It is important to look after your body, to help you to stay well and healthy for as long as you can. However, advice about caring for your body is conflicting and often confusing. It can be hard to know what’s best. Many people abandon any effort to take care of themselves because it’s just too difficult.

However, just because it is complicated does not mean the effort is not worthwhile. Common sense tells us that even doing a bit more exercise or getting a bit more sleep, and not eating that second slice of cake, are likely to be helpful. The application of a little science, and quite a lot more common sense, can go a long way to helping you to work out what’s best for you and your body.

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Why Should You Care About Your Body?

Caring for your body makes sense. After all, you only get one body in this life, and you want it to last as long as possible.

However, flippancy aside, caring for your body really does make sense.

Around the world, there is a growing problem of chronic, lifestyle-related diseases. These are diseases that are, effectively, caused by the way that we live our lives. Most, if not all of them, are associated with not looking after our bodies. Many are associated with being overweight and not taking enough exercise, or by putting the wrong substances into our bodies. These diseases and conditions include:

• Adult-onset diabetes;
• Heart conditions;
• High blood pressure; and
• Many forms of cancer.

You cannot, of course, avoid every illness or condition. Many are not lifestyle related. However, looking after your body will go some way to helping you to live a healthier life, for longer.

A Framework for Thinking

There is a simple framework that can be used to guide your approach to looking after your body. This will help you to think about your decisions more logically and understand why you might want to make particular decisions. It will also help to explain why it can sometimes be hard to do what you know is the right thing.

There will be many times when what you want to do coincides perfectly with what you know you should do.

You may want to go out for a bike ride because the sun is shining, or go to bed early because you are tired.

At other times, you will find that you are very tempted to do something that you know you would be better avoiding.

You may want to eat another slice of chocolate cake, for example, or not take exercise because you are busy.

It is important to remember that you don’t always have to do the right thing.

Every now and then, it will be fine to follow your instincts and eat chocolate, or laze around in bed all day. But if you do that too often, there will be consequences. For example, if you overeat and do not take enough exercise, you are likely to end up overweight, which can lead to the development of various chronic diseases including diabetes.

By all means give yourself a break from time to time, but don’t let bad behaviour become a habit, because habits are hard to break.

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Looking After Your Body: Three Key Areas

There are three very important aspects to looking after your body: getting enough rest and sleep, eating well, and taking exercise.

Rest and Sleep

Scientists have done a lot of research on rest and sleep, but we still don’t really know why we need to sleep.

We do, however, know that regular periods of rest and sleep are vital to our personal wellbeing. Being deprived of sleep is dangerous: it limits our ability to do things like drive, and can also make us ill.

Our pages on What is Sleep? and How to Sleep – The Importance of Sleep explain more.

Of course, everyone’s needs for sleep differ slightly. Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister, famously claimed to need only four hours sleep every night, and more recently, there has been almost an epidemic amongst CEOs claiming kudos for early rising. Scientists, however, suggest that most people need rather more sleep than they think. This, in turn, implies that most of us are probably trying to get by on too little sleep.

What is important is to be aware of your personal sleep patterns and ensure that you get enough sleep on a regular basis to function effectively.

Food, Diet and Nutrition

The phrase ‘you are what you eat’ has become a bit of a cliché over recent years, but it still has a basis in fact.

Most of us know that modern diets can contain too many processed foods that are high in fats, sugar and salt and that we should eat more fresh fruit and vegetables as part of a healthy balanced diet.

Obesity, high cholesterol levels, high blood pressure and Type II diabetes are all common problems in modern life and often a direct result of poor diets.

But what counts as a healthy diet?

Our pages on diet and nutrition explain what your body needs and why. They also show how some simple changes to your diet can make big differences to your life, including increasing your energy levels, lifting your spirit and, perhaps, reducing the likelihood of becoming ill.

There is also general agreement that we need a balanced diet—though there is not quite so much agreement about what ‘balanced’ actually looks like. In the past, the accepted best approach has been to make sure that you get enough of each essential ‘building block’ of diet (see box), and not too much of any one. This certainly seems to be a good starting point, although it is not the whole story.

The word ‘diet’ is used to describe anything that we eat. This may be a ‘balanced diet’, or it may be specific diets such as veganism or vegetarianism (and our page on Veganism and Plant-Based Diets explains more about this concept).

However, for many of us the word ‘diet’ is inextricably linked to the idea of losing weight.

On the face of it, losing and gaining weight is a fairly simple equation:

• If the number of calories that you take in is greater than the number used, you will put on weight.

• If the number of calories that you use is more than you consume, you’ll lose weight.

Our page on Calorie Counting and Food Labelling provides more information about measuring calories in food, and why this is not nearly as simple as it sounds.

Many scientists now argue that portion control is one of the most important aspects of healthy eating. However, a closer examination suggests that the situation is not quite that simple.

It is easy to lose weight by dieting. It is much harder to maintain that weight loss on a long-term basis. There are likely to be other things going on, and our page on Dieting for Weight Loss explains more about this.

Over many years, scientists have discussed various options to support weight loss. However, scientific trials of various diets have proved inconclusive. This is because different people react differently to different diets. It is now thought that this is related to your gut microbiome: the bacteria that live in your gut and help you to digest different foods.

Our gut microbiomes are highly individual. Even identical twins have different gut bacteria, because the make-up of your gut microbiome is affected by the foods that you eat. This includes whether you eat a lot of ultra-processed food (and our page on Ultra-Processed Food explains more about why this is so). It is also affected by other factors in your life such as whether you have recently taken antibiotics (and particularly if you have taken antibiotics over a long period of time).

Crucially, the key to health seems to be a diverse and thriving microbiome.

Our page on Understanding the Gut Microbiome explains more about how you can achieve this. You may also be interested to read our page on Organic Food, which explains why this may contribute to a more diverse gut microbiome.

Interestingly, it seems like your gut microbiome might also be the answer to managing food intolerances and allergies. These have been on the increase for some years now—and this increase seems to be real, rather than simply a greater awareness of the problem. Now, however, it is thought that you may be able to ‘train’ your gut microbiome to digest substances that you lack the enzymes to digest. There is more about this in our page on Food Allergies and Intolerances.

Exercise

Most people are aware of advice that we should take regular exercise.

Our page on The Importance of Exercise explains more about why this is necessary.

But what does that mean and why is it important?

Recommendations vary from 20 minutes of medium-intensity exercise (enough to raise your heart rate) per day, up to three longer sessions of high-intensity activity per week.

Many people, perhaps unsurprisingly, conclude that they just don’t have time to work out what they should do.

The common sense solution, however, is that any exercise is better than none.

Although the recommendations for the amount and intensity of exercise may change, nobody has yet concluded that taking some exercise is bad for you! However, very intense exercise over long periods may have some detrimental effect.

Even if you can’t do as much as exercise as is recommended, taking a small amount of exercise will do you good.

It is, however, important to ease yourself gently into any exercise programme, especially if it’s been a while since you’ve exerted yourself to do anything beyond lift the TV remote control or walk to the car. There is a risk of injury if you overdo it, and you can also run the risk of a heart attack or other problems if you ask your body to do too much.

There are a number of programmes like Couch to 5K that can help you to start exercising in a controlled way and avoid overdoing it. You can also find out more in our page on How to Exercise Safely and Effectively.

There are different types of exercise that you can take. The four main types are:

• Endurance exercise (also known as cardio or aerobic exercise), designed to improve your heart’s ability to work;

• Strength or resistance training, designed to build or maintain muscle;

• Flexibility training, designed to enable you to move around more easily; and

• Balance exercises, to help you to balance better.

Most people tend to think of ‘exercise’ as either endurance or strength training. However, it is also important to work on your flexibility and balance, especially as you get older.

There is more about these types of exercise, including examples, in our page on Types of Exercise. You may also find it helpful to read our page of Top Tips for Exercising on a Budget.

Age and Looking After Your Body

Looking after your body matters throughout your life. However, there are some aspects that may be more or less important at different times of your life. For example, the physical changes that happen to your body during puberty mean that you need to wash more, and also start using deodorant.

Later in life, you need to keep exercising—and particularly keep doing resistance or strength training—to avoid losing muscle mass.

You can find out more about looking after yourself at particular stages of life in our pages Looking After Your Body as a Teenager, Perimenopause and Health, and Aging Well.

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Doing the Right Thing

Knowing what to do, and actually doing it are, of course, quite different things.

Caring for your body is like other aspects of ‘goodness’. If you work on developing your ‘moral compass’, then you will be able to apply it to doing the right thing for your body too.

Yes, of course, sometimes your emotional response will win, and you won’t do the right thing but, with practice, you will get better at making sure that you take care of your body.

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