So often I hear people put their bodies down with phrases such as “I have a bad lower back” or “my digestion sucks” or even... “I am such a slow runner”. If we keep on saying that to our bodies, guess what will happen?! (you guessed it… your lower back will only get worse and your running slower)
What about reminding yourself about what is good in your body? When it really comes down to things, your body is an amazing self-regulating, adapting and evolving organism that is continually doing a million things all at once… and you don’t even have to think about it!! Here are some of my favourite examples to remind you of how wonderful your body is.
Firstly, the average adult has 7 000 000 000 000 0 living cells in his or her body at any given moment, which all function without you having to think about it!
50,000 cells in your body died and were replaced by new ones while you were reading this sentence.
The collagen in bone constantly replenishes itself, so every 7 years you have a new skeleton!
The human brain has a memory capacity which is the equivalent of more than four terabytes on a hard drive.
The average human body contains enough sulphur to kill all the fleas on the average dog, enough carbon to make 900 pencils, enough potassium to fire a toy cannon, enough fat to make seven bars of soap and enough water to fill a 50-litre barrel.
Human skin is completely replaced about 1,000 times during a person’s lifetime.
The surface area of the human lungs is approximately equal to the area of a tennis court.
Bones are about 5 times stronger than steel.
Our eyes remain the same size as they were at birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing. (Oh no, that means my nose will only get bigger!)
The human eye can distinguish 10 million different colours.
And here is my favourite one. Whenever your body comes in contact with a virus or bacteria, your bodies immune system will assimilate that virus or bacteria and create new white blood cells against it, thus slowly, over time, upgrading your immune system. Once in a while you might even notice this change when you produce a fever (increased temperature to destroy the heat sensitive invader) and mucous. Your body will shut down, becoming more painful and sleepy, forcing you to take rest. Some studies and thought patterns even suggest that developing a fever is crucial to our growth and evolution. Clever, isn’t it?
So next time when you feel when you find yourself speaking about your body in a negative way, quickly remind yourself of how lucky you are to have a healthy, functioning body… and your day will brighten up a bit as well!
Links:
https://hilo.hawaii.edu/academics/hohonu/documents/Vol06x24TheHumanFebrileResponse.pdf
http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/erarchive/1999/March/ermarch.1/3_1_99lampl.html