Your Body is Never Not Looking

I am getting ready to teach a class tonight that I call “medical day”  and as always I am trying to figure out the best way to explain difficult, confusing topics to my students.   The ability to do that is somehow a gift that I have, and only recently discovered.  I am told by my students that I am a “queen of analogies” and I bathe in gratitude for this nickname.

 Having Aced every class in nursing school, earning a BSN and then a Masters degree, several certifications  and years of working experience would very easily allow me to make my classes very complex and scientific sounding. But my goal is not to show off my knowledge or sound highly sophisticated in my presentations and classes.  I use whatever methods I can to make things easier and more clear and using analogies is my favorite trick.

My class tonight is about top health issues and killers of American people (heart disease, cancer, obesity, high blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes) and it could easily be the most complex and difficult to follow.   However, when we pull away from the details of it and look at the body as a whole, all of a sudden things get easier to understand and often it takes one or two analogies for my students to have an “aha moment”. 

One of those moments for me was a seminar I attended with Dr. Michael Klapper a few years ago. Here is his point (I am paraphrasing):  We often make food or lifestyle choices knowing that they are harmful  to our bodies. However many of us somehow feel that as long as we hide our actions from others (spouse, parents, children, doctor) it will be as the action never took place.  Eating late at night while everyone is sleeping,  sneaking candy and hiding the wrappers, smoking or drinking and masking the smell with gum,  eating health damaging foods and over exercising to burn of the calories, going to a drive thru fast food restaurant as to not run into anyone we know… etc etc.  Sounds familiar??? 

So our thinking might be : as long as nobody noticed, as long as I didn’t get caught, as long as I still look like  I am doing fine, as long as I am still functional, as long as nobody is looking- I am getting away with it.

 Well… YOUR BODY IS NEVER NOT LOOKING. Every time you “sneak” something you know you shouldn’t, your body is looking.  Your body does the “dear in the headlights” expression and it’s shocked that you somehow still don’t make the connection between how you treat it and what you will get in return.

If you treated your best friend the way you sometimes treat your body…if you punch your best friend in the nose but wipe the blood clean and make sure nobody noticed…If you pinch him/her regularly but only when you are alone, splash some toxic liquids on their skin, always be disappointed with what he/she looks like…

How long would it take for your friend to start reciprocating, punch you in the gut really hard or maybe even bail and leave you for good.

Your Body is your best friend.  Treat it like one.

 Your body is never NOT looking

Your body is never NOT looking

Your body is never NOT looking.

Iwona Leger, RN, MSN, Certified Health Coach, founded  Love and Peas Health Coaching and runs individual and group coaching sessions. She is very passionate about disease prevention, lifestyle and diet modifications, as well as stress reduction techniques.

For more info visit www.loveandpeashealth.com