For good or ill, your current state of health has taken your lifetime to develop up to this point. In other words, your health is the long-term accumulation of your history and environment, and whatever daily habits, attitudes and activities you have practiced, knowingly or unknowingly.
Rebalancing your health—reversing negative trends and restoring normal function in your body—also takes time, often years. And it requires the same daily commitment to and repetition of healthy habits that it took to produce the current state imbalance through unhealthy habits.
You can think of this process as your “7-Year Clock”, the time it could take for your whole body to renew itself, cell by cell.
Once you begin to support healing and restoration of healthy function—by fueling your body with essential nutrients, food energy, water, and plenty of rest—your tissues will begin to repair themselves as quickly as they are able.
It is a popular idea that the body regenerates itself completely about every 7 years or so.
While this notion is not 100% accurate, there is a significant amount of validity to the idea. Take a look at the approximate time it takes to completely replace the cells in some of our critical tissues and organs.
Mouth and lips: every few hours
Epithelial lining of intestines: every 3-4 days
Taste buds: every 10 days
Skin and lungs: every 2-4 weeks
Red blood cells: every 3-4 months
Liver: every 5 months
Nails: every 6-10 months
White blood cells: about once every year
Hair: constantly growing and dying at a rate of 1 cm/month
Bones: every 7-10 years (although there is constant buildup and breakdown of bone tissue to use calcium for balancing blood pH)
Heart: every 20 years
Brain: Sorry, but we only get one brain this lifetime—although it is capable of learning and changing through “neuroplasticity”
Eyes: ditto—just one set of eyes per lifetime
It also takes about 7 years to release just HALF of the toxic lead build-up in your body. Other toxic heavy metals like mercury, aluminum, and arsenic can take many years to mobilize and release from the body’s deep cellular storage.
The underlying point is that it requires time and patience for healing to happen at the body’s natural rate of recovery. You just need to support the body’s work through your daily choices so it can repair itself faster than it breaks down. Once you establish the necessary daily self-care practices, generations of new healthy cells will need to replace the sick compromised ones before you begin to notice long-term positive changes to your health.
So while your body may not literally rebuild itself every 7 years, it is true that you have the power to reset your healing clock RIGHT NOW. All it requires is committing to practicing the simple daily habits that sustain health and wellness. Do the work and check back in 7 years! No doubt you will see the benefits piling up from where you began!