We live in an instant society.
I will write this blog, and the moment I publish it someone on the other side of the world can be reading my thoughts.
But when it comes to making actual, meaningful, cellular change in the physical body, a good thing to remember is what I call the 120 Day Rule.
It takes 120 days for your body to make a whole new set of red blood cells.
Red blood cells, or erythrocytes, live for 100 to 120 days. You have between 20 and 30 trillion erythrocytes at any point in time. This compromises about 25 percent of the actual number of cells in your entire body. During their life cycle, these red blood cells are pushed through your arteries and pulled through your veins, bringing oxygen to every other cell in your body. Afterwards, they are removed from circulation.
If you want to change your physical body, you have to do something for 120 days to make a difference.
That is because you have to give yourself the opportunity to make an entirely new set of red blood cells.
If you quit your program in a day, a few days, a week, two weeks, a month or two months, you quit before your body can actually recycle your blood and make that change.
I have had clients who come to see me and say, “Oh, I have taken vitamins a whole month!”
I want to roll my eyes and say to them, “Try 120 days. Then do a year. Then come back and talk to me.”
Understanding the 120 day cycle is one of the big reasons I am such a fan of juicing, because juicing will end up cleaning your blood, delivering loads of enzymes, antioxidants, chlorophyll and other essential nutrients to your blood cells.
The longer you have been sick or struggling with something, the longer you will have to be consistent.
Here are a few things you will want to be really consistent with:
Exercise every day for 120 days. Yes, I know, we all have days when we are tired. Then go for a little walk or do qi gong.
Take your supplements as I recommend them for 120 days.
Ditch your gluten, junk food, fried food and processed foods for 120 days and then come back and tell me how you feel now.
Spend four months being very consistent with your rest, meditation and stress management and lowering your overall stress level. In four months, you can make a change in your adrenal function. You can feel a whole lot better in four months, but frankly, given the stress that most adults have put themselves under for literally decades, you will not totally heal your adrenals in four months.
If you are actually serious about getting out of adrenal stress, try an entire year. That is 360 days. That works out for 120 days of serious de-stressing, times three. There are three stage of adrenal stress, and if you are really serious about healing your metabolism, that’s what it’s going to take.
You can get angry about it, stomp your feet, get impatient, cry, feel sorry for yourself, curse your fate, wish there were someone who could wave a magic wand and the fact still remains that it takes 120 days of better eating, smarter exercise and more thoughtful stress management to begin to make any kind of serious change.
Whether you get mad about it or make peace with the facts, your body needs time to make changes at the cellular level.
