The impact of food and thoughts on your body and health is tremendous. Consequently, your conscious mind plays a big part in keeping your “body planet” healthy. How is your body a planet? Just think – humans are part of the earth’s ecosystem. We live amongst an unpronounceable number of other living beings, known and unknown, at a macro and micro level. It’s the same for our human bodies. They are little planets themselves, on top of being extraordinary pieces of nature’s technology. Some may think, “My body belongs to me. That it is me. I control it, I can master it.” But, we could put it in these terms: your body is not you – it is a global ecosystem that composes what is referred to as the human body.
You are a housemate within your body planet
On a physiological level, our body is populated with tens of billions of cells, tens of trillions of bacteria, fungi, microbes and many other and varied living things. It is an aggregate of living beings that are not asking for our opinion on how to live and do their job. All of them function totally independent from our conscious mind. They are interdependent on each other to live, grow, regenerate and keep the place clean. Also they make sure internal naughties are kept at bay and keep out the potential external invaders. They work towards the efficient functioning and homeostasis of their habitat that you happen to share. You are, therefore, their housemate.
What do you reckon your cell number 21.4 trillion and 47 is doing right now? What about the office hours of the chain production gut bacteria team for serotonin supply? (Which is produced up to 95% down there by the way!) Are you ordering your hair to grow or your heart to beat?
The conscious mind: the small, emerged part of the iceberg
Our conscious mind is equivalent to, let’s say, only 5%. Compare this to 95% of everything else that is going on inside us without our awareness. Because of that we can definitely say there’s a very small bit of us being hosted by the global ecosystem that composes a human. However, our conscious mind does play a big role in it. It manages our lifestyle, thoughts, state of being, food and physical activity. Those all have a substantial impact on the functioning and equilibrium of our housemates.
Science shows today how food and thoughts have the ability to modify our DNA up to our gene expression. This means that our little 5% of conscious mind does have a role in our cells’ destiny.
Your body is always younger than you are
Our body has the extraordinary capacity to regenerate itself. It does so constantly from our birth to our death. Almost all our cells, organs and tissues will be totally replaced many times during our lives. The only exception seems to be the heart, which hardly regenerates over a lifetime.
Basically, you have a brand-new body many times during your life. This means your body is always younger than you are!
Therefore, the idea is to provide our human body with a healthy ground, allowing it to regenerate beautifully and heal whatever it needs to. Like a garden, we can consistently throw litter on it and cover parts of it with sand. Or, we might only care about what it looks like from the outside without nurturing the soil from which it grows. There will come a time when weeds appear, and there will be places where plants will get sick or won’t grow anymore.
The cover on the boiling water
Allopathic medicine will take a look at one particular weed and spray herbicide to destroy it. It might remove some chunks of sand here and there. It might put fertilizer on the soil to get it back running or try any other kind of treatment to replace the functioning of what has bugged. These actions allow the garden to survive a little better, a little longer. But don’t get me wrong. I am absolutely grateful to allopathic medicine for dealing with the mechanics or suppressing symptoms. However, it’s like putting a cover on a pot of boiling water without removing it from the fire. That’s a big but only temporary relief.
All living ecosystems need a holistic approach and care, together with the necessary elements for them to function at their best. This allows for a healthy ground for our body to regenerate and consequently heal, working with the perfection that mother nature has created. And, no doubt, it will be able to tolerate and deal with the few grains of sand or weeds that might appear on the way.
A healthy soil for a healthy garden
We know we can do a lot to support our body for it to work as well as it is meant to. This can come from the outside, such as organic food, pre and probiotics, supplements, clean water and so on. Or, it can come from the inside by working on our mindset and thoughts, cultivating specific practices that raise our vibrations or visualisation. This impacts not only our mind but also our biology. Fundamentally, this takes care of this beautiful garden – watering, feeding, weeding and looking after it.
A personal health quest
For almost 15 years, I was under what we could call palliative care for a rare auto-immune disease, taking heavy medical treatments. I had a couple of remissions that led to gently reducing the dosages. Under a certain level of that chemical help, I would systematically see the disease resurrect from its sleep (remember the cover on the boiling pot analogy). My immune system was attacking its own body instead of defending it. There was no cure – it was medication or death.
On my path, I had the privilege of encountering a work position dealing with endocrine disrupting chemicals amongst brilliant scientists. I had never heard about endocrine disrupting chemicals before. With time and the mass of information I explored on the subject to get myself up to date, major insights occurred. One was understanding how closely the endocrine and immune system interact with each other. This led me into what was the start of my food and supplements quest. I say the start because it’s a never-ending discovery and adaptation depending on your own overall mind and matter evolution. By eliminating these endocrine disruptors and eating organic food when possible, I was stopping the external hormonal hacks my system was bathing in (eg. litter in the garden). I cleaned the soil and provided my body with the necessary elements found in nature so it could do its job correctly. And guess what happened? An incurable disease turned out to be … cured.
The microbiome
Another specific system that is worth a particular attention is your intestinal tribes’ life – your microbiome. This is because when they go wrong, your body goes wrong too. Your microbiome is tens of trillions of these little dudes. They are vital to a healthy immune system, hormonal function, mood and any many other systems. The amount of collateral damages a dysfunctional gut can provoke is mind blowing, from minor allergies to major diseases. A certainty is that taking care of our gut’s health produces miracles.
Food and thoughts are your main medicine
I could go on for hours sharing my thoughts and experiences around these subjects. So, I will conclude here. There is a lot of information out there, so get knowledgeable and empower yourself with how your body works. But above all, you are what you eat, on top of being what you think. Remember that food has genetic constituents that find their way to your genes and potentially modify them, and with that keep in mind that non-organic food has chemical substances that muck up the natural functioning of your ecosystem. Food also has a vibrational rate that might influence your own. Play with the idea that your body is a little planet and that your conscious mind is an influential housemate to your planet’s global health. Love it, nurture it and feed it well, and you will have a fun and agreeable house share.
Click here for further information on endocrine disrupting chemicals
A great, easy to read and fun book about the microbiome by Giulia Enders: The gut: the inside story of our body’s most underrated organ
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