Find Your Strength (eBook)

Colin Sharp (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
208 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-2287-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Discover how to 'Find Your Strength'! This impactful book teaches you how to achieve and maintain personal health within the constraints of a modern world and throughout an ever-changing life. Author Colin Sharp understands that health encompasses so many factors and layers. His book takes a deep dive into the mental, physical, and spiritual aspects of health and demonstrates how you can achieve them.

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Discover how to "e;Find Your Strength"e;! This impactful book teaches you how to achieve and maintain personal health within the constraints of a modern world and throughout an ever-changing life. Author Colin Sharp understands that health encompasses so many factors and layers. His book takes a deep dive into the mental, physical, and spiritual aspects of health and demonstrates how you can achieve them. Known well as a very fit, middle-aged man, Sharp wrote this book in response to a lifetime of others pondering his apparent ease of fitness. He explores the wonderfully achievable complexities of health and wellness throughout each section of the book. Topics covered include the basic needs of our human bodies and spirits, motivations and mechanics of an effective workout, responses to injuries and illness, among many more. This book will teach you how to thrive. Learn how to improve your health and learn how to improve each aspect of your daily life today! With this motivational guide, you are destined to discover your own personal strength and live without limitations.

Textauszug

Chapter 1

The Basic Needs of Our Bodies

I have decided to begin with the basic needs of the physical human body because this is a book about human health and because physical nutrition is a necessary first step in the development and maintenance of everything else.

Whether through instruction or experience, the basic needs of our bodies—air, water, and food—are taught to us at a young age. However, in this modern world of hustle and bustle, we are commonly distracted from these needs, and with a willpower strong enough to ignore the body’s urges for them, we sometimes create internal imbalances for ourselves.

Air

Air is our most important need because a lack of it shuts down our bodies faster than a deficit in any of the other needs. Breathing is one of those bodily functions that mostly happens involuntarily but may also be controlled consciously, when we choose it.

When we breathe in, air circulates briefly in our nasal passages, where it is adjusted to the temperature and humidity levels optimal for it to be later absorbed. In our lungs, it passes over the surface of thin, wet membranes with dense capillary beds just under them. These allow fresh oxygen—and whatever else is mixed in the air with it—to permeate directly into our bloodstream, in exchange for spent carbon dioxide (and other metabolic waste), which is then exhaled when we breathe out.

While driving long distances in a warm, vibrating car—staring for hours at the horizon—I subconsciously reduce my breathing rate, until I become aware that white is creeping in around my field of view, a sign that my body is about to lose consciousness. Sometimes I catch myself realizing that I have actually stopped breathing and on a couple of occasions when I haven’t, it has led me to unfortunately pass out behind the wheel. Thankfully, these times did not result in any injuries.

A few years back, I helped to coach a young man named Daniel through the minutes between his head-on pickup truck collision with a semitruck at highway speed and the arrival of the life-flight helicopter that was to whisk him away to the nearest large hospital. The look on his astonished face as he came to and admitted to having no memory of what had happened keeps me awake and alert on the road now.

I commonly find myself short on oxygen any time that I sit still without distractions for a lengthy period of time, not just when I am driving. I did not understand why this was such a common occurrence for me until the birth of our second son, Taj. The doctor and nurses had trouble clearing the amniotic fluid from his nose because he had, as they put it, “extremely narrow nasal passages.” He looked just like me, all long and skinny in body and face, and it suddenly occurred to me that I, too, had very narrow nasal passages. I often find breathing through my nose alone to be downright laborious and supplement with some mouth-breathing, which I do almost exclusively during exercise.

Oxygen is an absolutely essential fuel and building block for our bodies, which is why our bodies quickly experience dysfunction and then death when denied it. During any kind of strenuous activity, consistent breathing is important for our bodies to metabolize most efficiently and perform at their peak. Depriving our systems of oxygen shuts down the metabolism and other important bodily functions, like thinking. For these same reasons, daily stretching is important, as it increases blood flow to the various tissues of the body, allowing oxygenated blood to replenish the tissues and cleanse them of their metabolic wastes.

When we spend our time breathing in closed quarters, the concentration of oxygen in the air inside of our homes, cars, and offices is gradually being diminished, while its concentration of waste metabolites—like carbon dioxide and methane—increases. Although we frequently open windows or go outside enough to re-normalize these airspaces, the longer we remain inside them without doing so, the less oxygen is available to us in each breath.

Evolutionarily speaking, the human organism is intended to exist primarily outside—where life-sustaining hunting and gathering opportunities exist—taking shelter only when needed to avoid adverse weather, to rest, or to sleep. Finding inside spaces—as modern humans have created them—was possible for primitive humans only in rare circumstances, such as dead-end caves with an opening small enough to be sealed up behind them.

Even our skin has evolved to exist in a fresh-air environment, which is why it secretes oils (to prevent drying out), becomes flushed when we get overheated (to increase evaporative heat loss), and gets goosebumps when we are cold (to reduce blood flow at the surface and raise body hairs for greater insulation) or are feeling threatened (to look bigger, for intimidation effect). Body hair—the adaptive trait tying together all mammals—tends to grow thicker in response to cold weather and thinner in response to warm weather, as any cat or dog owner well knows. This is because the hairs all over our bodies are primarily intended to keep our internal temperature balanced and stable in the face of ever-changing atmospheric conditions outside of our bodies.

Despite a plentitude of research demonstrating extreme human adaptive tolerances to the heat and cold stresses of our planet, for those of us living in modern civilized human environments, living naked outside seems a far-fetched concept. However, consider one example: the aboriginal tribes of the Australian outback, a small subset of contemporary humans. Until their contact with modern humans in the 1700s, they lived out the entirety of their lives naked or nearly so and slept outside, on the bare ground, in temperatures ranging from just under freezing to just over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. This is the most common-knowledge example, and their particular genetic and behavioral adaptations have been well documented, but there are many more like them—including an estimated hundred or so uncontacted tribes worldwide—going on about their perfectly healthy lives, even today.

Fresh, clean outside air is what our bodies are designed to exist in and to process.

Water

Water is our body’s next most essential need because it is the solution in which all of our metabolic reactions take place, so if it were to cease flowing in, the body would cease functioning in only a few days.

I hear many people say they do not need to drink water because it is already in the other liquids they drink, which is true, in large part. In fact, I have a friend who goes through periods of stress during which he nourishes his body with only Pepsi and cigarettes, for days at a time. His body does not look good during these times, but it carries his soul through it nonetheless.

When we drink a liquid, it is broken up into its simple parts by our saliva and stomach acids before being absorbed into the bloodstream through the intestinal lining. Our kidneys then filter waste products out of the bloodstream, to be excreted through urination or sweat. Therefore, unless we are having extreme bouts of diarrhea or vomiting, nearly every molecule we drink passes through our bloodstream before it exits the body.

This is important to know because, while it is true that all of the other liquids we consume contain some proportion of water, our metabolic reactions require chemically pure water. The more sugars, milk fats, alcohol, caffeine, or other non-water molecules are dissolved in it, the less actual water they are getting, per unit consumed. Since our bodies cannot use Pepsi—or just any other liquid concoction we choose to consume—for their normal metabolic operations, they must perform work to filter the water from it and to groom any unnecessary atoms from these water molecules, until they reach their required purity.

This is akin to losing a bunch of teeth, wherein the body must then work harder, by chewing each bite more times, to achieve a still less efficient result because food particles are not broken up as well going into digestion. This takes the body more energy to process and yields less nourishment from each bite. Common sense tells me that any animal with missing or mangled mouthparts would expect to see a reduction in lifespan compared with its cohorts. Among humans, a decrease in life expectancy has been well correlated with tooth loss, and although I have not found any studies drawing a correlation between early mortality and drinking only fluids other than water, it would come as no surprise to me should it be discovered in the future.

Fresh, relatively clean water is what our bodies are designed to process.

Food

Food is an absolutely essential need of the body because it provides most of the basic building blocks necessary to grow and also the fuel used to power and maintain itself. Cells are the basic building blocks of our bodies and those of all other critters on the planet. Through the process of cellular division, most of the cells making up our bodies produce daughter cells, to succeed themselves, before dying and being broken down for recycling or excretion. Obviously, our hair and fingernail cells are being replaced quite quickly, but researchers have found that nearly the entire body is replaced over an average span of 7 to 10 years. That is, our bodies...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 17.1.2022
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Lebenshilfe / Lebensführung
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-2287-X / 166782287X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-2287-7 / 9781667822877