5 awesome things about your body

Coach Jonathan Wong has a Doctorate of Science in Holistic Medicine and is the author of "The Happy Body - Getting to the root of YOUR fitness, health and productivity". He is also the founder and CEO of Genesis Gym Singapore (tm), which aims to provide the best personal training and fitness services in Singapore. The views expressed below are his own.

Your body is amazing and knowing exactly how amazing your body is may just be the motivational “kick” you may be looking for to start taking better care of it. After all, you will only ever have one body.

1. Your eyes
Your eyes have more than 2 million working parts. They can “see” better in low light than the latest digital camera. They also focus automatically and never need rest unlike other muscles. The amount of data that they can record is amazing. They record video at about 12 megapixels, more than a high definition video camera.

Taking care of your eyes includes a diet high in antioxidants from colorful plants and veggies, as well as sufficient omega-3s.

2. Your brain
Your brain’s memory capacity is estimated at 2.5 million gigabytes. You need to take care of it because you are smarter when you do so. A study of one million students in New York showed that students who ate lunches that did not include artificial flavors, preservatives, and dyes did 14 per cent better on IQ tests than students who ate lunches with these additives.

Avoiding wheat based products if you are gluten intolerant, as well as eating enough healthy fats from unprocessed sources is a good way to keep your brain healthy. In addition, keeping blood sugar in control by cutting out refined carbohydrates is a good idea as brain diseases such as Alzheimer's are made more likely by constantly high blood sugar levels.

3. Your lungs
Amazingly your lungs are only about the size of a basketball, but when all the air pockets are “spread out” they are the size of tennis court so they can absorb oxygen efficiently. And you use them to take 22000 breaths per day.

Obviously, avoiding smoking is the simplest big thing you can do for lung health.

4. Your heart
In a lifetime, your heart beats over 2.5 billion times and pumps over 200 million liters of blood. That's about the same amount as the oil as a large capacity oil tanker. And it does this without fail because your heart is self repairing. No mechanical pump can do that.

Making sure you take nutrients like magnesium and potassium, as well as doing regular exercise keeps blood pressure lower, and your heart and blood vessels under less stress.

5. Your joints
The surfaces of your joints are smooth like glass, in fact the moving surfaces are covered with what is known as hyaline (“glass-like appearance” in Greek) cartilage.

They move so smoothly that they have a coefficient of friction of about 0.01 on a scale of 0 - 1.00. This is better than almost all lubricants in use today, and on par with the most expensive ball bearings money can buy. And if you take care of your joints, they need to never be replaced.

To take care of joints, you need to ensure that your posture and the muscles around your joints function well so that the joint does not wear out prematurely. Proper strength training does this in the most effective way.

There we go. I hope this glimpse into the incredible creation that you are, helps you take steps to stay in awesome shape.

Coach Jonathan Wong has a Doctorate of Science in Holistic Medicine, and is the author of "The Happy Body - Getting to the root of YOUR fitness, health and productivity". He is also the Founder and CEO of Genesis Gym Singapore (tm), which aims to provide the best personal training and fitness services in Singapore.