With all the advances in medicine and science, the rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer are skyrocketing. Diseases that were almost unheard of a century ago are now pandemics. Why, what’s going on?   Something’s Not Quite Right That’s right, we’re going to talk about some things that aren’t in the Bible in this series – and as a Bible teacher that’s something I’ve struggled with a lot in planning and preparing these messages. Just for a few programs, we’re going to do something that I as a Bible teacher do very rarely. Because there is something going on in our world that you won’t find in the Bible. Obesity, metabolic syndrome, cardio vascular disease, diabetes and cancer. That’s not to say that they didn’t exist back in Biblical times – with medical knowledge as it was a few millennia ago, of course, when someone died, let’s say of a heart attack or stroke, they didn’t know the cause back then – people just died. But by the late 19th century and early 20th century, we knew how to identify these diseases, it’s just that they didn’t exist. In the early part of the 20th century just a two or three thousand Americans each year would die of cancer. Today, that number is over 650,000 – and it’s only that low because medical science has come up with ways of reducing the morbidity rate of those who a myocardial infarction – that to you and me, is a heart attack. The rates of heart disease are much higher still, with up to a third of the population of the average westernised, industrialised country suffering from some debilitating effect of cardiovascular disease. If you were an Australian or an American at the turn of the 20th century, your chances of being obese were remote, around one in 25. Today, your chances of being an obese adult are around one in 3 and climbing. People, something terrible is going on and we need to talk about it. I am someone who all his life has struggled with his weight – I used to weigh 110 kilograms (that’s 220 lbs) and I’m not what you’d call tall. My problem was that I was always hungry – I lost lots of weight lots of times, but I always stacked it back on again. So in my early fifties I decided three things. Firstly all these low fat high impact diets hadn’t worked for all of my life. Second – if I didn’t do something about it – given what my blood tests and my doctor were telling me – I was going to be dead sooner rather than later. And third – I had to go and find out the answer – why was I constantly hungry, how could I change my appetite and how could I live a healthy lifestyle at a healthy weight. I’m not alone. There are huge numbers of people in that same place. So I went and did the research, found out the answers – which, by the way were contrary to what my doctor was telling me – and without much effort, changed my diet in such a way that my appetite reduced dramatically. And my friend, once your appetite reduces, losing weight requires almost no willpower at all. If you’re not hungry as much, you don’t eat as much. What happened to me? Well, I lost 25 kg (55 lb) over a year and a half, slowly. The fatty liver syndrome (a precursor to cirrhosis and cancer) that I’d suffered from all my adult life just went away. And my doctor is amazed at by cholesterol, triglyceride and blood sugar readings. He’s never seen such a drastic improvement in just a short time. So here’s what I’m going to do. These next few episodes of Christianityworks I’m going to share very simply and plainly my journey from obese, to healthy. It’s a journey that left behind the starvation diets, because I found out what I needed to wind back the clock on the western diet, remove the things that were causing my problem and eat a diet that is healthy, that I enjoy and that gives me the energy that I never thought I had. No fads. Not starvation. No rocket science. God has given you and me the most amazing bodies – and as it turns out this is the only body that I’m ever going to get on this earth and that is the only body you’re going to get on this earth. It’s time to start looking after them – and I’d like to share how to do that with you today, and over the next few episodes.   Your Amazing Body The body we live in is something that we take largely for granted. It’s just … there. It’s been there as long as we can remember and sometimes we live as though it’s going to go on forever. But this body that you and I are encapsulated isn’t going to go on forever. You know what they say: there are two certainties in life – death and taxes. One day your body and mine will quite literally, give up the ghost. Over the last couple of years I’ve been doing a lot of reading about diet and food and in particular our digestive system – how we process food. I’m now in my mid fifties and for most of my adult life, I’ve struggled with my weight. You get to your mid fifties and you know that you’re getting to the pointy end of this whole healthy eating and living thing, because it’s at this age that many people suffer heart attacks, discover they have diabetes, end up with cancer – the three big killers in western society and in any country that has adopted elements of the western diet. We’re going to talk a lot about that over the coming few days. But today we’re going to kick off by just realising how utterly amazing our body is. If we’re going to head to a healthier lifestyle – which many, many people need to do – there’s this decision that needs to take place about how we eat and live and exercise and sleep. Healthy living is a deliberate decision that we need to make – and when we do, all of a sudden, within just a couple of weeks we stat feeling so much better that we can’t imagine going back to the old ways of living. And part of making that decision is realising how incredibly precious this body is that we’re living in. So let’s kick things off by taking a look at just a handful of amazing facts about your body. Are you ready? Here we go. Did you know that: You produce 25 million new cells every second – 24/7 for your whole life? 25 million – that’s more than the population of Australia. And each of the 2.5 trillion red blood cells in your body can circumnavigate your body in under 20 seconds. Your nerve impulses travel at over 400 km or 250 miles per hour. And just one sneeze generates a wind gust of 166 km or 100 miles per hour. Your heart will beat around 100,000 times every day or 2.7 billion times in an average life of around 75 years. And your lungs, with a surface area big enough to cover a tennis court will inhale around 2 million litres or half a million gallons of air each and every day without you even thinking about it. Your eyes can distinguish over a million different colours and take in more information than the largest telescope we’ve ever built. I’m presuming that’s the Hubble Telescope out there in space.. And as if that weren’t enough, your nose is your personal air conditioning system – it warms cold air, cools hot air and filters out impurities. Just take a look at your hand for a moment – in just one square inch in the middle of your hand you have about 9 feet of blood vessels, 600 pain sensors, 9000 nerve endings, 36 heat sensors and 75 pressure sensors. And when you touch something, those sensors send a message to your brain at around 200 km or 124 miles an hour. Your eyebrows are there to keep sweat out of your eyes, you make around one litre of saliva a day. And if you were able to stretch all of the DNA in your body from end to end, it would be enough to take you to the sun and back almost 700 times. And I haven’t even begun to talk about the amazing chemical factory that your body is. It has the most finely tuned, complex processes that scientists and medicos are really only beginning to unwrap for regulating temperature, com...

Released on 13 Jun 2021