Treat Yourself with Love-3

Click here to read part one & two

Shake Up Your Body

Using the gardening analogy again, like a garden needs its soil lightly turned over before spring planting, your body needs to shake up now and then!

Call it a Sunday bike ride though the countryside, call it your nightly sex session with your twin flame, call it your morning yoga routine - call it what you will. Just do it! And do it with passion, do it with love.

Knowing it's a treat and not a task, will make exercise enjoyable, if it isn't enjoyable for you already. And exercise need not take you hours and hours, especially for those who can't make the time. In fact there is scientific research which suggests that we can get many of the health benefits of exercise from just 3 minutes a week.

Michael J. Mosley, a British journalist, producer and presenter, says that the research coming out of laboratories is challenging long term beliefs on exercise. One of the reasons people choose to exercise, in particular ladies, is because they think it will help them lose weight. At a simple level it all makes sense, burn calories and the weight drops off. But in an episode of BBC's Horizon, Mosley explains it isn't as simple as that.

On closer inspection, the uncomfortable truth between exercise and weight loss is that we would have to do an hour of running just to burn off a mid-morning snack consisting of a coffee, muffin and banana. And most of us either do not have the time or inclination for the long term exercise necessary to lose weight that way, or worse we compensate by eating more if we exercise. So, in the short term, exercise will not work for weight loss. If you really want to lose weight you have to control what you eat as well. And if losing weight is not the right motivation for exercise, why bother?

Research such as this might cause us to despair, especially for those of us that don't notice weight loss with exercise, but there are important health benefits that lie deep inside our body when we shake our booty!

Evidence put forward by Mosley shows that exercise lowers the levels of fat in our blood and gets our heart and lungs good at getting oxygen into our body, giving us the power to live longer and healthier lives. Scientists do not know why this happens, just that it does.

Oxygen is as important as love in this respect, we need both in the air we breathe. Both are important to the physical and mental well-being of ourselves, and our world. Another important factor is that treating ourselves with love, giving attention to your body's terrain, and exercising are all preventative methods against disease.

Prevention is always the best form of medicine for good health, over prescription medication. Doctors can only do so much, that's why we need to be our own gardeners under our doctor's supervision. And a good gardener knows that using pesticide on plants that spread, like weeds, will stop its growth, but in the long-term could poison the entire garden. So instead, we need to treat the reason for the appearance of the problem, by taking a look at our terrain. Because although weeds may come from outside sources, what yield they bring to our garden will depend on our skills as a gardener.

Easy as -1 -2 -3, right?

Not really, but we have to try, if for nothing else than to shake our brain cells to wake up to the fact that our bodies are the only real piece of land we'll ever own that won't outlive us, and we need to water our bodies with love to achieve any true equation of health. Love (and loving ourselves) is a necessary ingredient in living, to enable us to deal with life's realities.

Living a connected lifestyle is important for this very reason. Becoming the gardeners of our bodies requires a spiritual side, because psychological stress can profoundly influence our soil. We must link up our mind and soul with our body to get all three working together in unison to boost our immunities - that's why we are at our most healthy when there is a strong connection between the trilogy of mind, body and soul. Yoga is one way to achieve this, but there are many other unifying forms that will help build the strongest walls to protect our garden from what weeds may come.

Yours in love,