Because covid is still on the loose, let’s start the blogging topics with our health. We already talked about a few tricks, how to be more effective in your thinking, but we as humans are not just our minds, we have a body too. That body is responsible for the quality of our life.
If your body is out of balance, your mind will be out of balance. If you want to be really effective in every way possible, the first thing you need to optimize is your health. I know, this topic is huge and it would need a whole course of itself (maybe later), but let’s try to summarize the basics here in a blog format. This is the first part of a long series.
There is a huge difference between looking good and being healthy. Let’s not get in to the details what you mean by looking good, let’s just think about it from a broad cultural perspective. Like a movie star or celebrity who is known for their good looks. If you are not very poor or morbidly obese, you probably can put yourself together to look aesthetically pleasing in a relatively short period of time. Maybe you need some make-up or some fat burners, but you can do it, and it doesn’t take too much time, its just seems a bit hard. Although, if you want to be healthy, you need to think long term. You have to understand that your body is an adaptive system. If you want to better it, you need to put it under stress, because stress is what forces it to adapt. Once, you put your body under stress, your body is hurt, and your macro and micro nutrients are somewhat depleted. You need to replenish your body with the right amount of nutrients to fuel your regeneration, and you need to nap and sleep enough to give your cells a chance to rest. Bettering your body to be healthier, is all about the right balance of these cycles: Training – Replenish – Rest. Doesn’t really matter what you want to develop with your body, as long as you put direct attention to it, and you do the Training – Replenish – Rest cycles, you will adapt and be better in it as time goes by.
Training and rest is self explanatory, you feel it when you did it right, but the replenishing part is not so clear, that’s where the trouble lies. Before we dive in to deep waters, let’s try to understand the very basics of nutrients. There are two different type of nutrients: Micro nutrients and Macro nutrients. The difference between the two is the amount you need of them. You only need very small amounts from Micro nutrients, sometimes much less than a gram daily. Macro nutrients are a very different animal, you need tens or sometimes even hundreds of grams of them daily, if you are not fasting.
Micro nutrients are what we call vitamins and minerals. Vitamins are organic compounds what you need to put in to your body in small amounts to keep functioning. They like Oil in the car’s engine, they keep everything lubricated against wear. If you lack vitamins, your nutrients will run out of balance, and your body won’t be able to function properly. If you run out of minerals, your thinking will become cloudy and you will lose some control over your own muscle movements. So, whatever you do, you need to make sure that you have the right balance of micro nutrients in your body, if your balance is out for the long term, your body will wear out, and you become sick.
Macro nutrients is what we eat as food, they are mainly responsible for growing and fueling our body. There are three main calorie dense macro nutrients, but only two of them are essential. Essential means, that your body can’t produce it by itself, so you need to take them in (they are essential for bodily functions). The two essential macro nutrients are Proteins and Fats, they are very important, because they act not just as a burnable fuel in your body, they are the building blocks of your cells too. The third non-essential macro nutrients are Carbohydrates. Their main purpose is to provide energy to your body by burning it or by storing them in glycogen stores in your muscles or liver, you can find them in the form of simple or complex sugars, starches etc.
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Joey