I was on holiday in Scotland last week. I definitely drank too much ,ate a lot of crap fast food and definitely didn’t sleep enough. Fast forward to this week and I’m back at work with a raw throat , runny nose and YAY a cold sore just popped up this morning. I think I can safely call myself “run down” but what is actually happening here ?
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Your body is a horrendously complex machine made of a patchwork of systems that evolution made just barely good enough to get the job done. Basically everything is interconnected through that patchwork mess and every moment of your life is a constant war against entropy; your body is literally falling apart and you need to constantly spend energy, resources, and effort to stay alive.
So, take that and put in sub-par food, a lack of sleep, a virus that’s hijacking your body to make copies of itself, and the very real effort you have to expend fighting it off, other maintenance-related things necessarily fall by the wayside.
Remember how I mentioned evolution? One of the things evolution did was (very metaphorically) say, “right, we need to preserve energy to protect against starvation, so we’re going to direct and conserve resources for only the parts that will keep us alive *right now,* comfort be damned.” So even though that fast food has a lot of energy, your body is hoarding that energy and using as little of it as possible (mostly to fight off the cold), rather than using to efficiently fix all of you at once.
TL;DR your body is lazy and does the absolute minimum to keep you alive, and making that harder for yourself in anyway has cascading effects on your overall health.
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