What is Your Body Telling You?
Perhaps one of the best ways to remain healthy and avoid sickness is to listen to the ‘voice’ of your body? Do you know how to do that?
Our bodies are really cool machines with several built in mechanisms to keep them going. A lot of times, those mechanisms manifest themselves in the form of desires. Those desires are given to us for the fulfillment of our bodily needs, and we should keep that perspective. Notice that I am not saying that we should therefore give in to all desires. Because of the kind of world we live in, some of our desires are messed up sometimes, and we have to therefore live with self-control to not be controlled by desires.
The voice of the body manifests in the following ways:
- Hunger – our bodies need food to stay alive, as food contains many necessary nutrients, as well as energy (calories). Certain cravings might be your body’s way of asking for certain nutrients. And no, our soda cravings probably does not mean you are craving soda nutrients, because there are none. We probably really need something else and do not understand what our body is really saying.
- Thirst – our bodies are made up of about 60% water, so it is important that your body tell you when it needs more water. Not drinking enough water is an easy way to eventually get sick.
- Pain – yes, that pain you have actually means something. Your body is telling you that something is not quite right. That headache is telling you to deal with some issue you should find out (you might need water), so taking an aspirin to mask the pain does not help. It is technically worse to do that.
- Tiredness – I am guilty of working through tiredness sometimes. Our bodies are telling us that we need rest for the purpose of repair, or so that we can fight some disease or infection.
- Lack of Interest in Food/Nausea/Vomiting – in this case, either our bodies do not agree with a particular food, or your body wants to focus on getting you well from a sickness. I have to tell a story here. I used to eat this Chicken Parmesan dish from a restaurant not far from my day job every Thursday. It was a huge plate of noodles and sauce, topped with cheese and a huge fried chicken breast, served with two pieces of garlic bread. One evening after eating the Chicken Parmesan, I started to feel nauseous. Chalking it up to something else, I ate it again the next Thursday, and by evening on that day I actually threw it up. No more Chicken Parmesan for me!
Other body signals include Fever, Coughing, Gas, Bloating, Sneezing, and Runny Nose. I am sure there are several others out there.
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Why do we ignore these signals? From my personal experience, I have ignored these signals from perceived inconvenience, but of course the signals are not inconvenient by any means. I see it like a good antivirus software. If your antivirus software warned you to not open up a certain link or attachment, doing so would be very risky and would potentially open your computer up to problems, right?
How much more important is it to listen to the “antisickness” software installed in our bodies?
Let’s listen to our bodies and be healthy.
Reblogged this on benbrilliant.
Hi, Ben. I saw that you reblogged my post, but I clicked the link and didn’t see it. Do you know what happened?
Question about hunger:
What should I do about being hungry at 11 or 12 at night?
Man, my opinion would be that you 1) drink a glass of water first (since sometimes you can feel hungry but be thirsty), and if that doesn’t do it, 2) eat a piece of fruit. That’s what I’d do.
Very helpful article. I will be sure to listen to my body’s antivirus software more. Perhaps then I won’t be so sluggish. Thanks for the post! I enjoyed it.
Thanks for the comment, Brooke! Glad you enjoyed the post!
My downfall is confusing thirst for hunger. I always have to ask myself: am I really hungry? Or am I bored, feeling celebratory, feeling antsy, or just eating to be eating. Great article!
Thanks! Wife and I have found that we often feel celebratory and eat accordingly…even when there is no real celebration, lol. We’ve been having to curb that a bit.