so much better, that’s a promise.
It shouldn’t be any surprise to us that we have an amazing body because it was handcrafted by God Himself, He designed it, He made it, He gifted it to each one of us, my body to me, your body to you, it is a precious, precious thing. The more I study and the more I learn about the body the more I marvel at the faith required for an atheist to say there is no God.
Really? If there is no God how did these finely tuned, complex systems and feedback loops and balancing mechanisms and protective mechanisms happen in our bodies? By chance? Hey that takes a level of faith that I simply don’t have. The psalmist had it right in Psalm 139 when he wrote this to God:
For it was you God who formed my inner parts. You who knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works O God, that I know very well. My frame wasn’t hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts O God, how vast is the sum of them.
It’s true, God’s given us the most amazing body and it’s not an unreasonable thing for God to want us to look after that amazing body that He’s gifted to us. A body that’s absolutely essential to the life that we live. Hey, God has a plan for you, He has a plan for me, plans that if we abuse our bodies with an unhealthy lifestyle are not going to be realised.
So over these coming days we’re going to be talking about how, how anybody can live a healthy lifestyle. No brutal diets, no fads, no starvation, just simple healthy ways of living and eating, ways that have certainly changed my life and might just change yours as well.
Comments
Ethan Crawshaw
Hi Merril,
That’s such a powerful story about your weight journey. Thanks so much for sharing. For spiritual assistance please feel free to keep reading FRESH to get daily spiritual encouragement. Not every post will be relevant especially to weight-related topics but hopefully, you’ll be able to get a lot out of learning more about how amazing our God is and that no matter what we’ve been through or what our metabolism is like He loves us unconditionally.
Blessings,
Ethan.
merril
I really found your articles very true and confirm for me much of what I have learnt over the years. I am pretty much on a good track food-wise now (but do eat a bit of sweet stuff each day), with salad, nuts, cheese; unprocessed meats n fish, a couple of eggs a week. But now have mobility problems with damaged shoulders preventing me from taking on too much walking with also only partially mobile legs. I am trying to jigg around holding onto chairs n things, and do flowing body movements, but have just recently started regaining the weight I had managed to lose gradually over the last 20 years (over 4 stone in fact). Apparently, my metabolism is geared to activity more than lesser intake (everyone in my family eats more than I do, including naughty stuff). But ALSO I find that I still sometimes eat more when stressed or in between projects. I am a survivor of intense childhood abuse and a really damaging marriage, but had absolutely no weight problems till mid 40s etc. with my memory recovery, divorce and no longer the intense involvement with sport I had right into my 50s causing my weight to spiral right out of normal. I am telling you this because I know from my experience that survivors of abuse and similar get different body needs especially with food choices and their ability to balance their life. Now almost 80, and having processed the past pretty well with spiritual and other counselling, counterpoised with some pretty good achievements and adventures. It is mainly the present lack of being able to walk, run and adventure that has started my weight going up again – but I also recognise the intrusion of little bitts of extra snacks – and I can see that earlier on, I could just make sure that I had plenty of physical activity and that would also deal with the snacks, but now I cant seem (yet anyway) to do enough any more to keep me getting slimmer! When my creativity is in full flow (I do painting and pottery), I don’t seem to snack much, and of course, also move around a lot more, but now my stiff body is limiting what I can do artistically or exercise-wise, and my body is putting the weight back (with perhaps emotional sandbagging, frustration or perhaps loss of vision as well as the exercise difficulties?)
I, therefore, feel that some people may need some spiritual/psychological assistance as well as all the good things you’ve told us about eating and exercise, and feel that perhaps you could research this wider aspect of getting a healthy body and share your or associates’ insights about this as well.
blood sugar levels
Type 2 diabetes is definitely an adult-onset diabetes.
Obviously, patients are in their middle age. Most patients who’ve this kind of diabetes
are obese, or have hypertension, or high cholesterol,
and also other factors.
janet stone
Recommended by my brother. Sounds good.
I am reading Hartwig’s “IT STARTS WITH FOOD”.
Su
Absolute truth
Chrissy
I was so excited when heard your programe
On reducing refined carbohydrates
But unfortunately I am in England and when going on
Your broadcast site I could not upload the advice on
The foods to not take and the free booklet is only available in Australia I was wondering if you could give me the name of the person mentioned who has
Written the books on low carbohydrate food
Thank you
When clicking on the broadcast icons to listen again to your programe on this exciting new way of eating it would not open so hope you can he’ll listen to you different perspective broadcasts on ucb and have found them very encouraging thank you
Christine Fogarty united kingdom
Yours in Christ Jesus