Inflammation Part 1

We frequently hear the word “inflammation.” Do we really know what it means?

Often, we don’t.

We have an overall idea, but we can’t picture it inside our body because the type of inflammation we see it’s usually on our skin. Beyond that, we label it with another name or diagnosis.

Inflammation starts in an specific area of your body. It gets irritated, at first, due to external or internal agents causing  swelling in that part, redness, irritability and in some cases mucus or bleeding, depending where the inflammation takes place.

Every imbalance, illness, or unusual sensation in our body belongs to an inflammatory response. Inflammation is the way our body is telling us, “I am getting sick, take care of me.”

We do not “listen” what our body has to say for different reasons, here are some:

• We are busy.
• We are disconnected from our nature
• We assume being uncomfortable is normal.
• We can even make pain into a way of living just because we get used to it.

I truly believe our body is designed to function at ultimate health on its own, we just get in the way. How?

Well, we have a particular way of doing basic things unnaturally:

• The way we are eating.
• Sleeping deprivation.
• Negative thinking.
• Spend more hours facing a screen than anything else.
• Over-medicating.
• Breathing polluted air.
• Using chemicals on our skin.
• …and the worse of all, we live in constant stress.

We ignore the signals our body sends such, for example:

We eat something, let’s say pizza and we feel bloated, uncomfortable and the digestion takes hours to process. We even have to undo our pants button. In spite of all of that most, certainly we will eat pizza again and again…

That state is inflammation. Being bloated is not normal or good. That is the first sign we need to listen, our body is not happy with pizza!

If we persist with eating pizza, most likely the bloating will turn persistent. That is inflammation.

Inflammation causes all kind of unbalances and problems in our gut causing very unpleasant side effects such as:

• We gain weight
• We get gassy
• Indigestion
• Constipation

Learning how to listen to our body is very important.

Our body is a perfect machine that is capable of performing at very high levels when it’s well taken care of…or absolutely the opposite when not. Your choice, what’s going to be for you?

Stay tuned next month for more about inflammation. What causes it? How can you reduce it?