Is your body smarter than you?

“Mayday” is the SOS international Morse code distress signal that goes out during emergencies which is understood by emergency responders all over the world. Well, our body does the same, sending out signals of an internal SOS as it tries so hard to tell us what is going on inside us.

Inflammation increases in our body and all sorts of disasters take place inside us. Yet we choose to ignore the Mayday signals that our body sends. At first, the signals are not so loud, perhaps a little bit of weight gain and water retention and maybe a few migraines but then the signals get louder and louder until we cannot ignore them any longer.

Sadly, if we wait too long, we end up in the emergency room and sometimes we find ourselves sitting across the table hearing the tough prognosis at the doctor’s office about some kind of irreversible condition we no longer have control over.

Our bodies are begging us to make dire changes before it is too late.

Gambling with our health

Fellow desperate dieter, do we have to first be admitted into a hospital before we start taking better care of ourselves? Where is that breaking point for each of us when truth is going to stare us straight in the face and force us to make better choices? 

• Do we have to wait for the heart attack to strike before we stop making daily trips to the icecream store?

• Do we have to wait until we are all diabetic before we lay off sugar and reach for the fruit?

• Do we have to wait until someone in the family dies in their 40s or 50s before we start tracking how many calories we are scarfing down before the clock even strikes noon?

We have been so blessed with a very intricate alarm system. Our body quickly senses when things are out of balance and reacts almost immediately, sending us loud and clear messages. We receive signal after signal, warning us of the iceberg we are about to hit if we do not change our course. Yet, in our stubbornness, we insist on continuing on our path. We wonder what happened when we crash into that iceberg but that is just the tip of the iceberg! We do not take enough time to deal with all the things that are causing us to ignore those SOS signals.

Why are we ignoring our internal alarm system?

Perhaps we have filled our lives with so much noise that we simply cannot hear the distress calls any more. Perhaps we need to make room for quiet moments to sit in still waters and process through all that is going on in our lives and to rethink our goals. Perhaps we need to carve out sacred space in our lives to just have quiet times strategically dispersed throughout the day to recoup and regroup and just take time to breathe.

We are overworked and emotionally spent as we nurture and give our time to care for everyone else except ourselves. This seems like a positive and generous attribute on our part but there is only one problem: How do you help others take care of themselves if you cannot take care of yourself? Think about the emergency procedures on the airplane. The first thing they instruct you to do is to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you assist your child. Even your child must wait for you to put that oxygen mask on yourself because otherwise you will be of no use to them when you get dizzy and lose consciousness! The same is true in our lives.

Choosing health today for a better tomorrow

Let us love ourselves enough to exercise and eat well and take care of the body God gave us. Making better choices will help us and our families for generations to come as we pass on positive lifestyle habits. Your kids will thank you for it and your future grandchildren will adore you for it because maybe that will mean they will not just get to see you in a photo album. Maybe your better choices will mean you will get to stick around long enough to meet them face to face and still have enough energy to take them out to their favourite movie!

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine