Nutrition #7 - Become a Student of the Body

Your mind. Your body. Your soul. These three things are responsible for everything you are ever going to experience in life. This is such an important thing to be aware of because by realizing this – by realizing that you are the sum of three simple, yet enormously complex parts, you can begin to shape your life the way you want it.

You must also understand that our physical body is also where the mind and soul are housed. Our physical being is simply the vessel by which we transport our consciousness and spirit around this physical plane of existence. It stands to reason that the physical body is the root of nearly all ailments. This is an empowering belief, as through this realization, we can banish so much poor health, negative thought, depressed emotion, and self-defeating mentality by altering how we treat and understand our bodies.

Our body is an intricately designed piece of biological machinery. The product that we are experiencing today is the result of a billion trial-and-error experiments up the evolutionary biology tree – in order to very precisely fine tune a vehicle called the human. We are the ultimate pinnacle of biological achievement. Mother nature has succeeded in creating an organism with a level of consciousness high enough to simultaneously experience both itself, and the world it traverses. This is another extremely empowering belief – to understand that we have succeeded at the biological level in evolving to this level of higher consciousness.

So – what am I trying to say? Why am I rambling about all this evolutionary biology and the interconnectedness between the body, mind, and soul? It is my belief that thinking about these concepts is an important step in understanding our importance in this world, and also why we ought to treat our bodies as a holy place. When one begins to pay attention to their body, and they start to listen to the internal processes that are constantly happening, their heart and mind begin to open up.

THE ANALOGY

Think about this analogy. What if it took you over 3 BILLION years to come up with the designs to build a Ferrari. Then, it took you 250 million workers multiple tries to actually build that Ferrari, and 249,999,999 of those workers died in order to succeed with its construction. From there, you have a Ferrari – your human body. In case you didn't get the reference, the origin of life on Earth began about 3.5 billion years ago based on varying accounts, and there is 250 million sperm in each male ejaculation.

Anyways – you have your Ferrari, and you have a choice how to drive it. You can choose to drive it primarily on a bumpy dirt road with lots of cracks and potholes which will totally ruin its suspension, so when you go to drive it on a paved road it is jerky and has terrible handling and difficult to accelerate, break, or turn. This is the equivalent of you living a lifestyle and performing exercises which wreck your joint mobility, tissue quality, and muscle integrity. You sit at a desk all day for work and run sprints for the first time in over a year without stretching properly and all of a sudden your hamstring hurts incredibly bad. Weird. Or, maybe you choose to drive your Ferrari on a speed track all the time at top speeds, burning down the tires, and eventually you lose all traction and crash and burn – literally. This is the equivalent to you being on the go nonstop, fueled by Starbucks, Rockstars and take-out without ever pausing for reflection, stress management, and some basic mental and physical maintenance.

Or how deciding to save some money and fill up on unleaded fuel and extend your oil changes, because you’d rather put that money towards something ‘meaningful’, and you drive relatively normally with no problems for years and years. All of a sudden your engine seizes up, and you have to take it into the shop every 3 to 6 months for routine maintenance that could have been completely avoided had you filled up with premium and changed the oil as often as you should. This is exactly what most of us are experiencing today – consuming pesticide laden produce, antibiotic and hormone treated animal products, and preservative laced packaged goods which are toxic to our health, although we do not see immediate negative effects. All for the sake of saving a bit of money so we can get more for our dime.

We might eat like this for years and years and visit the doctor once in a blue moon when we are sick, get some lab tests done and everything comes back “in range”. We get a thumbs up from an overworked Doc who sends us home with a script for some antibiotics that will wreak havoc on our gut bacteria which we don’t even THINK about or are aware of, causing us even more problems down the line that we don’t know about, but we feel better from the drugs and the blood work shows that everything is fine and dandy so we continue living our lives exactly as we have been.

By the time we are in our forties and fifties we are wondering why we libido is nonexistent, we wonder why our backs hurt, why we are tired all the time, why exercising gives us massive fatigue; basically, we wonder why our lives suck. And for the most part, no one ever tells us we weren't supposed to feel this way. The breakdown of the body is common with age, right? We need to wake UP people! No one is going to help you truly understand your body except yourself. No matter how much you learn and see or experience, until you apply it upon yourself and truly understand it, looking within at how the body receives and processes outside stimuli ESPECIALLY the nutrition aspect of it, your ultimate progress will be hindered. There is absolutely no reason why you cannot be playing tag with your grandkids and kicking ass at 60+ (hopefully not their ass).

BECOME A STUDENT OF THE BODY

This is exactly why I do not advocate the typical bodybuilder meal plan, the contest prep meal plan, the fitness competitor meal plan, or the basic healthy gym goer ‘meal plan’. I do not believe in customized meal plans, either. People who sell these products typically are selling the results portrayed by their bodies. I definitely give them massive credit for their discipline, although I am not sure that many of these online personal trainers and dieticians truly understand the body. A lot of times we simply see regurgitated meal plans which have been around for decades. Chicken broccoli and rice anyone? Then on the flip side, we have ‘flexible dieters’ and the IIFYM crew which makes nearly very little sense if you have any value in your human system. I do not blame any of these folks for their beliefs, I just think that they have been misled by media, marketing, and the entire fitness industry. The real science lies with the biochemists, the immunologists, and the metabolic biologists. Not the dude at the gym who is 250 lbs and 6% body fat who has spent years grinding away, acquiring nuggets of useful information but never truly, truly understanding the body.

I am a proponent of intuitive eating and learning what works best for your own biological system. Remember – nutrients are messages to cells. Each cell membrane has receptors on it which unlock or open that membrane to allow different nutrients, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, various chemicals and molecules into and out of it. How are you going to influence those receptors? How do you know which ones to influence at what times, how many, how often, and through what process? All I can say is – I don’t know, and I don’t believe anyone truly does. Although, there are many extremely bright minds hard at work, researching these variables, and I am doing as much as I can to learn from them and apply their knowledge. 

And that is precisely where YOU come into play. I want to empower as many people as I possibly can to become a student of their body. 

And that is where I come into play – I want to help you along this amazing, self-enriching journey.

As I mentioned earlier, no one is going to help you truly understand your body except yourself. So it is up to YOU to become a student of your body. Become a student of the vastly complex and interesting biology that occurs within your physical walls. Seek to understand what is happening on the inside. Give yourself time to grow and understand the inner workings of the body. Learn to appreciate and truly experience this spectacular phenomenon known as the human being.

Once this enlightenment occurs, everything else is easy.