Most of us are creatures of habit. We normally do the same things every day, have the same morning and evening routines and pretty much carry on life as if it was just another day. As you are making your way through your day, I’m wondering how many of you ever consider what may be going on, on the inside of your body. We all seem to be more worried about the outside of our body! Well, there is some incredible work that is taking place inside of us. There is so much going on and everything fits together so well, that it’s almost impossible to comprehend!
Let me share just a few of the miracles happening at this very moment:
Your heart pumps approximately 2000 gallons (7571 litres) of blood through its chambers every single day. It beats more than 100,000 times a day to achieve this incredible feat.
You take around 17,000 breaths a day on average, and don’t have to think about a single one of them. Yet if you want to stop breathing temporarily, you can voluntarily hold your breath. A typical pair of adult lungs can hold a huge six litres of air.
Every day your body ensures ,you don’t contract cancer thousands of times over. Cancer is formed when cells are altered in a way which re-programs their DNA and it’s estimated that tens of thousands of cells suffer cancer-causing lesions every day. But the body sends special enzymes scuttling around to inspect DNA strands for faults and fix them before they turn into tumours. (In most cases).
Your brain doesn’t stop working. It’s estimated that about 50,000 thoughts pass through it each day on average, although some scientists put the figure closer to 60,000. That is a whopping 35 – 48 thoughts every minute.
The cells in your stomach lining produce an alkaline substance every few milliseconds to neutralise stomach acid. If they didn’t do this, your stomach would digest itself because some of the acids are strong enough to even dissolve metals.
You blink about 28,800 times every day, with each one lasting just a tenth of a second. This is a an involuntary reflex the body uses to keep the eyes clean and moist, which is pretty crucial given that 90% of the information you process is visual, and you can weigh up any visual scene in just 0.01 seconds. Consider how many people and objects you look at every day – it’s remarkable!
Most of the body’s energy is expelled via heat. Your body produces the same heat as 25 light bulbs over the course of a single day.
Red blood cells literally shoot around the body, taking less than 60 seconds to complete a full circuit. This means that each of yours makes 1440 trips around your body every day, delivering oxygen and keeping your body energised. Each cell lives for about 40 days before being replaced by a younger model. It’s no surprise their life span is short, having made 60,000 trips around the body, they must be exhausted!
You shed more than 1 million skin cells every day but they are constantly replenished automatically, to save you from turning transparent and becoming rather exposed! Your skin is actually an organ; in fact, it’s the largest organ you have, with a surface area of 18 square feet (2 square metres).
Your hair (if you still have any) grows about half a millimetre per day, and the average adult with a full scalp has around 100,000 hairs on their head. So that’s a combined 50 metres of hair growth every single day.
The brain and mouth work together to allow us to speak an average of around 5000 words a day. Well, that’s if you’re a woman, because studies suggest that men only speak 2000 words, yet both sexes utter 500 – 700 of real value (i.e., that get the job done, or provide useful information). Will the women out there have something to say about this suggestion?
Your liver is so busy over the course of a day, it is almost impossible to summarise its activities. It manufactures Cholesterol, vitamin D & blood plasma; it identifies the nutrients your body needs and stores some away for future use; it filters 1.53 (U.S.) quarts (1.43 Litres) of blood every minute and produces a (U.S.) quart (0.94 litres) of bile every day to help you break down your food. Basically, you have a factory plant running inside of you every day, which is pretty amazing!
The glands in your mouth produce an incredible 1.5 litres of saliva every day. That’s a lot of dribble! If this didn’t happen, your mouth would dry up and become overrun with bacteria, and you wouldn’t be able to digest your food.
Each of your kidneys contains 1 million tiny filters that work together to filter an average of 2.2 pints (1.3 litres) of blood every minute – that’s 3168 pints (1872 litres) every single day, despite each kidney only being the size of a fist. If that wasn’t enough, they also expel an average of 2.5 pints (1.4 litres) of urine from your body every day too.
You grow 8mm every night while sleeping, before shrinking back down again the next day. This saves you from some pretty hefty clothing bills and ensures you don’t have to raise the door frames every year or two.
Your body works overtime to digest your food and the process starts before it even hits the mouth. When you smell food, your mouth automatically produces more saliva to prepare the digestive system for work. It takes about 6 – 8 hours for food to pass through the stomach and two days to complete the digestion process. The average person will eat over 50 tonnes of food in his or her lifetime, which seems ridiculous!
And most amazing of all, your body cells are regenerating themselves every single day without any prompting. This means you have an entirely new set of taste buds every ten days, new nails every 6 – 10 months, new bones every ten years and even a new heart every 20 years.
So, next time you are thinking about pushing the limits on your body by unhealthy eating, drinking or smoking habits, remember all the incredible things that are happening inside it every day, because all of us really are a miracle!
Look after yourself!
Author: Kathryn Hartwell @ thestoryreadingapeblog.com
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