Beyond the aesthetics and the need to fill our tummies with food, most people have very little understanding of how their bodies work. We have subconsciously outsourced even the most basic understanding of the basic mechanisms of how our bodies function to healthcare professionals.
This inability to understand the rhythm and mechanisms of our bodies means that we end up overwhelming the healthcare system with ailments that can be best-taken care of by routine day-to-day maintenance. This routine daily maintenance is mainly about ensuring that our bodies receive adequate amounts of nutrition and energy to ensure that our health is at an optimal level so that we effectively carry out our daily tasks adequately.
Adequate nutrition and energy intake are rare and inconsistent undertakings for most people. This is evidenced by the rush to detox at the beginning of each new year. A quick look at the detox plans, especially on social media, reveals that actually, most of these plans list food and hydration intake that should be common throughout the year. But because these healthy eating plans have been labelled “detox”, people think they should only be consumed for 30 days max, and then it is okay to revert to “normal” eating programmes.
This is akin to saying you service your car once a year and fill it with high-grade petrol once-off, and the rest of the time, it should run optimally with whatever you give it. To an extent, our bodies adjust and manage to survive with less. But that’s just it; they simply manage to survive and not thrive.
Reference to our bodies’ health also includes our brains’ optimal health. But perhaps, reference to our brain health needs to be stated explicitly because most people do not make an immediate connection between the quality of the food they consume and its impact on their brains.
Most health research confirms a direct link between a deficiency in specific vitamins and minerals that leads to impulsive decision-making and behavioural problems. As people who earn our living from the knowledge economy, it is really in our best interests to know, in as much detail as possible, how to fine-tune our bodies and minds to bring our best selves to the game and alleviate stress.
This endeavour is even more difficult because there is such an abundance of information, and most of it is incomplete and/or contradictory. Pieces of information that are incomplete often list one or two nutrient elements as being the panacea for healthy living. Those that are contradictory tend to obfuscate and demonise certain nutrient elements without offering details about conditions under which those demonised nutrient elements may actually be essential.
These points about the importance of various nutrient elements have been made thus far to try and answer the question: why are we so disconnected from our bodies?
For the most part, people aged 35+ years are disconnected from the details of how their bodies function because this information was largely not taught in schools (and unlikely taught in detail in the current school curriculum). By the time they were teens and young adults who picked up magazines about good-looking bodies, they were met with advertorials disguised as health education, mainly aimed at pushing products with very little information about the mechanisms of action of the product under review.
So, as a result of over-reliance on glossy magazines, we learned to source products that focused on making our bodies look good and less on how we can make our bodies function optimally.
Specific mention was made of people aged 35+ mainly because as you edge closer to 40 years, the body’s “coasting” and survival mechanisms become less effective. Through pain and mental ailments, your body shouts to make you aware of its displeasure with how you have taken care of it. By this stage, you don’t know the essential mechanism to nourish your body correctly. You are overworked, stressed, and don’t have enough time to figure out how things work. As a result, you search for shortcuts or, in some cases, end up relying on chronic medications to manage conditions that a consistent nutrition plan could have managed.
The trick is making time to figure out how your body works and what it needs to thrive. There is no getting around it, especially if you desire to bring your best self to the game and live your best life.
It requires using the first principle to see your body as an interconnected system with several parts that need certain fuels to function optimally. If you are not optimising these parts, you are simply getting by. By using first principles, you can quickly figure out the foundational components of your body and what they need to thrive. Once you figure these out, it becomes relatively easy to stick to a healthy eating plan because you know what you need to consume and why you need to consume it regularly.
Although this article focuses on individuals’ responsibility to upgrade their health quotient, it has a cumulative effect on the greater society and its ability to respond effectively to threats and opportunities.
People’s ability to tap into their potential and optimise their performance, especially in adulthood, is critical – especially for a country like South Africa, which is still at a developmental stage and faced with various challenges impeding its growth.
More than ever, South Africa needs a workforce full of mental and physical vitality. A workforce that can look at the country’s challenges and use energised brains to seek long-term solutions. Paired with this is the physical vitality and resilience required to apply these solutions over a long-term period.
