30 Days of Self Healing – Day 12
Can Exercise be the New Medicine?
“ Exercise ignites the healer within and restores balance to our entire body.”
Dr. Fabrizio Mancini
If we could invent a pill that does every- thing exercise does (reduce the risks of heart disease, osteoporosis, and certain cancers such as breast, colon, and bladder; improve anxiety and depression; and strengthen the immune system, to name a few), we’d all be popping that pill on a daily basis! But unlike a pill or an injection, exercise has nothing but beneficial “side effects.” There’s no nausea, drowsiness, drug interactions, dis- charges, blurred vision, depression, or suicidal thoughts as is possible with medication. Instead, exercise gives you energy, mental clarity, healthy blood pressure and cholesterol levels, better circulation, and countless other wonderful side effects. It puts you in a great mood. Who wouldn’t want all that! And exercise doesn’t have to cost a cent. You can go for a walk, or do many forms of exercise in the comfort and privacy of your own home with little or no equipment. Sure, gym memberships can be costly; however, a family membership usually costs far less than medical bills for a family per year.
So I ask you, if your doctor prescribed physical activity that suited your abilities, would you be willing to regularly comply? The bottom line is that exercise is medicine—medicine you can take to live a longer and healthier life. But how does exercise accomplish all this? Why is there so much healing power in physical activity? What I have to share may surprise you. Before I talk about how exercise heals the body, let’s talk about what happens when we don’t exercise. Inactivity is tied to all sorts of health problems: depression, osteoporosis (thinning and weakening of the bones), dementia (loss of mental abilities), heart disease, obesity, some cancers, and type 2 diabetes. In fact, so many people are inactive these days that some experts have coined a new term for the epidemic: sedentary death syndrome. The condition helps cut short an estimated 250,000 lives in the United States annually, according to research from the University of Missouri. All the diseases I just mentioned have one thing in common: chronic inflammation. Inflammation is a swelling and redness in the body’s tissues that is usually brought about by an injury or an infection, and it usually doesn’t last long. It’s one of the body’s natural protective mechanisms, but when it becomes chronic, it can turn destructive. Scientists have confirmed that exercise heals by triggering the release of healing chemicals, which help reduce inflammation. Clearly, the human body is designed to self- regulate and self-heal under the right conditions, and exercising is among the most important of those conditions.
