Exercising to Prevent Sickness

You are in class and your nose is a leaky sieve, it is hard to pay attention to the instructor, and your eyes feel like they are going to pop out of yours skull. That is ok because later your snot nosed face will go make a fool of itself in a mess of mucous with a date you prefer not to blow snot all over.

That is what being sick is like, not to mention working isn't making things any easier. What would be good is if someone would bring you hot soup while you lied down and read Epictetus or Thomas Aquinas.

Or, even better than that would be if you could have avoided the sickness, embarrassment, and backed up work loud all together. Turns out you could have, but you didn't, because you were too lazy to exercise and eat right.

That is karma at its finest, treating your body like a lamppost in the winter time and your body contracts a cold and nobody cares-sorry about the completely pointless metaphor. Point is exercise would have prevented everything because that is what exercise does.

Besides making you look awesome, perform awesome, and look awesome again because that is really all anyone cares about, exercise keeps your body healthy. The extra blood flow travels throughout the organ systems and carries nutrients around, and all that stuff.

Though everything about the body that has anything to do with organ systems, nutrients or just health in general instantly becomes boring, it is still important to know, at least the basics. There is this one system in the body that is particularly boring and important, the lymphatic system.

This system is responsible for crapping out and making you feel like the first verb in this sentence. Usually it is supposed to keep you healthy by straining garbage from your blood; the humongous error and basic flaw in the human body, this lymphatic system has no way of making itself work.

The only way you can get the lymphatic system to actually do its job is by exercising. So if you are sitting on the couch eating potato chips and enjoying the flu, yeah, your lymphatic system is not doing anything to help you.

If you get up and start running, jump on a trampoline, or swim you can get some good lymphatic stimulation. This is how you could have avoided the total mess you are in.

Keep that in mind next time you wonder if you want to be sick in the future. Remember if you do not want to be sick all you have to do is exercise.