What happens if you put diesel in a petrol engine?

Your car won’t last 200 yards, right?

But we don’t do that, do we? We know better somehow. We understand that wrecking pistons, damaging fuel pumps and fuel injectors isn’t good for our car, our wallet, and therefore: for us. Besides our car simply shuts down and that’s signal enough that we shouldn’t go that route.

How come then, we aren’t this sensitive with our own bodies – one of the most sophisticated machines ever created? When we seem to understand with utmost clarity what the wrong kind of fuel would do to a car, why don’t we share the same sensibility about our body?

I’ve come up with two possible answers. First our body is meant to support us no matter what. Its designed to improvise and keep going, irrespective of what fuel you put into it. So while a car will shut down immediately if fed the wrong fuel, our body will not. It is programmed to survive under the most dire conditions and will extract what it can to keep us moving. However making it function under pressure and imbalance is going to affect us somewhere at sometime. Most modern day disorders and diseases are a result of that imbalance.

Second, our idea of what is the right fuel is warped. Media and political propaganda has led us to believed that a lot of unhealthy foods are ok to consume. We seem to have lost that intuitive connection with our bodies where it would signal the time and type of hunger it was experiencing. This has been the result of a more sedentary lifestyle (try a 30-minute run for a week and you will know exactly what to eat and when).

In some ways it doesn’t matter who is responsible: the government, the media, the corporation…because at the end of the day, we as individuals suffer. And its not just physical suffering. Cases of depression and other psychological and emotional imbalances are also being tied to unhealthy diets.

We seem to find time easily to love all things external: our kids, our partners, that movie, the latest car model: but when was the last time you expressed some self-love and did something wonderful for your own body?

This blog post is written in gratitude for the magical creation called your body. Now go give it a hug. A good massage. A walk on the beach. A lemonade. Anything that shows appreciation for the wonderland that your body is.

Image credit: Jenny Lee Silver, Flickr