Walking, Elimination

Evening Round-Up
by William Crosbie Hunter

(Page 5 of 14)

Walking

The Best Exercise I Know of

The benefits of walking are so quickly apparent that I hope to get you to make the start and keep it up for two weeks, and then you will require no further urging.

In walking there are two things most important to do in order to get the greatest benefits: first - walk alone; second - walk your natural gait.

So many people tell me they would like to walk all, or part of the way, between their home and office if they had company.

Company is the very thing you don't want in walking, and there are two reasons for this: one is if you walk with a friend you will hold yourself back, or else you will be walking faster than your natural gait, and in either case it is a conscious effort, and this conscious effort to a large degree will cause you to lose much of the benefit from your walk.

The most important reason, however, is that if you walk with a friend you are sure to talk and thus you are using your nervous energy and tiring your brain - the very thing you should rest.

Walking gives you physical exercise which is absolutely necessary for health. It is the best exercise I know of because you do not overdo your strength.

Walking is beneficial because when you walk alone you give your brain a rest. You cannot read the papers, you cannot talk, and your mental apparatus gets complete rest.

As stated in PEP I walk from my home to my office, something less than four miles, and it takes me about an hour to make the trip. I walk through a beautiful park and every morning I see something new and interesting in bird and animal life, in the vegetation and in the geological formations through which I pass.

I recommend that you walk anywhere from three to four miles in the morning.

If your home is more than four miles from the office, walk three or four miles and then take the car.

Do not walk home in the evening unless the walk is a short one. In the evening you are tired and you should conserve your strength. In the morning you are fresh and the exercise comes to you at a time it is most needed. It will give you strength, courage and help to keep you in a good mood all day.

I cannot too strongly emphasize the importance of walking alone, for then you have shifted your nerve energy from the dry cell battery of the brain to the magneto, which is the spinal cord. The spinal cord works automatically and it doesn't wear itself out. The brain tires if it uses its energy.

In walking you use the thought and the brain impulse to start the magneto then the spinal cord action is automatic.

This automatic action of the spinal cord is a wise provision of nature to conserve strength.

The spinal cord energy is what you might call automatic habit.

For instance, in dressing and undressing yourself you will recall that you put on or take off your clothes in regular order without giving the matter any thought. It is just habit.

If you wish to demonstrate the difference between the control of the physical body by brain impulse and the spinal cord impulse, try this some morning: Start out on your walk, and mentally frame sentences like this as you walk, "right step, left step, right step, left step," and so on; give thought to each step you have taken and notice how tired you will be when you have gone half a mile.

The next morning start to walk, walk naturally, give no thought to walking, keep your mind on the beauties of nature by which you are passing or in pleasant soliloquy and you will feel no fatigue.

There isn't a bit of theory in this chapter; it is positive practical sense I have proved by my own experiences and by the experiences of everyone to whom I have made this suggestion of walking alone.

The moral is this - walk every morning and walk ALONE.

Elimination

The Body's Safety-First in Keeping Health

The body is made up of billions of little cells. These individual cells are in a state of perpetual activity. They exhaust, wear away, break down with work and rebuild on food and rest. Every process of life - the beat of the heart, the throb of the brain in thought, the digestion of food, the excretion of waste - all are due to the activity of groups of highly specialized individual cells.

Every cell uses up its own material and throws off poisonous by-products during activity. These by-products, or wastes, are very poisonous to the individual cell as well as to the entire organism. To get rid of this waste is one of the first duties of the system.

It is with the body, made up of its countless millions of individual cells, just as with a city and its myriad people: the sewage of the community must be collected and disposed of. The city forms its poisons which we call sewage and the body its poisons, which we call excreta (or carbonic acid, urea, uric acid, etc.) It is no more important for a city to gather up and get rid of its poisonous sewage than for the animal organism to collect and excrete its cell-waste. Hence, the importance of maintaining normal and constant elimination throughout the body.

Elimination is kept up by the alimentary tract, the kidneys, the skin, and the lungs.

These four are the great pipe-line sewerage systems so to speak, by which the body throws off its gaseous, liquid and solid poisons.

The lungs momentarily strain carbonic acid out of the blood and throw it out in the expired air. They likewise exhale other noxious matters from the system.

The alimentary tract throws off faeces, made up of the waste tissue from the whole system, especially the digestive organs, as well as indigestible and non-nutritious portions of the food.

The kidneys strain out urea, uric acid, and certain other poisons from the blood and eject them through the urinary tract.

Finally the skin likewise is an excretory organ and exhales a very definite amount of gaseous and fluid waste in the course of each twenty-four hours.

The skin throws off from a pint to two quarts of liquid each day in the form of vapor.

Thus, to carry on normal elimination from the body, the breathing, digesting, urinary and cutaneous systems must be kept working normally. To impair the work of any of these is to retard bodily drainage. To insure that elimination is going on naturally it is necessary to secure perfect functioning of lungs, bowels, kidneys and the skin.

Any stoppage in the process of elimination means that some fault has crept into the work of one of these excretory systems. It must be plain now why a disorder of any one of these organs of elimination means so much more profound disturbance to the whole organization than merely disease in one structure; it means that waste products are retained which ought to be thrown out of the body; so straightway every cell in the body begins to be more or less affected. Some poisons disturb one organ more and some another, but in the end the whole body must be affected.

Lack of exercise, bolting of food, eating soft, starchy things, failure to chew properly, failure to get enough roughage, insufficient water, insufficient fruit, these are the general causes of stoppage in the elimination processes.

Drink one or two glasses of warm, not hot, water first thing in the morning.

Eat one or two apples, skins and all, every day. Eat toast, especially the crust, eat cracked wheat or whole wheat bread often.

Exercise plenty. Keep cheerful, eat regularly.

Very likely you eat too much. You don't need three big meals a day unless you work out doors at hard physical labor.

Your body is an engine. No use to keep the boiler red hot and two hundred pounds of steam if your work is light.

Good health depends upon proper assimilation and elimination as nature intended.

Eat less, exercise more, you who work indoors. If you don't use this caution you are just slowly killing yourself.

Published by Hunter Service Kansas City, Mo., USA
Copyright 1915 by WM. C. Hunter