Why Does My Body Need Energy?

Why does my body need energy, and where does it come from?

Usually something comes up during the week between blog posts that gives me an idea of what to write for my next post, but nothing came up in the past week. When that happens, I turn either to Google Analytics or the Google Search Console.

They are both great places to see what people are searching for that potentially get them to my website. So I decided to hit the Search Console and see what was there. Looking through the keywords, one search phrase jumped out at me – what your body needs.

That was it, not “what your body needs to sleep well,” or “what your body needs to lose weight,” or “what your body needs to stay fit.” Just “what your body needs.”

There are so many things that could mean and so many ways you could go with it. I’m want to take it at face value. What does your body need? For this post I’m going to focus on energy and answer the question, why does my body need energy?

Why Does My Body Need Energy?

Everything that moves needs energy in one form or another. Your body is a highly refined machine and needs energy in a variety of forms.

Energy for Fuel

The most obvious form of energy that you need is the fuel that your body burn so that you can move. You satisfy this need by eating and drinking. Did you know that the energy that you get from food comes to you indirectly from the sun?

Plants collect the energy from the sun and, with chlorophyll and carbon dioxide, make glucose, a sugar, and release the leftover oxygen. You then eat the plants, or the animals that ate the plants, and break down the sugar with the help of oxygen to release the energy and carbon dioxide.

I believe that we were designed to eat plants directly so that we have access to the densest concentration of energy. When you eat animals you only get what is left over after the animals use it. Consider, you don’t have to cook the plants you eat, but you do have to cook the meat. That’s something to think about.

Energy for Warmth

Why does my body need energy? I need it stay warm. You generate some of the heat you need through movement, which comes from energy from the sun as we’ve already talked about. The sun also gives you energy directly to help you stay warm.

This warming energy comes in a particular range of the light spectrum. This is what you feel when you are outside in the winter and feel the warmth of the sun on your face. This energy can penetrate your skin and warm you from the inside out.

There are products that generate this particular energy to warm you up as well. Most people have probably heard of certain kinds of saunas.

The tools that I like are the ones that capture your body heat that you radiate off, convert it to that energy spectrum, and send it back to you. Certain comforters and blankets can do this to not only keep you warm, they can also help to regulate your body temperature so that you don’t get too warm.

When my kids were little I would use our special comforter to control their temperature if they got a little under the weather. It worked like a charm every time.

Light to See By

Why does my body need energy? I need light to see by. Light is a form of energy, and like the others, it comes originally from the sun. When light energy strikes an object, some energy is absorbed and some is reflected. You see objects when your eyes absorb the light they reflect.

Thanks to Thomas Edison we now have electric lights that we can turn on and off with the flip of a switch. With all due respect to Mr. Edison though, seeing by electric light is not the same as seeing by natural sunlight. The wavelength makeup of different kinds of electric light can be very different than the makeup of natural light.

Your eyes developed by seeing by natural light. You can do a little experiment. Find something with somewhat small print on it. Try to read it under natural sunlight outdoors and by electric light indoors. Which way is easier to read. I can always see better by natural light.

Full-spectrum lamps generate light that contains more of the natural wavelengths contained in natural light and can be much easier to read by. The full-spectrum lamp I use was designed to mimic natural sunlight as close as possible, without the ultraviolet components, to make indoor reading easy. I love my full-spectrum lamp.

Earth Energy

All of the energy I have talked about so far comes from the Sun. It makes sense that we would have to also get some energy from our home, the Earth. By Earth energy I mean magnetic energy.

Physics.org has a nice article that explains how the Earth’s magnetic field is believed to be generated. The short answer is that it is caused by pressures in the core of our planet along with its spin. The end result is this magnetic field that all life on our planet has lived in.

Just like the animals in the oceans need the water they live in to survive, we need the magnetic energy that surrounds us to survive as well. The problem is that we spend a lot of our time insulated against it in cars and houses. The electrical current flowing through the walls of our houses creates an artificial magnetic field at a very different frequency that blocks out the Earth’s natural magnetic field.

While we are indoors we can use static magnetic devices, like magnetic insoles and magnetic mattress pads to supplement the magnetic energy that we would get naturally if we were outdoors all the time.

More Next Time

I only covered the energy piece of what your body needs, so I’ll talk about the other pieces – materials for building and repairing and alternating periods of activity and rest – next time.

One little not of disclosure. Some of the pages that I linked to in the post are affiliate pages. I may earn a commission if you order any of the items on those pages.

Can you think of a type of energy that we need that I missed? Let me know your thoughts and opinions in a comment below then please share this with your followers on social media.