Understanding Physiological Principles
My Understanding of The Big Picture
As of May 2018, it has now been exactly 25 months that I have started this journey as an attempt to change my lifestyle for a healthier one. To make this wonderful journey possible, I used several different practices that I named starting points. I also like to refer to them as seeds for change, in order to express the idea of a small habit being able to grow over time into something that can make a huge difference in our lives. Call them starting points or seeds for change, I believe that all these practices I’ve been embracing, have ended up being extremely beneficial for me in order to grow into a healthier person. There is one in particular, I believe it to be a bit different and possibly the most important one. This one consists of understanding some of the most important the physiological principles of the human body.
Learning more about the physiological mechanisms of my body not only has been helping me to to be more knowledgeable on the subject, but more importantly, it has been a tremendous motivating factor to embrace and sustain my starting point practices. This knowledge has been helping me in understanding the role these practices play in the big picture of my body healing itself and becoming a healthier and better performing entity. In this post I am going to try to explain in my own words my understanding of how I believe the lymphatic system works.
The Cell
The human body is made of an extremely large number of cells. These cells have a number of needs in order to stay healthy and accomplish the work they need to to. They need to be nourished, and since they all fulfill a function and perform tasks, they produce waste. They are in a way a minuscule version of ourselves. Cells have membranes, and its through these membranes that the exchange with the outside environment is made possible. In order for the cell to be able to evacuate the produced waste, the outer environment of the cell needs to be more alkaline in pH than its inner environment. In other words, if the outer environment is more acidic, then it becomes very difficult for the cell to evacuate its waste material. Consequently, not being able to evacuate waste material could result in having all kinds of problems at the cell level first. From there, an entire group of cells, then a whole organ could be negatively impacted and this situation can turn into what is commonly called a disease in the modern western medical lexicon.
Once I was able to understand the physiological mechanisms and the conditions the cell needed to evacuate its waste, then I understood the importance of eating fruits and vegetables in abundance, and the benefits of eating them raw as much as possible. If our lymphatic fluid is constantly more alkaline than the inner environment of the cell, then it is pretty easy to draw the conclusion that this is going to present an ideal situation for the cell to evacuate its waste material outside of the cell. Once I understood this principle, there are two questions which came to my mind:
- How can I make my lymphatic fluid more alkaline other than eating more fruits and vegetables?
- What happens to the waste material once they have made it out of the cell?
Alkalizing vs Acidifying
In order to keep our lymphatic fluid more alkaline we need the alkalizing factors to outweigh the acidifying factors. And this goes beyond just food. Controlling our food intake is actually the easiest part in my opinion. There are other acidifying factors such as pollution, low quality interpersonal relationships, negative work or living environments, our fears, and our worries. Those are in my opinion all acidifying factors in addition to acidifying foods. Once we understand this, it’s easy to understand that in order to have a more alkaline lymphatic system, we need the alkalizing elements in all domains of our lives to outweigh the acidifying ones.
Lets start with food. My idea here is to share my own experience. The last thing I want to do is to classify different types of food as healthy or unhealthy, since I believe things to not be as black and white as they are often presented to us. I also believe that one single type of food can have several different affecting factors on the human body. All I can say is that reducing drastically my consumption of animal products, and quitting altogether my consumption of alcohol and coffee, has been having tremendous positive effects on this process of having a more alkaline inner environment. In addition to reducing and quitting my consumption of what I consider being acidic foods, increasing my intake of fruits and vegetables have been great supporting factors as well. I got myself into the habit of preparing slow pressed juices, and eating raw plant based salads in abundance.
As I mentioned earlier, food seems to me to be the visible part of the iceberg when it comes to acting on the acidic alkaline balance of our body. The acidifying factors such as stress, worries, interpersonal problems, lack of good quality sleep, and our inner negative thoughts are in my opinion a bit more difficult to act upon. In order to get rid of those acidifying factors, I’ve been embracing dry-fasting, breathing exercises, physical exercising, and having an overall grateful attitude towards life. Accepting and enjoying what life is offering me at this very moment, instead of being unhappy of elements I don’t have access to, was a huge breakthrough for me. Those three practices and the change in my personal philosophy of life, helped me to chase my self-fabricated inner demons and the negativity from my head. This resulted in improving my overall morale, increasing my motivation to do things, canalizing my energy into positive thinking, and sleeping better at night. I think the most important and powerful progress I was able to make is that I feel more in control of how I feel. I have more control in staying away from inner and outer negativity.
Moving the Lymphatic Fluid Around
Movement for the lymphatic fluid is essential for it to accomplish its role of being the sewage system of the body. Unlike our blood stream, our lymphatic fluid does not have a pump to make the actual fluid move throughout the human body. Therefore, I believe that we need to include movement in our daily routine in order to make our lymphatic fluid move around. The techniques I’ve been using are: hot and cold showers, exercising, massages, sauna sessions, and dry brushing. These practices are going to promote movement of the lymphatic fluid, and if we in parallel embrace the alkalizing behaviors I mentioned earlier, I believe that we already have a good base to move towards a situation where our body is in a better environment to heal itself.
The Evacuation Process
Increasing the alkalizing factors on the body and creating an environment for the lymphatic fluid to be less stagnant can be seen as a good start, but they could quasi be useless if we can’t eliminate the waste material by getting it outside of the body. From my understanding, once such waste is in our lymphatic stream, it first gets treated in our major lymph nodes. It is then supposed to be evacuated outside of our body through our kidneys, digestive system, and our skin. If we don’t have a well functioning body to start with, as it is often case with people living in a modern urban environment in my opinion, these actual organs are probably not functioning at their best to do their elimination job. This is why I think that it is very important to monitor our urine to be sure that our kidneys are filtering properly and are getting rid of the acidic waste material. I believe the kidneys to be the main evacuation organs of the waste material carried by the lymphatic fluid.
Where to Start?
So far I explained my understanding of this mechanism in a linear fashion to make the process easier to grasp. But in reality, if we want to act effectively, the most logical approach would be to start backwards. Meaning that, first we should make sure that our kidneys are filtering, then promote movement of our lymphatic fluid, and lastly start the detoxification process by fasting and increasing the alkalizing factors in our lifestyle. I don’t know if this sequence works best or not, since I did not have the knowledge I have today when I first started this journey.
I personally started by changing my eating habits first, and from there, as I was learning new physiological principles, I incorporated the rest. One thing I can tell; if your lymphatic system happens to be as backed up and stagnant as mine was in April 2016, it’s going to take some time before getting concrete results. I did immediately start to feel a bit better as I embraced change on this journey, but it took me somewhere between a year and a year and a half to see and feel real sustained results in my well being. Keep also in mind that during the first year of this time period I was unemployed, and later on I was able to get a steady freelancer job opportunity. Meaning that the job related stress was tremendously reduced from my daily life, and I had time in my hands to invest it in this project by acquiring more knowledge and turning them into practices that I was able to include in my routine. Even with me being in an ideal situation to let my body to heal itself, it took me almost 18 months to turn the ship around. Therefore, one of the most important teachings I was able to get out of this experience, is that patience and consistency are the most important virtues one should embrace to be successful at becoming healthier for the long run.
My Conclusion For Now
This was my first write up for this actual starting point. I am thinking of approaching it differently than the other ones, in the sense that I am planning on writing a series of posts of my understanding of the different physiological principles. As I’ll be making progress with my own journey and learning more about human physiology, there will certainly be more to share. Once again, with these posts I am intending to share my understanding of things and my own experience of applying certain principles. My observations and explanations could be seen as wrong or inaccurate for certain people with different views, and this is totally fine with me. I am only trying to find what works for me, and share my experience here with you, hoping that the information can be useful.
Understanding how our lymphatic system works is in my opinion one of the most important concepts to grasp to reach a state of absolute health. The symptomatic approach of the modern western medical world has a tendency of classifying and giving complicated names to symptoms. As far as I am concerned more I understand about how the lymphatic system works, and what happens when it is unable to perform its job, more I am coming to the conclusion that the root of pretty much all symptoms are the same. I think of focusing on fighting the symptoms as a waste of time and money. We need to go to the root of the problem if there’s a problem. And if there’s no visible health related issues at the current moment, I think we should make sure that our lymphatic system is in the best conditions to do its job, and we are not accumulating acidic cellular waste in our bodies throughout the years. Because if that’s the case, sooner or later, I believe that we’ll be faced with negative consequences.
I AM NOT A HEALTH PROFESSIONAL. I would like to make it very clear that I am only sharing my own experience on this website, and have no intention to give any specific advice on health. Please read the disclaimer section for more information.
