Wake Up To Your Body’s Clock

By Author: mVirtual health
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Our body is continuously at work in a roughly 24 hours body’s daily cycle. Circadian rhythms are the bodily changes that follow this cycle, primarily responding to light and darkness in our environment. This cycle influences sleep-wake cycle, hormone release, cell regeneration, body temperature and other body functions. Disturbance in this cycle is associated with chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, as well as weakened immunity to infections and impaired cognition.

To be precise in 24 hours, our body runs 3 eight-hour cycles to provide us energy, restore health and prevent disease.

1. 12pm to 8 pm: Digestion time. At this time we are most active and present. This is the time to eat as body is most efficient at digesting and metabolizing our food and providing us the energy required.

2. 8pm to 4 am: Absorption time. At this time body is hard at work, absorbing nutrients from food and using them to repair, rebuild and heal it. That’s why, this is the time to relax and sleep.

3. 4 am to 12 pm: Elimination time. At this ...
... time body is cleansing itself and getting rid of waste and toxins. That’s why eating fruits and food easy to digest is suggested for breakfast to support this elimination process.

Based on the study of body’s clock researchers also found the best time to give therapy. They found that DNA repair system is most active in the afternoon and evening and least active in the morning. Therefore cancer therapy is more effective early in the day, when this system is less able to repair DNA damage in cancer cells.

Body cycle actually gives cues for our ideal sleeping-waking and eating time. However, in recent times our body’s natural rhythm has been disrupted with adverse external factors like too much artificial light at night, irregular eating and stress. This has lead to constant flow of hunger hormones in our body causing food cravings and resultant weight gain. These days more and more people are also going sleep deprived resulting in increased cases of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and other mood disorders.

Through, gradually and systematically adjusting our bedtime to body’s sleep-wake cycle and tuning our eating habits to the body’s clock, we can stop untimely food cravings, ease digestion and maximize metabolism. Besides helping in shedding weight, it will also make us feel more energetic and enjoy a life free of metabolic disorders and many life-threatening diseases.