New Body in One Year

Are you a “cup half empty” or a “cup half full” type of person? Life is full of many changes, including how our bodies are changing with age. Are you “going with the flow” or are you fighting every step of the way?

Just what is happening to us as we get older? Wrinkles start appearing and our skin loses its freshness and elasticity. Bones begin to thin down, hair whitens and starts to thin. Muscle mass shrinks and our joints become stiffer with a decreased range of motion. Our senses and memory become diminished.

Our internal home incurs yet more changes. Our heart muscle cells degenerate slightly and blood begins to thicken due to the natural reduction in total body water. Cells become larger and are less able to divide and reproduce. Because of cell and tissue changes, our organs also change. Aging organs gradually but progressively lose function, and there is a decrease in their maximum functioning capacity.

So what exactly is positive about getting older? Our body is miraculous! Let’s back up a little bit to our wondrous beginnings. Did you know that at birth our healthy baby body is perfect? The theory is, if we could preserve the immune system we had as babies we could live up to 200 years of age. Our immune system in the early years is ideal as nothing has yet taken place to distort the perfect harmony in which our body and its organs function and coordinate with one another.

Our body fights to defy the aging process for us too, so why should we fret? Did you know that our body keeps renewing itself continuously? Bones keep taking fresh calcium and keep rebuilding themselves. Our stomach lining renews itself every five days. Our skin is replaced every month, the liver every six weeks, and the skeleton every three months. We have been given internal organs that have a greater capacity than what we actually need, and in one year from today, 98 percent of the atoms in our body will be exchanged for new ones. In one year, excluding the two percent, we become new bodies.

If this is the case, how do we get old? After 30 years of age, all the changes in the body amount to one percent each year. In other words, the decay is one percent for each year of life. By the time we reach our eightieth birthday, there is 50% loss of what we had at age thirty.

We can choose to worry about getting older, or choose to accept what we’ve been given and rejoice in our body no matter our age. The best things we can do to stay young at any age, are to eat right, stay active and enjoy a positive state of mind. Perhaps the one percent of decay for each year may be reduced if our expectations of ourselves continue to keep us creative and vibrant with a fervent love of life.