How your body actually works
Five systems explain most of what you feel day to day. Understand these and most health advice stops sounding like a list of rules.
01
Energy and metabolism
How your body turns what you eat into what you do, and stores the rest. When this runs badly it shows up in your blood long before it shows up on a scale.
02
What your blood carries
Fat does not dissolve in water, so it travels wrapped in particles. How many of those particles you have is the clearest thing anybody can tell you about your arteries.
03
Your gut
A few pounds of bacteria that ferment what you cannot digest, and the fibre you eat is what they live on. It is the one part of you that changes within days of changing what you eat.
04
Your nervous system
The same system that speeds your heart up under pressure slows your digestion down. Stress is not a feeling with no body attached, it is a setting the whole machine runs at.
05
Breathing
The one part of that system you can operate on purpose. Slowing your breath is the shortest route anybody has to changing their own state deliberately.
Want to know where you stand?
Reading is one half. The other is a number you took yourself, and one measurement today is the start of a line you can actually follow.
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